Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park, a novel by Michael Crichton, is a story of how people's greed, ambition, mistakes, and desire to accomplish the impossible turn the simple concept of an amusement park into a disaster that will forever be remembered by those involved. Isla Nublar, a secluded island off the coast of Costa Rica is where John Hammond, with the help of his geneticist, uses dinosaur blood obtained from prehistoric biting insects to recreate dinosaurs. Hammond recruits a team of scientists to evaluate his park, and brings them, along with the computer programmer responsible for the code that keeps the park running, to Jurassic Park. The computer programmer, a sly and greedy man, shuts off the power to the park in his attempt to steal the company’s knowledge and sell it to a

different company that is offering him more money, and in turn the dinosaurs escape and eat many people, including the programmer. The sad thing is that Hammond never listens to all the people he brings in, and never realizes that this park is a mistake. As the few survivors leave, they witness the Costa Rican government bombing the island, making dinosaurs extinct once again. At the end of the book, scientists are still trying to clone dinosaurs and no one has learned their lesson. A main point of the book is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.
Michael Crichton’s book is filled with scientific details and his writing style is very technical. Certain characters in his book talk in extreme detail and bring out very complex theories and topics that would normally be boring and difficult to understand, but along with these technical characters, he includes characters that are not experts in these fields, and he uses his technical characters, like Ian Malcolm the mathematician and Dr. Wu the geneticist, to explain the details to the others in the book. An example of is when Malcolm describes nonlinear signatures by saying, “That [high and low spikes on a graph] is characteristic of many complex systems. For examples, water dripping from a tap. If you turn on the faucet just a little, you’ll get a constant drip, drip, drip. But if you open it a little more, so that there’s a bit of turbulence in the flow, then you’ll get alternating large and small drops. Drip drip … drip drip …” (Pg. 92). As you can see by this example, he explains non regularity of a complex system by giving a simple example that everyone can relate to. This use of characters of different backgrounds keeps the technical parts interesting and understandable, and makes it one of my favorite parts of the book. Along with this technical style of writing, Michael Crichton’s book displays all the characters’ thoughts and emotions in an equal fashion as it is written in an omniscient narrator style. It’s a narrative that tells everyone’s story from their own perspective, but not in the first person.
When I first read Jurassic Park a few years ago, I found myself skipping all the parts where Malcolm was talking and the pages with complicated-looking graphs and tables.

I didn’t much care for the book. One thing that I’ve discovered now that I’ve reread the book a few times, and have read all the parts in it, is how great an author Crichton is. I avoided those pages because I thought they were scary, and they intimidated me, but once I took the time to read the way he uses his characters to explain things, he has become one of my favorites. I’ve read books by other technical authors and did not like them as much because there is no explanation of what the experts are talking about. One thing this book has done for me is shown me how much my reading has improved over the years. One connection I’ve made is that some real world scientists do tend to focus on whether or not they can do something versus whether or not they should. As technology is advancing, cloning is becoming possible, and I hope that scientists always ask themselves whether or not they should be doing what they now can. Overall, Jurassic Park is one of my favorite books, and every time I reread it, I learn something

new.