|
| 
| Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Vintage Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $4.63
You Save: $10.32 (69%)
New (114) Used (167) from $4.63
Avg. Customer Rating:  1529 reviews
Sales Rank: 46
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 287
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307387895
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307387899
ASIN: 0307387895
Publication Date: March 28, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Softcover exihibit wear and tear, have pre-owner and text incription, h/lighting and underlining, rolled spine, broken CD cover or no CD, exposed to wetness with stains and dirt, spine rolled. Advice shipment date!
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Ontological study of parent child love August 22, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
First, it must be stated that if you read this book as just a science fiction apocalypse novel you are missing, well, everything that makes this book a work of genius.
The most powerful moments of the book are those where the man is suddenly, jarringly pressed to contemplate the imminent possibility of having to make an ultimate sacrifice. Call it a biblical sacrifice maybe but nothing in the bible moved me like this book. It's not suicide but much, much worse.
In fact, if you weep (as I have when reading this book) you weep not for the earth nor society lost nor for the loss of anything else save a terrible empathy for the man and his child when that child is in peril.
Oh, and a warning to all you grammar-school teachers: Cormac McCarthy strips down his writing to match the devastated and depleted world he has created. Do you read just for the punctuation? Fair enough, find another book.
And as for the apocalypse; He gives nothing to the survivalists, nothing to the Rapturists and end-of-timers, nothing to Al Gore, nothing to the Tree Huggers and the After-the-flood thinkers. Whoa to the bunker dwellers and the hoarders and the Mormons. McCarthy has spoiled your party. He takes and he takes and he takes and what's left is a man, his son and their "fire."
It's perfect and devastating.
 Rubbish August 22, 2008
0 out of 14 found this review helpful
Of all the books I have read this is the worst. The book has no solid beginning, it just starts off with a father and his son wondering around in what appears to be post apocalyptic America, (they never really go into detail about what happened). The ending is equally as horrible as the father dies of some unknown ailment and the son is picked up by complete strangers. All in all, the book is a waste of time. That is if you like reading a book were the main characters walk and walk , have a flashback, pass by a huge army of raiders, or "bad people" so claims the father, and then walk some more. Horrible, Horrible, Horrible.
Simple, heartfelt and brilliant August 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was simply an amazing book! From the moment I picked it up, I couldn't put it down and even when I did, the bleak landscape that Mccarthy paints for us so eloquently would not leave my mind. All things considered, this book has more heart than any I've read in a long time.
I can't wait to see the movie. Viggo usually doesn't miss his mark if the script is well written.
An absolutely superb story that you wont be able to put down for a second. READ IT NOW!
The Road August 20, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This beautifully written work is quite intelligent and evocative. It provokes deep emotion and thoughts in this reader. Both poignant and horrifying all at once, this tale of post apocalyptical earth and the father and son trying to survive is breathtakhing. I could not put it down.
Well Worth the Terror August 19, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The first science fiction novel I read was Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano which I checked out of the local library when I was twelve years old, lured by its startling cover and the promise of a "prophetic, nightmarish vision of the future." Before Vonnegut the only thing I'd read that dealt with the future was the "Book of Revelations" in the "King James Bible." So imagine my surprise when I discovered an entire genre of books set in the future, far-flung stories of distant times and worlds, alien people and technologies.
I vividly remember staying up late at night reading "Player Piano"--a futuristic story about our world dominated by super computers, where we no longer have a sense of purpose because machines do everything for us--and being frightened in an indescribable, but incredibly visceral way. I was horrified by what I read, and yet I was fascinated, too. I started looking for similar books and over time I discovered Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" & "Oryx and Crake," Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," Ocatvia E. Butler's "Parable of the Sower," and, of course, the always terrifying world of George Orwell's "1984."
Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, "The Road," certainly has many elements in common with earlier futuristic dystopias. Set in a post-nuclear holocaust of an unending winter, a wasteland where every green blade has vanished, where even the rats and cockroaches have been wiped from the face of the earth, "The Road" gave me some of the worst nightmares of my life. Before "The Road" I thought "1984" was the worst of the worst possible scenarios, but I'd much rather be mentally controlled and physically brutalized by Big Brother then find myself wandering a bleak, frozen wilderness with a starving child in tow.
The terrors our heroic, broken protagonist encounters as he struggles to survive and provide for his young son recall the most horrific atrocities we've encountered as a human race: think Nazi concentration camps. Beyond the reach of law and order, science, even God, these two thin scraps of life have only each other and the hope of a quick death in the form of two remaining bullets.
So why read it? Why subject yourself to such a mournful, infernal vision of the future? Because, as with the best of futuristic dystopias, McCarthy manages to celebrate what still matters when all else has been stripped away, in this case the bond between father and son. Thus, this is not an action-packed sci-fi story full of the usual roller coaster plot twists or excitingly inventive technologies. Instead it is a meditation on that which sustains us, on that which makes even a decent into hell worth surviving.
In short, this is a book about love, and McCarthy writes about it in a way that makes you realize just how few authors manage this subject without dipping into sentimental cliches. McCarthy's stunning prose makes us realize that love is simple and powerful and the only thing that allows us to keep putting one step in front of the other when it all comes tumbling down.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
