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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A crackling good disaster novel.,
By
This review is from: The Tower (Hardcover)
Richard Martin Stern's The Tower is one of the two novels that Irwin Allen's production of The Towering Inferno was based, the other being The Glass Inferno by Scorita and Robinson.On the gala opening of the latest world's tallest building, an unstable construction worker detonates a bomb and starts a fire that spirals quickly out of control, leaving the celebrants trapped on the top floors. As the fire climbs closer and the situation grows grimmer, the characters true natures are revealed, and some are not pretty. The elements Irwin Allen used in his film version are easily found, but they work far better in the source material. An excellent suspense story with a refreshing and somber finale, highly recommended.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good plot, weak characters,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Tower (The Towering Inferno) (Paperback)
"The Tower" provided the suspenseful plot and approximate building height for the movie, "The Towering Inferno" -- but the blockbuster movie wisely left this book's unsatisfactory characters and dialogue behind.In "The Tower," a corrupt electrical contractor builds the world's tallest firetrap, and a deranged worker sets off an electrical surge that turns the lower-Manhattan skyscraper into a towering you-know-what. Strong on technical details and a grim sense of foreboding, the book unfortunately falls short in character development: There is too much of it at exactly the wrong moments. Worse, the characters seem less than fully developed: Several characters speak with a similar vocabulary and rhythm, as if the author could not give them common human distinctiveness. Instead of allowing character actions and expressions to speak for themselves, the author spends inordinate time telling us (via narration) about several characters that are really little more than shallow early-Seventies cliches: an amoral feminist wife, a maverick governor, an Irish cop. As a result, any dramatic buildup is repeatedly knocked down by stretches of ponderous reading. Thankfully, the book is stronger in basic plot than the book to which it is often compared: "The Glass Inferno," which served as half the inspiration of "The Towering Inferno." The notion of an electrical fire erupting throughout The Tower's 125-story building is, frankly, more compelling than The Glass Inferno's storage-closet fire in a 66-story building. And The Tower's rather dark conclusion is now -- given certain real-world events -- more plausible than Inferno's heroic waterlogged climax. I first read this book as a teen-ager in the 1970s, and read it again recently. Then and now, this book's characters were forgettable, but its grim vision of the outcome of a major skyscraper fire haunted me afterward.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but not THAT good,
By Jason E. Moran (Manchester, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Tower (Hardcover)
A good read, however I found this book somewhat tedious in parts. One of two novels that inspired Irwin Allen's blockbuster disaster movie "The Towering Inferno", I saw the movie before I read the book, and it doesn't live up to what I expected. Not quite as hard hitting as I would have liked, the technical details are well written, but it lacks a punch elsewhere.
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