Dead on Arrival: A Novel

Just imagine. You've landed at a small regional airport somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The world has gone silent. There's nothing but static on every channel on the radio. The body of a man in a jumpsuit lies sprawled on the tarmac, and human figures inside the terminal are motionless. Is this beginning of a dystopian tale? Will people everywhere be victims of a mysterious pandemic? Or is something else happening here?In Matt Richtel's debut novel, Dead on Arrival, something else is definitely going on. As will quickly become apparent, what appears to be a pandemic is somehow related to a top-secret project at Google. There, a small team of brilliant engineers is exploring the connection between information overload, memory, and attention. Has the experiment gone awry? We'll find out.Dead on Arrival is loosely based on contemporary neurological research that is turning up disturbing findings. The information overload to which so many of us are subject through our mobile devices and social media is a problem on many levels. First, the information glut that keeps us glued to our screens can impair working (short-term) memory. Second, information overload is causing many of us to suffer from decision fatigue. Third, as The Economist has noted, "information overload can make people feel anxious and powerless: scientists have discovered that multitaskers produce more stress hormones." Lastly, our marriage with social media may be driving us apart, causing us to drift ever closer to political extremes (although some studies question this assertion). Matt Richtel has built his novel around these questions, speculating that the potential exists for electronic media to impact us in far worse ways.Matt Richtel won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles at the New York Times about distracted driving. He later wrote a bestselling nonfiction book on the topic, A Deadly Wandering. Before writing Dead on Arrival, Richtel studied the impact on the human brain of living with "a deluge of data" from digital devices. He shared the thought that children's brains are developing differently from those of their parents and others of older generations. Richtel, a graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, holds a Master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism.

This book was recommended to me on the premise that I'd liked 'I Am Pilgrim'. Dead on Arrival certainly grabs the reader's attention with the opening scene, but alas somehow didn't manage to follow through. There is a strong social message within the plot that has stayed with me, but ultimately the suspense and tension did not build to a satisfying conclusion. That said, I'm not entirely sure what sort of conclusion I would have been happy with, and there's no pleasing everyone! It's certainly well written and the point made within the story could not be more relevant if it tried, but somehow there was still some 'oomph' lacking. What I found a bit lacking, others will find thrilling, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Well conceived, well delivered, and kudos to the author.

This one started out really great. Creepy and atmospheric. I had high hopes for the story. However, I realized it wasn't going where I thought it was about a quarter of the way in. Some of the characters didn't ring true (Jerry, the copilot) and after awhile, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief enough. I also started to think this book was more about trying to make gun owners look like crazy, out of control people. That turned me off. I finished it but it really just didn't live up to what I thought it was going to be. Could have been so much better.

Matt Richtel takes the reader on an all-too-real and truly terrifying journey of the lengths to which technology could potentially be taken - and might it? In his swift-paced Dead on Arrival. Richtel is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist whose deep research into the addictive nature of cell phone usage provides the all-too-familiar backdrop of people's wandering zombie-like with faces pressed firmly to devices. Woven throughout this intense page-turner are fundamental questions that are inescapable: have we become inextricably entwined with our devices? Have we let things go too far? As we race past an opening that is anyone's worst nightmare towards an even worse catastrophe, the questions hover: are we complicit? Just how unrealistic is this? That's the truly scary part of this very well-crafted, intense novel. If you're searching for a Halloween story that will scare your hair into a permanent frizz, this is your book. Five stars.

This was definitely not my favorite book. I prefer ones with closure and not dozens of hanging threads. The various unexplained factors reminds me of a book that moved from section to section by unexplained coincidence. It was difficult to follow-I rarely have difficulty following the authors chain of thought but this book could have been improved by adding meaningful chapter headings like dates or character names. The ending was poor-it just basically stopped. What happened to Alix or jennifer etc. The overall story was original and held interest--very original.

I was disappointed in this book. It was so "over-hyped" which might have contributed to the let down I felt. I loved the plot line and the technology, but the story-telling seemed emotionless to me -- sort of "just the facts". I almost quit reading several times because I got annoyed with the one-dimensional characters and the story seemed bogged. It just never got me emotionally involved. The cause of the "death" in the book was predictable. The actual ending, i.e., the last 2-3 pages was surprising but didn't have much of an impact.

As other reviewers have commented, the book starts off with promise. I actually found myself wanting to read more until about half-way through the book, then it became an exercise in how silly could this get. The premise is interesting and it does make you think about our reliance on, and seemingly constant attention to, our devices. But the book limps to a less than thrilling conclusion. If any lesson is to be learned it's to make sure your password is secure and can't be guessed.

Was very good reading