Can you have a mid-life crisis at twenty-four? Or is it just the usual crisis of adulthood, something I was going to have to get used to until I doddered into oblivion? For the past year, I realised, I had been suffering from this pain, this leaking of hot lead in my stomach. Every morning when I awoke and stared at the ceiling and listened to Jane’s gentle snoring it flooded my gut, a dark swell of recognition that here was another pissing day to be got through as me. How can you tell if that’s...

So you invent a time machine, and what’s the first thing you do? You go back in time and kill Hitler, of course! Except you can’t (TVTropes), because either it doesn’t work or it screws up the timeline even more. Thus resolving one of the burning questions surrounding time travel: if it’s possible, why do we still have Hitler? Stephen Fry tackles this in a best-of-all-possible worlds way in Making History, where his protagonist succeeds in averting Hitler’s birth only for someone more charismati...

The book started well enough, young chap at Cambridge (Fry's alma mater) immersed in the history of Hitler, working towards spending his life at Cambridge in a paid capacity, is having a tough time with his hard-nosed scientist girlfriend who finally leaves him (I found her more interesting than our hero, stronger, and more capable of carrying a story, and was sorry to see her go). Young man makes a hash of his thesis, dissertation, whatever, by being way too inventive for historical research, b...

This was clearly not a success for me. Especially the literary level was very low: weakly portraited, one-dimensional characters, an occasional exciting moment but a lot of very boring moments, especially in the passages that have been written as a film script, and a really really dull final. The only interesting approach is that Fry tries to imagine what the consequences would be of attempts to change history, but even that is poorly executed. As a novel this does not exceed the level of cheap

Probably my favorite fiction book by the wonderful Stephen Fry - when you have read his autobiography, my suggestion is to go for this one! The story, obviously, is about the changing of history and the consequences thereof. Wonderful, live and likeable characters (and some not likeable at all, of course) and has all the trademark Fry: English humor, wit, and beautiful language. At no point in this book this feels overdone, but I felt that he hit just the tone and pace here. The outcome of the m...

More like 3.5 stars but whatever.The story follows Michael D. Young, a 24 year old guy who is supposed to turn in his thesis to achieve his doctorate. He lives with his girlfriend Jane, who is a very clever ambitious Chemist (I think, idk anymore) and both of them are so different that this relationship isn't good for any of them. The thesis Michael writes focuses on Adolf Hitler and his mother but (because he is dumb, I can't find another reason for such a bad thesis) he writes it in prose. Lik...

I tried, I really did. I love Mr Fry but this was flat as a pancake, two dimensional in every respect. The first couple of chapters were like a flashback to some trip in my twenties, an acid burn. By the time it had pulled itself into something that aligned with my attention span, my attention had got up and gone out for a drink.I followed it, leaving the book behind.Sorry, I know that a great deal have really rated this, but for me it didn't mesh.

What if you could go back in time and prevent Hitler from ever being born? In Making History, an ambitious History PHD student at Cambridge, along with a physicist, try to do exactly that. Making History is an entirely ambitious book, and while it was entertaining, it did have some pacing issues at the beginning particularly. However, I do feel like Fry's wit and sense of humour largely made up for that!

This was a great disappointment. The best part of the book was the alternate world that Fry imagined, with a very different outcome to the Second World War from the one we know.I found the protagonist incredibly irritating, though I was presumably supposed to find him charming. For someone who is a PhD candidate in history at Cambridge University, his inability to see that removing Hitler from the picture would not change the disastrous situation in Germany after the First World War, and that of...

Slow to get started, but once the set up ended (around page 150), it got completely awesome and very interesting. Michael and Leo try to fix the world by making it so that Hitler was never born, except the world that results is even worse. I loved the glimpses of the technology in the alternate world. I think the premise that the world ends up in a perpetual state of the 1950s is fascinating. I liked how Michael and Steve's relationship evolved, although I'd have liked to see a bit more of it. I...

Thoroughly good book. The idea this book is based on is nothing new, people have discussed this many times, but this is the first time I have seen the idea written down. It has been very well done, the different writing styles used keep you entertained. Michael and Leo are very good characters and some of their dialogue had me in stitches.The first book I have read by Mr Fry, I will be back to read some more.

When someone as talented, witty, and educated as Stephen Fry writes a book, you half-expect brilliance on every page. While his genius was clearly in evidence, it was only every other page or so where it struck me--still a helluva good rate.Fry did not lack for ambition. But it was always going to be difficult to display humor, humanity, romance, and imagination when the fate of the whole continent's Jewish population was at stake. The book asks whither a world without Hitler. Fry's treatment an...

Amazing. My absolute favorite of Fry's excellent works, and one of my favorite books, period. Hilarious, it goes without saying. Intelligent, playful, silly/serious. Romantic. No one but Fry could write a book about Hitler that can make you cry with laughter. "Sodding pants."

This amazing novel is a blend of science fiction, history, and time travel, and I thought it brilliant. If you're over the age of sixteen, chances are that you have spent a minute or two - in school or outside of it - pondering what our world would be like if the Germans had won World War II, or if Adolf Hitler had never been born, and that's exactly what this novel is about. Fry explores a spectrum of potential realities: historical, political, scientific, cultural, and sexual, and his speculat...

I wish I liked this book more, because I love Stephen Fry as an actor. But it started off so slow, like the first 200 pages were difficult to get through. After that was fine, but nothing that really blew me away and made the rating jump up for me. I wish I gave up on it, but the concept was so interesting that I was hoping it would get better. Unfortunately it was a bit too late and it didn’t redeem itself, so I was pretty disappointed with this one.

This book is about Michael Young, a PhD candidate in the field of history, and Leo Zuckermann, a professor. They both attend Cambridge and have a big interest in World War II, and in Hitler especially. Young is writing his thesis about Hitler's life, while Zuckermann creates a time machine. When these two people meet, they decide to eliminate one of the biggest evils that this world has ever known: Hitler. They succeed, but what they did not know is that the world may had been better off with Hi...

I think I read somewhere once that the first rule of timetravel is that you try to kill Hitler, and the second rule is that it either doesn't work, or things get even worse.This book falls into the second category. So, in terms of concept, it's not entirely new, but the execution is really really good.The book does an excellent job of capturing the human emotional level of the whole insane thing, and it's much funnier than you'd expect this kind of book to be.This is not really a science-fiction...

This is my first approach to Fry's books.It is an entertaining read. He is a talented and cultured man and that it is what you see while reading.A book is always embedded with the author's feelings likes and dislikes and opinions about anything. It is his "creature" after all. No surprises there. However, it may seem here that the story is just a necessary background against which Fry's impress many of its thoughts (academia's live and fauna, “Scientific” vs. “Humanist” views, English vs. Americ...

Wow - this book was amazing! In the beginning, the switch between past and present was a bit odd and I had a hard time to find into the book. But after several chapters, you see how all of it fits to the story and then I couldn't stop reading. So I am really happy that I had the opportunity to read it & can only recommend it!

Making History has one of the most uniquely mind-bending plots I have ever come across. Michael Young, a student pursuing a Ph.D. in History, encounters a non-assuming physics professor on a fateful day, thereby changing his life and the whole course of history. They both fixate on the idea of how the world would turn out if Adolf Hitler had never been born, and set about to make it into reality.This isn't the first time I have heard about Stephen Fry, but I was always reluctant to try his books...

This is the first time I’ve picked up a Stephen Fry novel, and it was an enjoyable, if slightly uneven, experience. Thumbing through the opening pages, I noticed that this book was first published in 1996, which begins to make sense when considering some of the faultlines running through this alternate history offering. The book is an intriguing premise – two men decide, for very different reasons, to tamper with history by ensuring the one man responsible for the rise of Nazi Germany is never b...

This was my first Stephen Fry book -- and I was a bit daunted by the 500+ page length. The writing is pretty fast moving -- heaps of details that make me feel like he's writing for a film, plus some sections where it's written like a film dialogue (not really sure why he's used this).Essentially, the story is about a student working on his PhD dissertation which sounds like an even more purple style of prose than Erik Larsen (bless his heart) and is laughed off by his dissertation advisor. He cr...

This was the first book by Stephen Fry that I have read. It is an enjoyable easy read, dealing with one of my favorite genres, time travel. I found the chapters that were written to mimic a movie scripts were very distracting, and don't really understand its use as a literary style. does Fry do this often?The storyline is a fairly classic one, What would happen if you travelled back in time and prevented Hitler from being born?The clever consequences of this action make this a very interesting r...

As much as I adore Stephen Fry, this was my first exposure to his fiction writing. It's as clever a novel as I thought it would be. Wonderful use of language and style and a complicated storyline. The novel poses the question of what would happen if you could go back in time and get rid of Hitler. It also makes the assertion that you don't know what you've got til it's gone. The two strands of story blend well together and it's clear a lot of research has gone into the sections that deal with pr...

There are not so many books which manage to get in your head in such a way that you ask yourself all those questions even though you know you won't get an answer. And it does so in such a light way filled with humor but it talks about topics darker than the night sky. What if Hitler had never been born? Would have this world been a Utopia or would it be even worse? Is there always a worse possibility? And should we ever, if given the chance, tamper with time and past events and what not? What if...

Although it took me a while to get into it (the beginning of the book is slow), I greatly enjoyed "Making History". Fry manages to take a well-discussed topic and a well-known (even worn) idea, and shape them into a funny and insightful story. Mostly, I'm amazed by his ability to meaningfully discuss such a complex and heavy topic, and still leave me with a smile on my face.While I didn't like Fry's writing style and his peculiar protagonist at first, I learned to love them both by the end of th...

Loved this book from the first page, Stephen Fry has a wonderful turn of phrase and the way, which is so easy to read.The story is different take on time travel and results in history being worse after the first bout of time travel than it originally was. However all things end up as they should by the end, or do they?At times it was very funny, at other times quite serious, but a great read overall.

a little too long, but a fun ride nonetheless.

A 'butterfly effect' tale of the twists and turns of history and the potential impact of trying to ;make things better' by removing Adolf Hitler from the gene pool. Told with Stephen Fry's brilliant humour and love of language (such a way with words!), the audiobook is read by Fry himself as well as Richard E Grant - what more could you want?!As a side note, I have to give props to Fry for his open discussion of sexuality and love in a book written in the mid-90s when I suspect this was less com...

I love the writing and the plot is one of the most fascinating ones I've read *-*