This book is fantastic it is about a very poor boy named Charlie Bucket. He always goes to school with out a jacket because they don't have money to buy Charlie things. The setting of the book is an unnamed city; small wooden house on the edge of a great city,a fabled chocolate factory. The conflict is five children who have found golden tickets compete to see who will take over Mr. Wonka's chocolate factory. It all started when the newpaper announces that the Wonka chocolate factory will hide five golden tickets in the Wonka chocolate bars. Charlie desperately hopes he will find a golden ticket. The problem is that each year he gets a chocolate on his birthday, and he doesn't have money to buy one. Charlie father loses his job and the poor family is on brink of starvation. Charlie finds a dollar bill on the street, and before he tells his mother, he goes to buy two chocolate bars. One of the bars contains the fifth golden ticket. Charlie and his Grandpa Joe go to the Wonka Chocolate Factory. When the are finally there Mr. Wonka tells everybody to be careful,and not touch any thing from the factory. Then Augustus Gloop falls into the hot chocolate river while attempting to drink it, and gets sucked up by one of the pipes. Veruca Salt is determined to be a bad nut by nut judging squirrels who throw her out with the trash. Violet Beauregarde grabs an experimental piece of gum and chew herself into a giant blueberry. She is removed from the factory. Mike Teavee shrinks himself and his father has to carry him out in his breast pocket. So Charlie is the only one that is left in the factory. Mr. Wonka tries to find a person that would keep the chocolate factory. Mr. Wonka decided to give away his factory because he is too old. Then he decides that Charlie is the one who will run the factory exactly the way he has always run it. Finally Mr. Wonka congrarulates him for winning the entire factory for himself and his family.

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In most thrillers, "hardware" consists of big guns, airplanes, military vehicles, and weapons that make things explode. Dan Brown has written a thriller for those of us who like our hardware with disc drives and who rate our heroes by big brainpower rather than big firepower. It's an Internet user's spy novel where the good guys and bad guys struggle over secrets somewhat more intellectual than just where the secret formula is hidden--they have to gain understanding of what the secret formula actually is.

In this case, the secret formula is a new means of encryption, capable of changing the balance of international power. Part of the fun is that the book takes the reader along into an understanding of encryption technologies. You'll find yourself better understanding the political battles over such real-life technologies as the Clipper Chip and PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software even though the book looks at the issues through the eyes of fiction.

Although there's enough globehopping in this book for James Bond, the real battleground is cyberspace, because that's where the "bomb" (or rather, the new encryption algorithm) will explode. Yes, there are a few flaws in the plot if you look too closely, but the cleverness and the sheer fun of it all more than make up for them. There are enough twists and turns to keep you guessing and a lot of high, gee-whiz-level information about encryption, code breaking, and the role they play in international politics. Set aside the whole afternoon and evening for it and have finger food on hand for supper--you may want to read this one straight through. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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In 1978, science fiction writer Spider Robinson wrote a scathing review of The Stand in which he exhorted his readers to grab strangers in bookstores and beg them not to buy it.

The Stand is like that. You either love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it. Stephen King's most popular book, according to polls of his fans, is an end-of-the-world scenario: a rapidly mutating flu virus is accidentally released from a U.S. military facility and wipes out 99 and 44/100 percent of the world's population, thus setting the stage for an apocalyptic confrontation between Good and Evil.

"I love to burn things up," King says. "It's the werewolf in me, I guess.... The Stand was particularly fulfilling, because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and man, it was fun! ... Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke."

There is much to admire in The Stand: the vivid thumbnail sketches with which King populates a whole landscape with dozens of believable characters; the deep sense of nostalgia for things left behind; the way it subverts our sense of reality by showing us a world we find familiar, then flipping it over to reveal the darkness underneath. Anyone who wants to know, or claims to know, the heart of the American experience needs to read this book.

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