Dinosaur Summer [Hardcover]

Tony DiTerlizzi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1998

Peter Belzoni is dreading summer in Manhattan. Then his father, photojournalist Anthony Belzoni, offers the youth a job, a byline in National Geographic...and a trip to South America. For the Lothar Gluck Circus, once the world's foremost dinosaur attraction, has gone bankrupt. Left behind is a menagerie of avisaurs, centrosaurs, and ankylosaurs, as well as one large predatory raptor named Dagger. And now two filmmakers and the circus trainer plan to return the giants to the wild - with Peter and his dad chronicling the odyssey for Geographic. The task seems impossible. Many have died trying to bring beasts out of the Lost World, the plateau of El Grande in Venezuela, but nobody has ever attempted to transport nearly a dozen fullgrown, multiton prehistoric creatures across continents, down rivers, through jungles, and up a mountain that has been isolated for 70,000,000 years... The trek will strain the technologies of trains, cargo ships, barges, trucks...en route lurk robbers and hostile, trigger-happy soldiers...and each mile toward freedom excites Dagger toward an unstoppable, primal killing frenzy. When the unthinkable threatens to strand Peter and the rest of the crew in an uncharted realm, four modern Americans will face all the unknown dangers, mysteries, and terrors of El Grande...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Remember Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, in which an expedition led by Professor George Edward Challenger discovered an Amazonian plateau where dinosaurs still roamed? In Dinosaur Summer, Greg Bear assumes that Challenger's expedition really took place, and that for nearly 50 years dinosaurs have been relatively commonplace in zoos and circuses throughout the world. But the beasts are not easily kept in captivity, and slowly but surely their numbers are dwindling. Now there is only one dinosaur circus left, and it's shutting down. The dinosaur trainer wants to return his animals to the wild, so an expedition is organized to return the dinos to their nearly inaccessible plateau. Accompanying the group (which includes special-effects master Ray Harryhausen) is 15-year-old Peter Belzoni, the son of the National Geographic photographer covering the story. The boy is about to have the adventure of a lifetime.

From Kirkus Reviews

Fantasy built on a fantasyin Bear's alternative 1947, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World wasn't fiction, but fact!mingling real and imaginary characters with a quite unbelievable hodgepodge of defiantly unextinct beasties from the Carboniferous on up. Circus Lothar, the last dinosaur circus, is closing down, and its animal trainer, Vince Shellabarger, is determined to return his charges to their home, the isolated Venezuelan plateau of El Grande discovered by Professor Challenger in 1912. National Geographic's Anthony Belzoni will cover the event, assisted by his 15-year-old son Peter. Filming the cavalcade will be Willis ``OBie'' O'Brien (of King Kong fame) and special effects/animation genius Ray Harryhausen. The tough journey is made more difficult by the Venezuelan Army's quarrel with both the politicos and the local Indians. Still, the expedition reaches the rickety bridge leading on to El Grande, and most of the animals cross safely. But Dagger, a vicious predator, escapes from his cage; predictably, the bridge falls, marooning Peter, Anthony, OBie, Ray, and Billie, an Indian pursuing a spirit quest. After various adventuresthe group is menaced by critters ranging from giant salamanders and hungry therapsids to huge ``death eagles''they make it back, minus assorted limbs and teeth, bearing a couple of precious eggs. Amiable, sometimes stirring incident-packed baloney: a yarn that screams I wanna be a movie! (illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 321 pages
• Publisher: Time Warner Int; 1ST edition (February 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446520985
• ISBN-13: 978-0446520980
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,227,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Greg Bear is the author of more than thirty books, spanning thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy, including Blood Music, Eon, The Forge of God, Darwin's Radio, City at the End of Time, and Hull Zero Three. His books have won numerous international prizes, have been translated into more than twenty-two languages, and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Over the last twenty-eight years, he has also served as a consultant for NASA, the U.S. Army, the State Department, the International Food Protection Association, and Homeland Security on matters ranging from privatizing space to food safety, the frontiers of microbiology and genetics, and biological security.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag of fun and disappointments, August 6, 2000

By 

Robert James (Culver City, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dinosaur Summer (Mass Market Paperback)

As somebody who spent his early adolescence watching old monster movies like "King Kong" and reading old science fiction like "The Lost World" by Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes, if you don't know), I was truly excited when I picked up "Dinosaur Summer." It was such a great idea, to treat the tale of Professor Challenger as if it actually happened. But when I was done reading it, I was curiously disappointed. I had loved the premise, and even enjoyed parts of the narrative, but when it was done, I felt like I'd been cheated. I think the mixed reviews this book has received come from this: we were led into the book expecting a kind of Golden Age science fiction, with lost worlds and intrepid professors and risks and dangers and escapes, and we were presented with a 1990s sensibility of moral and environmental failures. Nobody succeeds at much of anything in this book, which runs directly counter to the genre it's attempting to revive. I love Greg Bear's work, especially "Blood Music," but here I think he forgot the whole point of an homage: to recreate the spirit of the original work. Still, I'm glad I read "Dinosaur Summer," if only because it sent me back to the originals again (which is another goal of homage, of course).

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delight, July 27, 1999

By 

D. Thierry (Rolle, Suisse) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dinosaur Summer (Mass Market Paperback)

I'm not surprised that this book has been underrated by many readers. It comes from another age, when Doyle and Burroughs were the hottest adventure writers around. It was a big challenge for Bear to satisfy the old hard-liner of "Lost World" but the "exercice de style" was achieved to the perfection. But don't be surprised if under the apparent naivete inherited from the Lost World a very clever, educated and gripping story is developping. After all, that's the Bear Touch.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dinosaur Summer is adventure in the great old-fashioned way., April 17, 1998

By 

Michael E. Stamm (Eugene, Oregon) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dinosaur Summer (Hardcover)

In what we are pleased to think of as our reality, such men as Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (producers of the 1933 KING KONG), special effects geniuses Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, President Harry S Truman, and circus impresario John Ringling North, to name only a few, are-or, for most of them, at least were-very real. On the other hand, such men as George Edward Challenger are inhabitants of the vast realms of fiction-in this instance, Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 classic, THE LOST WORLD.

Now Greg Bear-author of such major SF novels as MOVING MARS, EON, / (Slant), and many others, provides in his new novel DINOSAUR SUMMER a world wherein our reality and Doyle's speculative adventure collided head-on and merged, eighty-six years ago, with the return from Venezuela of the Challenger expedition-complete with real, live dinosaurs. And the result is quite a reading experience. (An added bonus: the novel is illustrated, both with fine line drawings and excellent full-color paintings reflecting a style of illustration of over fifty years ago, by Tony DiTerlizzi.)

In DINOSAUR SUMMER it's 1947, and dinosaurs are passé; a world in which they still lived lost interest in them after only a few decades (unlike our world's continuing fascination with the creatures of a vanished epoch). The last dinosaur circus still extant is out of business, its facilities sold to John Ringling North, its last remaining sad living exhibits destined for an uncertain fate...until the National Geographic steps in, offering to fund an expedition to return the dinosaurs to the massive prehistoric plateau, the tepui of El Grande, known to the nearby Indians as the sacred Kahu Hidi. Along for the ride, to preserve this quixotic journey's high points on film, are movie expert Willis O'Brien, the young Ray Harryhausen, photographer Anthony Belzoni, and Belzoni's son Peter, the novel's focal character.

I don't want to give much away, but I can say that the first half of the novel moves relatively slowly but steadily, quietly getting under way; after the expedition at last arrives at the gateway to Kahu Hidi, events really start to rock and roll like a runaway train, hurtling toward a powerful and emotionally resonant conclusion. Greg Bear, in addition to considerable knowledge of his subjects (prehistory, history, politics, movies, people), obviously has great affection for them as well.

I must have read Doyle's LOST WORLD more than a dozen times when I was a kid, my favorite movie of all time may well be the `33 KONG, and I've seen every O'Brien and Harryhausen fantasy film many times since as a result, not to mention JURASSIC Park and its sequel. That said: for readers like me, DINOSAUR SUMMER-which despite its Bradbury-esque title contains significant (and by no means gratuitous) scenes of graphic violence at its climax, and is not really for younger kids-is a real treat, and one I expect to return to again. Like Doyle's novel and KONG, it more than fulfills Cooper and Schoedsack's Three Ds-"Keep it Distant, Difficult, and Dangerous"-in a way that happens all too rarely, a way I can really prize.

-Michael E. Stamm is a clerical worker in the English Department at the University of Oregon; he has been reviewing science fiction, fantasy, horror, and genre fiction for various publications for nigh onto twenty years now.