" Michael Cunningham may be the best prose stylist writing fiction today. Yet the shimmering beauty of his prose is wasted on a world view that borders on nihilistic. Specimen Days, named for a work by Walt Whitman, traces the decline and extinction of humanity from the industrial age, where men and their lives are eaten by machines, through the present where children are turned into monsterous killing machines, to the future where humananity is gone and all that is left on earth is a humanoid cybourg and a dead alien bioform. Man has become machine. Throughout the 3 sections (past, present, and future), Cunningham uses Whitman's celebration of man and nature to contrast with the creeping death of humanity. The writing, the structure of this novel amounts to a tour de force. The message, not so much. "
— Beverly, 1/18/2014