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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780307387899 ISBN: 0307387895 Label: Vintage Books Manufacturer: Vintage Books Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 287 Publication Date: March 28, 2007 Publisher: Vintage Books Release Date: March 28, 2007 Studio: Vintage Books Editorial Review: 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: NATIONAL BESTSELLER PULITZER PRIZE WINNER National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post The 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. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - End RoadIn 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 ... Read More Rating:  - Unending, Tedious, Oppressive NihilismCormac 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 ... Read More Rating: - Heartwrenching. A slow burn up to the worthwhile end.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 ... Read More Rating: - The Breath of GodCormac 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 ... Read More Rating: - The art of staying alive throughout the end of the world without losing dignityIf 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 ... Read More |
