Jurassic Park: A Novel

Unless your species evolved sometime after 1993 when Jurassic Park hit theaters, you're no doubt familiar with this dinosaur-bites-man disaster tale set on an island theme park gone terribly wrong. But if Speilberg's amped-up CGI creation left you longing for more scientific background and ... well, character development, check out the original Michael Crichton novel. Although not his best book (get ahold of sci-fi classic The Andromeda Strain for that), Jurassic Park fills out the film version's kinetic story line with additional scenes, dialogue, and explanations while still maintaining Crichton's trademark thrills-'n'-chills pacing. As ever, the book really is better than the movie. --Paul Hughes

I sell books for a living. There are just a handful of authors in the world who sell at the multiple million copy level and if you're a reader you can probably name them just as well as I can. (King, Koontz, Crichton, Rice, Ludlum, Clancy, Grisham, Steel etc.) And yet just because an author sells a lot of copies doesn't mean each time a new one is released it's an event, because everyone's become accustomed to having the author sell well. An event becomes defined by the intensity of the sale and the magnitude by which the public is clamoring. Remember Peter Benchley's JAWS? Thanks to the movie, that was an event. But I didn't sell JAWS, which leads me to the other point. You may see a selling "event" once during a career, if at all. I happened to be selling JURASSIC PARK when the movie released and I don't expect to have an experience quite like it ever again. Whereas a big best seller for me at the time would have been 40-50,000 copies in my territory, I literally sold hundreds of thousands of copies of JURASSIC PARK. It was incredible. I've never approached that number again. The success of this book changed the way publishers and authors looked at movies as a vehicle to sell books; it was truly an event. It's also the reason why I recommend it.

--Ron Lundquist, Ballantine Sales Rep.