Customer Reviews

Certain Cure: Where Science Meets Religion

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

WHAT A GREAT READ. I LOVED THIS BOOK. THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH MYSTERY. IT'S SUCH A GREAT TO READ AND FAST, A REAL PAGE TURNER. IF YOU LIKE, HARLAN COBEN, MICHAEL CONNELLY, PATRICIA CORNWELL, JOHN GRISHAM, AND MY FAVORITE THOMAS HARRIS, SCOTT TUROW, STUART WOODS, LAWRENCE SANDERS, LISA SCOTTLOLINE, JAMES PATTERSON, JUMP ON THE BAND WAGON. LETS GET JENNIFER VALOPPI TO WRITE ANOTHER BOOK ASAP. I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE MOVIE!!!

Ordered, opened and finished, from the first page to the end could not find a place to take a break. I strongly recommend this book to all. Hopefully, Ms. Valoppi has another book in the works. Great gift to friends and family.

About 50 pages into this book, I thought, this is going to make a great movie. It's a fast moving thriller that is tough to put down. I read the whole thing in a weekend!

The characters are likable and well developed. The plot was DaVinci-code like but a little more fun. It had me thinking about how much we rely on various technological and medical breakthroughs to make our lives better, but what happens if they go to far? Where does the line between progress and ethics begin to blur? Very interesting!

It's an impressive book. I would recommend it to any one from my mom to my 14 year old neighbor.

This was a very fast - and exciting - read! I thoroughly enjoyed it and did not want to put it down - can't wait to bring it to my book club so I can discuss with others.

A somewhat creative and original plot gets lost with the "jumping" between characters and multiple subplots which don't connect as well as they probably should. At times I found the characters very uninteresting and I simply didn't care about them. Incredibly dissapointing and unsuspensful ending.

A cure for cancer is an ultimate good, right? "Certain Cure: Where Science Meets Religion" is the story of a new treatment which is promoted as a guaranteed cure for cancer, and could save the life of a woman. But when a physician is murdered with no clues, signs appear that make people question their faith, and medical professionals are ruthlessly jockeying for career advancement, the benevolence of a cancer cure may not be so benevolent. "Certain Cure" is an intriguing and entertaining read of medical and religious worlds intertwining.

This story moves along at a galloping pace, changing horses several times on parallel threads that sometimes are of questionable worth to the overall point of the tale. The fundamental premise is that a mysterious doctor (Smith Viviee) graduated from an American medical school and then went to China to pursue medical research that could not be done in the United States. Viviee has returned and is touting a mysterious microchip that he injects into the dying body of Claire Cummings. Claire is suffering from terminal cancer that has spread throughout her body. From the outward appearances, it is a miracle cure and Claire's daughter Helene, a television talk show host, arranges to have Claire and Dr. Viviee on her show.
It is a ratings bonanza, leading to a massive public outcry for the microchip cure to be made available to all the sick. The prospect of fewer seriously sick people terrifies the medical groups that profit from illness, so there is a bit of a counterattack against Dr. Viviee based on the most cynical of financial concerns.
The examination of the consequences of a sudden cure for major diseases and the alignment of interest groups around those cures makes this book a very cutting edge piece of fiction. If you are following the current debate over health care reform in the United States, then the interest group aspects of this story will appear to be quite close to the facts.
Unfortunately, despite the excellent build up, the ending was quite weak, with all the serious medical material to work with; the author relied on mystical religious causes to drive the conclusion. Furthermore, there were also a series of threads involving an online game called Battle Ultimo, a weeping statue hailed as a miracle, a security professional and former police chief that is a near alcoholic, some senseless inclusion of quantum physics, numerology, terrorist threats to a major meeting at the United Nations, a brutal murder that baffles the largely incompetent police, thousands of people disappearing due to a limited state of rapture and a Jewish mystic that appears poised to unlock many of the secrets in ancient texts from the time of Daniel. A great deal of this could have been left out with no significant loss to the driving point of the plot. If that had been done, this book would have been an extremely powerful literary force.

The characters are very interesting and the writer takes a lot of time building them so you can get a good sense of who each of them are. But, in my opinion, I find the author takes too much time building to the point the book moved slow for me. I am just at the last few chapters and I just can't bring myself to finish the book when it SHOULD be that I can't wait to finish. I will finish and I am looking forward to hearing the ending but it just hasn't left me dying to find out what happens. EDIT.....................................................................I have now finished the book and I didn't care for the ending at all. It really didn't make a lot of sense to me. There are so many loose ends that were never tied up in the ending. This "Battle Ultimo" buisness the writer kept talking about through the whole book had absolutely NOTHING to do with anything which I found highly annoying. Based on the ending, I am changing my star rating from 3 stars down to a 2 star even though Amazon won't officially let me change my original star rating. This writer has great potential. Perhaps with her next book, she will take the time to make sure her ending wraps up more of the loose ends and not leave it scattered all over the place like I found this book to be. Would I recommend this book? Maybe. Would I read another book from this author? Yes, I think for a first attempt, she did a fairly good job.

Great read. This is an impressive work, especially for a first time author. Moves fast, keeps the reader engaged and is 'Michael Crichton' like. I highly recommend this book for those that like science thrillers.

I do not read too many books thinking I am too busy to get involved in a book so I read the paper and magazines. This book caught my eye, then my attention and then all of me where I couldn't set it down. When I did have to set it down, the short chapters and interesting characters made it easy to pick back up and get right back into it. I like it when you can't predict the end or who all the good and bad people are and keeps you on the edge until the end. This does great work in intertwining history, the Bible, religions, government, medical, corporations, and the media to take you on an adventurous journey and leaves you thinking at the end.