| | Road (Vintage International (Turtleback)) |  | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Topeka Bindery
Category: Book
List Price: $25.65
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1629 reviews
Number Of Items: 1
ISBN: 1417817763
EAN: 9781417817764
ASIN: 1417817763
Publication Date: September 2009 (In 271 Days)
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Availability: Not yet published
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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
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1624 more reviews...
 Brilliant and endearing and ultimately uplifting. September 27, 2006
477 out of 584 found this review helpful
THE ROAD is a tremendous achievement, multi-layered, yet with enough surface story to attract mainstream readers. It resonates with classic allusions, simple parables, endearing moments, aphorisms, even some old testament language a la BLOOD MERIDIAN. In fact all of McCarthy's earlier novels are echoed here.
As with NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, all of the doomsday clocks, both personal and communal, stop at 1:17, a reference to John 1:17 in the Book of Revelations. As with his previous novel, McCarthy names love as the one value worth living for in this vale of tears, the last thing to go.
Comic relief is provided in the form of Ely, the only named character in the book. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether they think that Ely is the prophet Elijah, Christ in ragged disguise, Buddha on the Road, or just a funny old man who speaks in koans.
THE ROAD will remind some of Jose Saramago's BLINDNESS, which won the Nobel Prize for that deserving author. Others will liken the beautiful writing to the very best of Ernest Hemingway--with the understatement one finds in BIG, TWO-HEARTED RIVER and THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA.
Cliched? Not in this reader's eyes. Of course the great themes here have been rendered before in the classics, and books are made of books. I immediately recognized Homer's ghosts of hades in here, pointing and pleading and crying for help.
What is the quote in THE ROAD on page 110? "Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it." Which resonates to a quote from Marcus Aurielius, saying that a man ought to live his life as if borrowed, and that he ought to be prepared at any time to give it back, saying--here, I thank you for this life which I have had in my possession.
I found it uplifting. A testament to the condition of humanity and the nature of death and the riddle of existence. Universal themes, the greatest themes in our literature.
The future is now... March 28, 2007
453 out of 514 found this review helpful
"The Road" is a work of stunning, savage, heartbreaking beauty. Set in the post-apocalyptic hell of an unending nuclear winter, Cormac McCarthy writes about a nameless man and his young son, wandering through a world gone crazy; bleak, cold, dark, where the snow falls down gray; moving south toward the coast, looking somewhere, anywhere, for life and warmth. Nothing grows in this blasted world; people turn into cannibals to survive. We don't know if we're looking at the aftermath of a nuclear war, or maybe an extinction level event -- an asteroid or a comet; McCarthy deliberately doesn't tell us, and we come to realize it doesn't matter anyway. Whether man or nature threw a wild pitch, the world is just as dead.
The boy's mother is a suicide, unable to face living in a world where everything's gone gray and dead. Keep on living and you'll end up raped and murdered along with everybody else, she tells the man before she eats a bullet. The man and his son are "each the other's world entire"; they have only each other, they live for each other, and their intense love for each other will help them survive. At least for a while.
But survival in this brave new world is a dicey prospect at best; the boy and the man are subjected to sights no one should ever have to see. Every day is a scavenger hunt for food and shelter and safety from the "bad guys", the marauding gangs who enslave the weak and resort to cannibalism for lack of any other food. We are the good guys, the man assures his son. Yet in their rare encounters with other living human beings, the man resorts to primitive survivalism, refusing help to a lost child and a starving man, living only for himself and his son, who is trying to hold onto whatever humanity he has left. It's in these chance encounters with other people, even more than their interaction with each other, that we see them for who they really are. The boy is a radiantly sweet child, caring, unselfish, wanting and needing to reach out to others, even though this bleak, blasted world is the only environment he's ever known; the father, more cautious, more bitter, has let the devastation enwrap him until all he cares about is himself and his son. And to hell with everybody else.
Their journey to the coast is an unending nightmare through the depths of hell and the only thing that holds them together is their love for each other. When one is ready to give up, the other refuses to let him. I won't let you go into the darkness alone, the man reassures his son. But ultimately, as the boy finds out, everyone is on his own, and all you can do is keep on keeping on.
McCarthy has proven himself a master of minimalism; with a style as bleak as the stripped terrain the man and the boy travel through, but each sentence polished as a gem, he takes us into the harsh reality of a dying world. The past is gone, dead as the landscape all around them, and the present is the only reality. There is no later, McCarthy says. This is later. Deep down the man knows there is nothing better to hope for down the road, even though he keeps them both slogging down it, only to keep his son alive. And we keep slogging down that road with them, hoping against hope that around the next corner or five miles down the line, maybe there is something, anything, to make survival worth while.
Living in such a hell, why would anyone want to survive? The mother made her decision; she checked out long ago. We come to the end of this book totally drained, enervated, devastated, but curiously uplifted. Because as long as there is love, McCarthy tells us, maybe there is something to live for, and as the book shows us at the end, maybe there is a even little bit of hope.
Judy Lind
 Mass Psychology? April 24, 2007
287 out of 406 found this review helpful
Throughout these reviews and elsewhere, I see words like profound, masterpiece, moving, Pulitzer Prize, Oprah. I must admit that these descriptions caused me to buy this book. But I must completely disagree (and here come the comments about how shallow or unintelligent I must be!) I should know by know that most all of Oprah's selections are very depressing and disturbing. And the Pulitzer certainly doesn't mean "a good read". McCarthy's writing style is very distracting. Many of you have defended his lack of punctuation and his use of sentence fragments. I'm sorry, but as my eyes are scanning the written page, it disrupts my thoughts, as I try to figure out why he "didnt" use the apostrophe there, but "he'd" already used it here, and his words like "they nooned in the middle of the road". Also, an author has the right to write a depressing story, but this one was too dark and dreary, left too many things unknown or unexplained (more comments about how shallow I am), and brought no inspiration or sense of redemption, to make the reading somehow worthwhile. As I complained throughout the book of all these issues, my wife kept pleading for me to just quit reading it. But by gosh, I was determined to see it through, to maybe finally understand all the hoopla and finally see where it was headed. I shouldn't have wasted the time.
"This is the way the world ends..." September 26, 2006
228 out of 303 found this review helpful
In a barren, ashen landscape that was once the United States of America, a weary man and his young son are traveling south in search of the ocean. They scavenge for food and shelter, and they must constantly avoid marauding bands of fellow survivors who would prey on them. The one thing that sustains them on their way is their ferocious love for each other. THE ROAD is the story of their heartbreaking journey.
Every now and then, when we need reminding, a great writer shows us one possible future for our species if we continue on the path to self-destruction. In 1957, Nevil Shute gave us ON THE BEACH, and now, 50 years later, Cormac McCarthy has given us an eloquent new version of the same cautionary tale. We didn't listen then. Perhaps we can learn something now.
I have rarely been so moved by a work of literature. To call this the most important novel of 2006 is an understatement. Read it and weep. Read it and be uplifted. Just read it--before it's too late.
What a waste of time and money September 1, 2007
166 out of 250 found this review helpful
Synopsis:A man and a boy push a shopping cart with a bad wheel down a road. The road is covered with ashes, though there is no explanation as to the origin of the ashes. It rains. The man coughs. The little boy whines. They have bad shoes.
After a couple pages, the man and boy push the same shopping cart with the same bad wheel down the same road. They're hungry. It rains some more. The think they see someone else on the road. They see a house. They build a fire in a ditch. They wrap their feet in cloth. They pass through a town. There are lots of ashes.
After a couple pages the man and boy have trouble pushing the shopping cart with the bad wheel down the road. It's cold and wet. They avoid someone. They wrap their feet in coats. They see a house and find something disgusting to eat. It snows. There are ashes everywhere.
A ragtag army comes up behind the man and the boy pushing the shopping cart with the bad wheel down the road. They get off the road. They kill a man. They run away. The man thinks he knows where they are on the map. They wrap their feet in a plastic tarp. They return for the shopping cart with the bad wheel and push it down the road in the rain. Not so many ashes, but they will be back. They build a fire in the woods.
They build a fire in a fireplace in an empty house. The man tries to fix the wheel on the shopping cart so he and the boy can push it down the road more easily. It works better for a couple pages. They build a fire under a bridge. The man isn't sure where they are on the map. They are hungry but refuse to kill and eat anyone, though that's what everyone else seems to be doing. The rain and ashes are back.
The man finds a trove that would last months, maybe years. They don't have to build a fire because they have a stove. The man has no idea where they are on the map. The little boy fails to close the gas valve properly. They don't build a fire beside the road. They load their shopping cart with the wheel that's gone bad again and leave everything behind them that they can't carry and push the shopping cart down the road. They have bathed. They have new shoes. It's raining. They are ash deep in the remains of a fire.
The wheel gets worse as the man and boy push the shopping cart down the road. The man coughs. They build a fire in the road. The man knows where they are on the map. They avoid some people they see. They avoid some people who aren't there. The boy whines. They meet and feed someone on the road who says his name's not Ely. They continue down the road.
They go through some towns. They see some houses. They push the shopping cart. They get a wheelbarrow. It rains. The earth quakes. Lightning flashes. They build a fire under a bridge again. The ashes make things tougher. Did I mention their shoes? Their shoes are worn out by the ashes and the rain and the snow and pushing the shopping cart down the road. They wrap their feet in layer upon layer of whatever the author can think of. The man isn't sure where they are on the map. The shopping cart has a bad wheel.
They reach the ocean. The man ransacks a beached sailing ship. He coughs. The boy loses their pistol. They find the pistol. It's dark. It rains. The ocean isn't blue. There are ashes as far as the eye can see. Someone tries to rob them. The man forces the robber to strip naked and they leave him. The boy whines. They return to succor the naked thief. He's not there. The boy whines again.
The man coughs and dies. Another man shows up. The boy goes with the other man.
Now you don't have to suffer through 241 pages of rain, ashes and pushing a shopping cart with a bad wheel down some stupid road.
You're welcome.
What I thought:Gryke. Discalced. Mastic. Meconium. Rachitic. Siwash. Parsible. Woad. Kerf. Chary. Firedrake. Palimpsest. Middens. Pampooties. Salitter. Dolmen stones. Crozzled.
I read a fair amount. I have pretty good reading, writing and speaking vocabularies. The above words are in The Road. Two of them I could not find even in the OED. The ones I could look up mostly had mundane meanings. I like books that stretch my vocabulary, but not books that stretch my vocabulary to no end. Why is "chary" better than "wary," which is what chary means. Why is "gryke" better than its preferred spelling grike and why return to the 18th century to tell me there was a crevasse in the limestone cliff. I don't find stumbling over unnecessarily obscure words conducive to my reading pleasure, nor am I impressed by big words.
I understand that The Road has been favorably compared to Stephen King's "The Stand." "The Stand," in one of its editions, is more than 1300 pages long. It's a brilliant book. "The Road" couldn't hold "The Stand's" jock. That being said, "The Stand" is not the best end-of-the-world book. King got his idea from George Stewart's masterpiece, "Earth Abides."
"Earth Abides" is the quintessential end-of-the-world book. It reflects reality. It is a great story, It invites the reader to think. In its most recent edition it is 368 pages.
If you are looking for the best in post apocalyptic literature, no one will ever be able to top "Earth Abides!" (This message brought to you by Post, the official Cereal of the Apocalypse!)
If you are looking for a book with little punctuation, no attributions, no chapters, etc. stick with "The Road" If you want to read a real book, read just about anything else. Maybe if enough people buy "The Road," McCarthy can buy a typewriter that has a working comma key, apostrophe key, quotation marks, etc. That's not enough of an incentive for you to spend any amount of money on this book. I am ashamed to have to tell my wife I paid money for it.
This is worse than a bad book.
Your mileage may vary.
There was one noteworthy moment in "The Road. On page 145 an old man notes, "Where man can't live, gods fare no better." You just dodged another bullet. I told you the story above. You know the one vaguely insightful line. Don't send me any money, but next time you're in a book store and you see someone considering this book, warn them. That will be thanks enough.
By the bye, this is Oprah's next book. I bet she loves it.
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