Alchemist

by Peter James

Book Overview

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger... Monty Bannerman's father is a leading genetic scientist, and Nobel Prize winner, whose company has just been taken over by what will soon be the world's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0752817299
• ISBN13: 9780752817293
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
• Length: 676 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Yes Yes Yes!

This is what supernatual thrillers should be like! Set in a scenario that is all too real these days, this book has all that you need and more besides. If you on here reading this, chances are you already know who Peter James is, and his genre, and are just looking for recommendations. In which case, i say with feeling, grab a read of this.

Brilliant

One of the best reads for a long time. Stanic rituals, sex, suspense ...But it aint no script for some B movie. Read it but be prepared to be scared

A warning about corporate ethics and bad science

For a generation of British schoolboys brought up on Dennis Wheatly a new star has appeared in the heavens. Peter James describes the dark forces behind so much of corporate culture. In Dennis Wheatly's day the Satanists were usually Nazis or Leninists. With the demise of these all too obviously totalitarian cultures the target list has diminished. For a while fanatical muslims provided the soft target for the creators of nightmares. The end of the Cold War saw opinion formers creating villains out of muslims: Robert Ludlum wrote about them; Schwarzenegger acted in films about them, and Willi Klaas suggested NATO turn it's military prepredness against Islam. But muslims are obviously suffering a severe pounding under the world's weaponary. The basic respect for truth enshrined in the Islamic message is too great for the religion to be really hated. No writer can be consistently successful by casting muslims as ignorant fanatics. The widely despised and detested Iran of the 'Salman Rushdie' fatwa becomes a bastion of liberal and progressive ideas compared with the Afghanistan of the Taliban (and perhaps TEXACO). It is widely rumoured that the Taliban leaders have enjoyed hospitality of Texas Oil millionaires. In the meantime bereaved and perhaps cynical widows and daughters undertake military training in the freezing cold mountains because they knew that someone had once built a university that would teach women in nearby Mazar-i-Sharif. The Iranians have women in the government. ALCHEMIST is a very topical book. At 'The End of History', with the eradication of obviously totalitarian dictatorships the corporate sector is the only arena for the play of good against evil. The arms trade is mentioned. But more important for the characters in the book are the life and death powers held by modern corporations. None of this is news to anyone who saw pictures of Hitler's rocket making bunkers in the Harz mountains. Slave labourers were drafted in by corporations and worked to death. Primo Levi is one of the best chroniclers of twentieth century science based capitalism. He experienced it's sharp end. If it is no longer necessary to use armed guards and barbed wire to keep the workers in the factories, that does not mean that armed guards and barbed wire have disappeared altogether. On the contrary the fiefdoms have proliferated. In an unregulated world of free markets any trans-national corporation can administer its own slave labour organisation. Mostly this is done by proxy, through militaristic regimes. Other forms of slavery exist. Addiction is the most basic. Liquor, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals are the mainstays of physical enslavement, while gambling and perhaps internet addiction are more in the spiritual sphere. ALCHEMY deals with the pharmaceutical industry. The corporate world is every bit as boorish as the author describes. The Satanic rituals are mere kid's comic stuff com

really great entertainment !

this book definitely is one of my favorite holiday recommendations: a thrilling crime story, embedded in an interesting occult context and completed as a love story. You won't miss anything and enjoy it all!

Pharmacutical corporation in dirty dealings shock

This book is initially quite a complex and interwoven story dealing with a series of characters and situations connected with genetics and pharmacuticals. Each of these develops into an absorbing amalgamation of the central theme and until the middle of the book this works and I certainly couldn't put it down. A smattering of the occult graces the pages from beginning to end and this may be enough to get you through but by the end a familiar and somewhat cliched parody of many books of the same ilk becomes evident. Enkoyable enough but prepare for disappointment and a little frustration