The title of the book I just read was Broken Blade it was written by William Durbin. It was published in 1999. The setting was on Lake Huron in Canada, around 1800. The main character is Pierre, along with Beloit and La Petite. The important point is that the only reason Pierre is on the river is because his dad cut off his thumb. The one part of the book that I did not expect is that Pierre is only 13 and is very well educated. I would recommend this book because is is fun and had a lot of adventure.

This is a terrific book which combines rapid action and adventure with solid historical research. You acutally feel like you're paddling along with the voyageurs as they are shooting rapids, fighting storms, and trading with the Ojibwa Indidans. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking to take a trip into a vital and exciting period of our history.

I'm a teacher and a parent who is always looking for books which are appropriate and interesting to middle grade students. THE BROKEN BLADE is one of those rare titles that I enjoyed just as much as my students did. The 2,400 mile canoe journey of the main character, Pierre, is described in such a way that the reader actually feels he/she is paddling along with the crew. The landscape, the river, the interaction with the Lake Superior Ojibwe, and Pierre's fellow voyageurs, who are a rowdy and a very real bunch, are vividly depicted, and they all help bring this nineteenth century story to life. My students and I have decided that we want to read more about the voyageur period, and the first book on our list is WINTERING, the companion to this story.

This very short book will dissappoint all but the most blindly fanatical Burroughs fans. A series of sketches inspired by the Nourse novel of the same name, it simply repeats well-worn themes dealt with more effectively elsewhere in his work. It seems to be the collected results of an aborted attempt to write a novel or screenplay, and from these insipid, lifeless scenes it is easy to see why it was aborted. The only question is: why display the lifeless corpse to the reading public? Methinks his manager was behind this unwise decision$$$

For completists only.

If you're looking for a connection to Ridley Scott's brilliant 1981 film release, you won't have it here. The only real connection is the title itself. It strikes me that someone creative and well-read in the Blade Runner film development came upon a phrase which just wouldn't let go, and that's how we got the term for the film. Burroughs' description here and that in the film are similar in their urban and societal context, but that's about where they end.

Reading this book, it strikes me that the producers of "Escape From New York" read this novel, and took an awful lot of creative vision away from it. This is especially true of the descriptions of a decrepit and decaying New York City, walled, populated by the dead, dying, and murdering, and where entire cultures flourish hundreds of feet above in the dead skyscrapers.

Written in late 70s, published first in 1979. Set in 1999, or maybe 2014, or maybe 1984, or maybe any number of time citations Burroughs coughs up.

Basically it's a futuristic nightmare, a technological hell in which the state has taken over all aspects of life, bureaucracy dictates every waking moment, and the medical institution is the vilest, most corrupt, most bloodthirsty, and most reckless of them all. Underground and legit drugs, as well as designer plagues all vie in the marketplace. Genetics are manipulated and diseases are voluntarily contracted for the material and physiological benefits the accrue.

Inside this hell the blade runner is central. "Essential to underground medicine are the blade runners, who transfer the actual drugs, instruments and equipment from the suppliers to the clients and doctors and underground clinics." The second half of the book, all two-dozen-odd pages of it follows Billy and his mates, blade runners all, as they fight their way through life on the street.

If you're a Burroughs fan, you've seen it all before in Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads. Nothing exotic or new or surprising here. This is a good addition to complete your Burroughs library, but not much more.

Burroughs's Blade Runner, A Movie, though as noted in previous reviews, bears no relation to the P.K. Dick work by the same title, it is nonetheless a far-reaching work of science fiction which explores the potential ramifications of the state of the nation if national health care were to be instituted (the work was penned in 1979). Though many people, when confronting a sci-fi work that has become literal in one sense yet in other aspects have yet to occur, will prey upon the latter while failing to salute the former. However, many times such critics are only exercising half of their literary aestheticism, for these people quickly forget the literal and the metaphorical are, at its best moments, entirely inseparable. With this in mind, yes, part of what Burroughs has written has occurred in regards to the implementation of HMOs yet other aspects have, and will not, but are to be taken metaphorically. Yet, regardless of interpretation, it is a tale told by a master that is easily accessible (even for Burroughs). Blade Runner is entertaining, and as always with WSB, thought provoking.

It may be that I am being a tad harsh, but her writing style drove me crazy. Some people might not mind, but I have had the mechanics of writing pounded into me since I could write. She kept switching tenses, she wrote the majority in past tense, she kept changing point of view with no warning and the change would only last a sentence or two, and she stuck exclamation marks everywhere, even during narration. All of this is the sort of thing that ensures you get no better than a 'C' on a paper, it would drive my teachers up a wall. It was like hitting a bad note or hearing nails on a chalkboard. That's why I had to give only three stars, even thought the characters and the plot were superb. The story, however, made it good enough to read through and recommend buying used for no more than a dollar. Kate is a sheltered girl from Bermuda who comes to England and is struck with a world filled with the most disturbing people who batter at her sensibilities and fling her into a cold, violent storm. Claudette Williams does a superb job telling Kate's tale if one can discount her awful mechanics.