The Road | 
| Manufacturer: Knopf
Category: EBooks
List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $7.96
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1482 reviews
Sales Rank: 50
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B000OI0G1Q
Publication Date: March 20, 2007
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Amazon.com
Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane
 Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).
Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane
Product Description
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1477 more reviews...
 End Road July 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
In terms of the flow of language and gramatical structure, I really do not feel that Cormac McCarthy is a good writer. Though the book progresses clumsily at times, the engagement of the plot overcomes this flaw. With a morbid and disspiriting theme, the reader plots along toward the end, wondering what may happen next. "The Road" and its melancholy themes create an unusual bond of engagement with the reader that can compare strikingly with "The Grapes of Wrath".
A boy and his father are progressing in a journey south after surviving an unnamed apocalytic catastrophe. Along their road they see shocking sights, struggle for food and shelter, while the father tries to disguise the fact that he is dying from his son. Alone in a world of villains or "bad guys", the father knows he must prepare his son for life after him. Reading the book while enjoying the luxuries of the modern world, it may even strike some readers as awkward as they read of things that no longer exist. As the story draws to a close, the conclusion of the heartbreaking journey to the South may catch some readers by surprise.
The greatest flaw of this book is the style in which it is written. Once a reader gets past this flaw, it is a reasonable expectation to be entertained and even learn from this book. When one puts this book in the prespective of the movie "The Day After", it is difficult to deny the book's authenticity.
 Unending, Tedious, Oppressive Nihilism July 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Cormac McCarthy in the Writer's Alamanac for July 20, 2008 is quoted as saying, "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous"
I think HIS ideas and books are dangerous, depressive, and non-productive.
The Road exemplifies his nihilistic viewpoint, and is a waste of precious reading time. Read "Happier" by Tal Ben-Shahar instead.
Heartwrenching. A slow burn up to the worthwhile end. July 24, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Of course I'd heard plenty about this book before I picked it up, and I was afraid it would be overrated and since my expectations were high I'd be disappointed. I wasn't.
You know the plot is about a man and his young son who spend their days moving from the northern U.S. to the south after the world has turned into a postapocolyptic ash-covered graveyard, and every moment is a struggle to survive.
The beauty in this book is the way McCarthy delivers simple, touching phrases in description and dialogue. The relationship between the man and the boy is so perfectly perfectly strong. Their human love is so clear when the rest of the world is so grey.
It's weird. The plot wasn't action-packed, but I had to find out what happens to these two. I thought I'd ruined it by reading ahead to the last few pages while I was still in the middle of the story. But even though I expected what happens to happen... I still wasn't ready for it. The whole book was a slow burn up until the very end.
I was touched, moved, stirred, heartbroken, inspired. I wanted to wipe the tears from my eyes and call everyone I know to tell them I love them. It's a full day later and I could still crumble just thinking about it.
This book is entirely recommended.
The Breath of God July 23, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of those rare novels which is capable of showing the great brutality inherent in human beings, alongside and contrasted with, our capacity for love, kindness, and charity, with unflinching equity. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where an unnamed man his unnamed son wander about a countryside of ashes and ruins, this terse, swift novel has a curiously uplifting biblical feel. In one chapter, the father and son meet an old man on the road named Ely, who admits Ely is not his real name, and refuses to reveal his true name. This is an echo of Jacob's wrestle with the man, or God, in Genesis, and the refusal of that mysterious combatant to give strenght to Jacob by revealing the inherent power in his very essence, the name by which he is called. The Road's prose is sparse, but McCarthy intersperses it with prophetic diction and phrases, giving hints at the real meaning of this novel: In a word seemingly abandoned by God, we become God's replacement. By even simple gestures of kindness and mercy, in a world where men and women act like animals to survive, we become godly; for McCarthy, being created in God's image means acting as God's stand in on a barren, dead earth. Powerful, gripping, sad, terror invoking and in the end hopeful, The Road is a fully realized, masterful work.
The art of staying alive throughout the end of the world without losing dignity July 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you are looking for fun or cheap adventure, pass your way. This book is bleak in tone and desperate in perspective, with only a faint touch of hope, like the last remnants of dying embers from a fire.
The story features the struggle for survival of a father and son after the end of the world, on a post-apocalyptic Earth that has become dark due to ashes ever present in the air, blown by the wind. Obviously, these two people have managed to stay alive for a number of years after the events that led to the destruction of almost all life on the planet, save for a few human beings. Animals and plants have become extinct en masse. What remains is the rusted testimonies of a bygone world, groups of survivors that can not be easily distinguished from foe to ally. Worse, with the scarcity of food, a great number of survivors have turned to cannibalism.
The father and son's objective is to reach the ocean in the Southern part of the USA. The story features their voyage to the intended destination.
The book is extremely somber, with bits of hopes here and there. Hope comes primarily from their successful finds of food in deserted houses, and from the affection that, in spite of all odds, still links the two together.
McCormack has produced here a superb work. After a while, one gets IN the book, with a dreadful and real feeling of what the end of our world would be. In terms of description, atmosphere, perspectives, dialogues and feelings, the book is beyond criticism. It feels real. Its genuine power is that it can be taken as a forewarning of what a totally devastated and desperate society would look like. Difficult to feel at ease in it, but should these events ever occur, we won't be able to say that we hadn't been warned before hand, thanks to McCormack's genius...
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