The book NEVER engaged my interest. It struck me as having been written with the coldest of scalpels in the coldest of operating rooms. If stark coldness was Larson's intent, then he was hugely successful. I found it tedious to the extreme. I never felt that Larson capably tied together the two sub-stories. Obviously well researched and, from the standpoint of language, well written. Some of his descriptive turns of phrase are delightful. If this were a piece of technical writing, I'd assign it a grade of A; since it's not of that genre, I give it an F.