By: Cormac Mccarthy Average Rating: Binding: Kindle Edition Format: Kindle Book Label: Knopf Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 256 Publication Date: March 20, 2007 Release Date: March 20, 2007
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.
Amazon.com Review: 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
Just Take An Overdose of Sleeping Pills and Save Your Money An absolutely depressing book. I read the hype and should have taken a long nap. If you liked it, I would recommend some nice pictures online from one of the world's hundreds of refugee camps.
NHot impressed with authors ability As an avid reader of 2-3 books per week I sometimes have difficulty finding new books that would interest me. One of my perennial favorites are books on the future, and that is why I chose to purchase this book.
To say I was disappointed would be a great understatement. This is not creative in the writing sense at all. Nothing is easier then to produce a piece that is 100% one thing or another with no nuance, no thought of entering even a clue into the writing of where the author is coming from. All is settled from page one. The worlds is a sewer and it ain't getting any better.
This book could have been written as a short story of 15 pages instead of a 250 pp novel that just keeps getting more and more gloomy.
Like no other book I wanted to throw this book across the room so often - yet I couldn't release my grasp or even put it down for 2 days.
What would I do, my 5 year old son near starvation, who would I kill, could I end both our lives if I had no hope of anything short of a miserble tortured death? McCarthy forces the reader against these maddening questions with prose worthy of the best reporter. Hershey's Hiroshima is the only thing close. Simple spare prose, with occasionally arresting words made more remarkable by the flat relentless pace of surrounding colorless vocabulary. This book is not for everyone. Other fathers may find it too horrible to read. Even McCarthy tells us that once an image enters your head it won't leave. And you won't enjoy so many images he offers you. Yet he completely and deeply captures the primal abiding love of a father for his son. Deeper and more vital than civilization, food and shelter or even morality. What a book!
Absolutely Moving The work is just amazing. The landscape and tone are bleak and depressing. But somehow McCarthy manages to bring a more overpowering emotion in the face of such horror. The story is told in a simplistic manner, one that moves the story along easily and involves the reader. I have no idea how to describe the book. It seemed that the overwhelming sense of hope for the characters, conjured up so well by McCarthy that it seems unintentional, softens the blow of the hopelessness of their world. I couldn't put the book down; never have I been so moved by such a book.
McCarthy's Best Book Ruined by Awful Narration This book, so carefully constructed to achieve almost mythic tone, is rendered unlistenable by the hamminess. Reading a book out loud does not require dramatization, and when such drama is pushed too far, as it is here,it diminishes and thwarts the power of the book.
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