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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An incredibly gripping Jurassic drama, February 12, 2005
I wouldn't have thought what Robert Bakker has done in this book was possible! Certainly his academic work grabbed the public imagination, and his factual book "The Dinosaur Heresies" stirred up controversy with his theory that dinosaurs were actually fast, warm-blooded animals quite like modern mammals and birds. But to write a full-length novel about the day-to-day life of a dinosaur? How interesting could that be?
Well, maybe it's me - when I was a boy I used to devour the "animal books" of Jack London and Ernest Seton Thompson - but I just couldn't put "Raptor Red" down. You hear that said a lot, but this time it was literally true. Told in the present tense throughout, this story simply rips along, going from one thrilling episode to another and astonishing you with little-known but exciting facts and informed speculation.
By the way, the heroine (you have to call her that) turns out to be almost identical to the "velociraptors" in the film "Jurassic Park". (Please see the first Comment below this review for a correction of the following statements). At the time, everyone thought Steven Spielberg had contradicted all the scientific evidence by making his raptors twice as big as human beings - then in 1982, the year before the film was released, someone dug up fossils from a raptor that was almost identical to Spielberg's. That animal - christened Utahraptor - is Raptor Red, and she tangles with some scary opposition along the way. You wouldn't think there would be much that could threaten a fast-moving 500-pound monster with razor-sharp claws and teeth... until page 16, anyway.
Bakker is a born writer, and not only does he keep the action humming along, he even finds time for a lot more character development than you will find in many novels about people. Within a few pages you will find yourself identifying with Raptor Red, urging her on as she stalks prey, holding your breath when she is in danger, even sighing when she finds a mate. Then you pinch yourself and remember that she'd have YOU for dinner in about half of no time at all.
The key lies in Bakker's belief that some dinosaurs - certainly utahraptors - were highly intelligent, perhaps as much so as wolves and bears, or even the great apes. That opens up a whole new dimension that most renderings of the prehistoric world have utterly lacked.
Although it's a compact and inexpensive paperback, "Raptor Red" has been carefully produced, with considerable attention to detail. Starting with the holographic portrait of Raptor Red herself on the cover - it's corny, but I liked it. Every one of the 26 chapters begins with a little thumbnail drawing of a type of dinosaur mentioned in the story. And Bakker has written an interesting and instructive preface and epilogue, to explain some facts he couldn't reasonably fit into the book itself.
If you are in the least interested in dinosaurs, or animals of any kind - read it! You can't go wrong.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Raptor's Point of View, January 9, 2007
Not everyone can write a book about a dinosaur from the dinosaur's point of view and get away with it. In fact, few have ever tried. Bakker succeeds in this undertaking for several reasons, not the least of which is because he really knows his science. The last time I read a book of this kind, in which the author attempted to evoke the life experience of another animal from the animal's point of view, was when I read Gordon Allred's great little book "Dori, the Mallard" way back in the late 60's. He's the only guy I ever knew who could describe what it was like to be a duck from the duck's point of view. Bakker's book is equally compelling.
The second reason this book works is because it resonates with a rare kind of credibility. No one really knows if Raptor Red or any other raptor was really sentient, nor does anyone really know whether the abstract ideas Bakker posits for her were actually part of her way of intepreting her life experience. No one knows because we simply can't know such things, but the very notion of it is compelling for those who have witnessed sentience in other species in our own life experiences.
The physical attributes he attributes to her, such as the size of her brain relative to her overall mass and structure, is reasonable. The conclusion he draws, that she was unusually intelligent because she possessed a big enough brain to sustain thoughtful sentience, is a product of reasonable scientific extension of known facts. The keenness he attributes to her olfactory and visual senses is acceptable because it is based on sound scientific information that is universally known and widely accepted. Her ability to reason, solve problems, recall past experiences in the context of current challenges, discriminate between one cultural norm and another, interpret scent messages, and so on, are all attributes commonly demonstrated by other highly evolved, warm-blooded creatures living in our own time. The question he asks is a reasonable one - if we find these characteristics in sentient creatures of our own time, why couldn't they have existed in times long gone by? And if they did, what was it like to experience the world of their time from their point of view?
It is Bakker's erudite and imaginative ability to explore the possible answers to these questions, without lapsing into our peculiar brand of twentieth century Disneyfication, that makes this a meaningful and valuable book. Bakker is a rare find - in the world of laudatory science fiction there are very few authors who could have made this book work. For this reason alone, if there were no other reasons, I would recommend this book to others without qualification.
Finally, I found this book not only well written in terms of its science but as a story told from the first person's point of view. It is well paced, liberally laced with explanatory science which informs without boring or overwhelming the reader. When Bakker makes a leap of faith not shared by others in his profession, he justifies his point of view by informing our own critical thinking without becoming argumentative. This is an unusually entertaining and informing book which I heartily recommend to others.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Paleontology into fantasy, March 2, 2001
Using fiction to expand the audience for a scientific idea is a novel ploy. Robert Bakker has given us one of the best examples of this technique. In The Dinosaur Heresies, Bakker presented a beautifully written, but highly detailed, account of the likely scenarios of dinosaur existence. The full range of dinosaur life was described with elegant care, overlaid with Bakker's fine wit. But the wealth of information in that book may have deterred some readers from delving into what was basically a serious description. Here, Bakker's simply dumped much of the scientific annotation to provide a similar depiction of dinosaur life. Raptor Red incorporates a recent find of a large predatory dinosaur. Having positioned the find with its cognomen, Utahraptor, Bakker weaves a highly plausible tale of likely events in this creature's life. Cleverly portraying Raptor Red as female, he gives the "character" a wider range of experiences. Most of these are fully credible based on the increased knowledge gained by teams of paleontologists and volunteers. For example, recent finds indicate dinosaurs, unlike most of today's reptiles, probably stayed with nestlings after the hatch. Bakker has done a credible job in working in this concept and other revisionist thinking about probable dinosaur behaviour. We must be careful in assessing whether Bakker has taken liberties with levels of dinosaur intelligence. Science has revealed unexpected mental capacity in the minute fruit fly [see Jonathan Weiner's Time, Love, Memory for a fascinating account]. Dinosaurs reigned over the planet for over 150 million years. That's a fine testimonial to their adaptability and capacity for survival. Bakker acknowledges this aptitude at the story's opening by introducing the raptor as a migratory species entering a new territory. From this beginning he goes on to give the raptor emotional capacity, environmental awareness, and almost love. While flirting lightly with anthropomorphism, Bakker deftly maintains the creature's reptilian identity. It's a fine line, but he manages it without granting the animal more intellect than it deserves. He must find a way to impart motivation and without some means of doing so, we wouldn't have had the story. And it's a fine story.
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