Iceberg (Dirk Pitt Adventure) by Clive Cussler
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Book Reviews of Iceberg (Dirk Pitt Adventure)
Book Review: Not nearly as good as Cussler's later work
Summary: 2 Stars
A co-worker told me about Clive Cussler's books and I started out by reading, Flood Tide, Atlantis Found, Trojan Odyssey, and Black Wind. All of these were great books that I had trouble stepping away from. Next, I read Iceberg. Iceberg was originally released in 1975 and is one of Cussler's earliest works. It was okay but not even close to being as good as the other books I had read to that point. Cussler's skills have obviously improved over time. I would suggest to anyone new to Cussler to start out with his later work and then go back to his earlier work if you are still interested.Book Review: Reprint of a book from the 70s
Summary: 2 Stars
This book is a reprint of a novel published in the seventies -- it shows its age, and probably wasn't all that good back then, either. The action is implausible, often silly. The characters are one-dimensional stereotypes, and the conversation is dull. If nothing else, it shows how far the thriller genre has progressed -- compare with Robert Brace's BLACK TIGER, for example, where the plot line is believable and the characters genuinely engaging, even minor ones.Book Review: Not his best work-not even plausible
Summary: 2 Stars
Some of the stuff in this book was so hokey that I almost hurled. Like bein' able to see a boat through a few feet of ice, or the shootout in Disneyland. Dirk Pitt just isn't a believable character--just your standard issue dashing, cynical, super-agent surrounded by a buncha standard issue sidekicks including the grumpy cigar-chomping general.Book Review: Offensive even by Seventies standards
Summary: 1 Stars
I remember the Seventies. Yes, they could be sexist, but very few published books of that time were as relentlessly homophobic, sexist and violent as this piece of crap. Example: in one scene, the Admiral's secretary is bringing coffee to Pitt and the Admiral, climbing a galley stair in a motorboat. The Admiral, without warning, accelerates. The secretary is thrown backwards, doused in scalding coffee. When she remonstrates with her boss, he and Pitt joke that she must be on her period. Real men take responsibility for their actions, especially when they hurt someone else, but Dirk Pitt is crafted to the standards of the cardboard, testosterone-laden heroes of the Matt Helm generation. At the time this book was written, the women's movement was nearly ten years old, and most honest and sensitive authors had made at least token gestures towards reforming their old, condescending, patronizing attitudes towards women. But not Cussler. While it may have been too much to expect a he-man author of the Seventies to treat gays with respect, it was definitely not asking too much of them to treat women with more respect than Cussler's characters did. As a woman and a reader, who has enjoyed more than her share of Bond, Helm, Marlowe and the rest of the hard-boiled school, I found Dirk Pitt nearly intolerable.Book Review: Sexist and annoying
Summary: 1 Stars
If this were the first Clive Cussler novel I'd ever read, I probably never would have picked up another one. Absolute garbage. Of course I say that from the woman's standpoint - and Dirk Pitt is indeed a sexist pig, sitting at a table with his boss and a female secretary, referring to women as broads. The women act with "typical female irritation" and "typical female attitudes".
Just as people need to read unexpurgated books like Huck Finn et al to know how blacks were viewed back in the early 19th century...and even up to the 1960s, so people need to read these books from the 60s and 70s which show the male attitude of the time. This is the way the US was in the 1970s in real life...
I gotta tell you, I so wanted to slap Dirk Pitt...and by extension Cussler....several times while reading this book
Frankly, Cussler never has been a very good writer. If he hadn't chosen to write a book about the Titanic, his career probably never would have taken off. But that success skyrocketed him to the top. Then, he found the formula he needed - the formula which keeps me going back to his books even though they're so poorly written - the historical preludes, and how what happened in the past ties into what's going on in the near-future in which these books take place.