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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2006, 256 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2007, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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A searing, postapocalyptic novel by the author of the much loved Border Trilogy.
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.
Excerpt
The Road
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a ...
Pulitzer Prize Winners
2007
As a prophetic vision of the end times, McCarthy's interpretation would leave the fire and brimstone prophets of old quaking in their sandals. As a parable or allegory, The Road offers rich veins of interpretation, precisely because it lacks a clear message, leaving it up to the reader to interpret it as they see fit...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of
Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years,
two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where
he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award
for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he
worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper,
published in 1965.
Outer
Dark was published in1968, followed by Child of God in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the
screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in
1977.
In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and ...
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