|
|
Whistle Stopper - The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
|
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $5.69
Your Save: $ 9.26 ( 62% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage Books
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307387899
ISBN: 0307387895
Label: Vintage Books
Manufacturer: Vintage Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 287
Publication Date: 2007-03-28
Publisher: Vintage Books
Release Date: 2007-03-28
Studio: Vintage Books
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Breath of God
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The art of staying alive throughout the end of the world without losing dignity
Comment: 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...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dull and simple
Comment: Interesting story of a not unknown concept. post apolyptic wanderers However the story is dull and repetative. The theme changes little and , and any dialog between characters is fairly close to stupid and repeatative. A obvious and silly attempt has been made to stretch a very short book into something resembling a full size paperback by using larger text and big spaces between lines. With out this trick the book could have been less than 100 pages. NOT WORTH THE MONEY OR TIME.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I'm going to be perfectly honest - I just didn't enjoy it.
Comment: I'm going to keep this brief.
I just did not enjoy it. The premise was interesting, granted, but it was dark, dreary, and it felt like I was reading the same thing over and over. I understand that the core of the story is not necessarily the setting, but the relationship between the man and the boy, but I just didn't get a whole lot out of it. I've enjoyed a few of McCarthy's other works, "No Country for Old Men", to name one, but this just didn't do it for me.
I personally do not think it lives up to the constant praise it gets, but that's just me. A lot of people enjoyed this book, and there's nothing wrong with that. I was just not one of those people.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Run, he whispered. Run."
Comment: This is the first book that I have read by McCarthy. I don't really know why, I just had this idea that I wasn't going to like his work very much. Something that I heard once about All the Pretty Horses struck me the wrong way. I am not sure what it was that I thought that I wouldn't like.
In any case, I bought The Road because a co-worker was convinced that I would love the book. And he was right, I do-- although "love" is a funny kind of word to relate to post-apocalyptic fiction.
What do you need to know about this book before you read it? Nothing much beyond what almost everyone knows. This is a story about a man and a boy, set in a post-apocalyptic USA. We aren't told what happened, and all question of "why" has fallen away.
There's a lot of things to take away from the novel. Hope as an impulse even after hope is irrational. The drive to keep living, even when the dead might well be the lucky ones. (One maudlin writer after another has suggested this idea, but in this book McCarthy posits a world where it might actually be literally true.) There's also something about the people who consider themselves the "good guys". And then again, the idea that there really are no good guys in the inferno. Unlike in Beckett, the journey of these characters actually leads somewhere. But it is by no means certain that somewhere is better than the place where one began. Manufactured hope.
I really liked McCarthy's prose style. Perhaps because my own sentences are long and loopy, I really enjoy the short economical phrases. I will definitely be picking up another McCarthy sometime soon. I would recommend this book to virtually all readers. While the subject is forbidding, it is perfectly accessible as text.
The Road was the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Let me know in the comments if you would particularly recommend another of his novels.
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
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
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
