Transformation: The Breakthrough [Hardcover]

Whitley Strieber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1988

According to bestselling author Whitley Strieber, his contact with strange aliens did not end with the release of his controversial book, Communion. Instead, the "visitors" kept coming. In Transformation, Strieber challenges his own fear for a triumphant breakthrough in understanding. Soon to be a movie. HC: Morrow. (Nonfiction).

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co; 1st edition (September 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688077005
• ISBN-13: 978-0688077006
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best that Whitley Strieber Has to Offer!, August 31, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Transformation: The Breakthrough (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is the most compelling book about Alien Encounters that I have ever read. It is a brutally honest account of one man's struggle for complete understanding of what is happening to him. I have been a critic of Strieber's more recent books. This, his second book of the Visitor Phenomenon, better captures his feelings while he still had an honest perception of them.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Clarifications only muddy the already darkened waters, June 2, 2000

By 

Chadwick H. Saxelid "Bookworm" (Concord, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Transformation: The Breakthrough (Mass Market Paperback)

Whitley Strieber felt the compulsion to further explore the events he described in Communion and clear up some facts. He only makes the reader doubt him more. More hearsay and nothing truly concrete, unless you take the author's continual statements of truthfulness at face value. Will frustrate even the most forgiving of readers. I still found it interesting reading, but just barely.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Communion follow-up: recommended only for the Strieber devotee, November 15, 2010

By 

Archer Books "Archer Books" (Dubai UAE) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Transformation : The Breakthrough (Hardcover)

This book was written concurrently with the author's international bestseller "Communion" and published just one year later. It turns out Strieber had always intended for his exploration of what happened to him with the visitors to become a publishing series, starting with "Communion" (which is genuinely worth reading) and continuing through further volumes, which sold far less well and are not so highly regarded.

Whereas "Communion" has a simple, visceral power and reads as a coherent, chronological narrative about the author's experiences with the visitors, "Transformation" is more a collection of recollections and speculations which didn't make it into the first book. It jumps from one idea to another and is less focussed than the first volume, though it does contain some interesting stuff. Further abductions both of Whitley and his son Andrew (whose real name is used in this book) are described, some of which do read as dream-like; their reality is degraded by the uncomfortable fact that, whereas thousands of abduction accounts from other abductees describe exactly the same beings and processes, Strieber's are in many details unique and different. This is usually a red flag, and lends support to the contention expressed by many that Strieber "has a hard time telling fact from fiction."

At the core of "Transformation" is the author's struggle to find the meaning of the experience, and here he goes way off the map. He journeys into metaphysical and rather new-age territory as he comes to believe the visitors recycle souls, and that the Earth is a kind of "school." There are echoes of Jim Sparks' writings in the self-indulgent, obsessively introspective narcissism which characterises much of the book's content.

Strieber is still a good writer though, and this is the saving grace of "Transformation." From the pen of a less competent writer it might read as a rambling incoherent mess, a meandering tract of new-age mumbo-jumbo. However the book is better than that: it's just nowhere near as good as "Communion" and doesn't make any lasting contribution to the understanding of what is going on with this pervasive phenomenon - though it pretends it does.

In summary, "Transformation" would be of interest mainly to the devotee of Strieber's writing (and he's admittedly a good writer), or to anyone who wants to read everything ever written about the abduction/visitor issue. It's OK, but not one of the better books on the subject.