The Road (Oprah's Book Club) | 
 enlarge | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Vintage Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $4.00
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Rating:  1608 reviews
Sales Rank: 229
Media: Paperback
Pages: 287
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307387895
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307387899
ASIN: 0307387895
Publication Date: March 28, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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 iNo Country for Old Men/i, and iThe Road/i. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, iThe Road/i 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/i, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. i--Daphne Durham/ibrp hr size="1"span class="h1"strongGuest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane/strong/spanbrbrimg src="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/books/promos/a-plus/coronado.tilt.jpg" border="0" align="left"span class="small"bDennis 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 iMystic River/i, blew fans all away with the mind-bending iShutter Island/i, and switches gears with iCoronado/i, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play). /b /spanbrbr Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, iThe Road/i, 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 iThe Crossing/i. 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 iThe Road/i, 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. i--Dennis Lehane/ibrbr hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" /br
Product Description
bNATIONAL BESTSELLER/bbrbrbPULITZER PRIZE WINNER/bbrbNational Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist/bbrbrbA iNew York Times/i Notable Book/bbrbOne of the Best Books of the Year/bbrbiThe 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/i/bbrbrThe searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.brbrA 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-#8212;and each other.brbrbThe Road /bis 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 1603 more reviews...
Carrying the Fire Through The Darkness November 18, 2008
Gary F. Taylor (Biloxi, MS USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Published in 2006, Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD has been among the most widely praised novels of the era, receiving numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has also been extremely popular with the reading public--something of a surprise, for it would be difficult to imagine a novel that is more relentlessly bleak than this one. br / br /THE ROAD presents us with a nameless father and son, the latter about ten years old, who have survived an unspecified environmental disaster and who are now traveling south in an effort to escape the ever-intensifying cold that seems to grip the landscape. The journey is horrendous: they push a grocery cart through a seemingly endless sea of gray ash beneath a gray sky, cold, wet, hungry, and very fearful of other people--and with good reason, for in the absence of other food many survivors have turned to cannabalism. Cities are empty with the occasional corpse; rivers and streams are dead; the forrests and fields are dead; they have no certainty of what they will find when and if they reach the sea. br / br /McCarthy writes in a style that is sparse to the point of painfulness, and the narrative is repetitive in the same sense of a reoccurring nightmare. At the same time, however, the darkness of serves to set off the one golden glow: the father's love for his son. "We carry the fire," the father tells his son. "We're the good guys." And so they struggle on together in the hopeless hope of finding a means to live. br / br /As THE ROAD progesses it acquires a certain mythic quality: the concept of a heroic journey into the unknown to win a great prize; the idea of a light in darkness; the imagery of carrying the fire to the sea. At the same time, however, heroism is in short supply and the great prize is simple survival in a barren world. McCarthy does ultimately offer a grain of hope, but only of the most tenative kind imaginable. br / br /I would be remiss if I did not state that this is easily one of the most profoundly depressing works I have read. Recommended--but you might want to keep a couple of Zoloft handy. br / br /GFT, Amazon Reviewer
 A Road To Treasure November 18, 2008
Terrence Aybar (New York City)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
You know who they are. Those people that get upset when stories are told that aren't a sugar coated version of the world, stories that seem like they were written by authors who truly believe that ignoring cold, hard reality is the best medicine. br / br /Cormac McCarthy is not one of those authors. At the very, very least not with this book he is. And this is not a book for those who can't face what true horror can be. By true horror, I don't mean the boogie man in your closet or having to work for some really nasty boss with a penchant for administering torture in the form of some really nasty humiliation tactics. This is a story about facing absolute oblivion in its truest form and continuing to move forward under its weighted stare. br / br /McCarthy's writing is poetry. The book is written in some of the most sparse prose I've ever seen read with my own eyes. You can finish this one in about a day, its such a quick read. Yet somehow the book manages to paint a detailed landscape for this poor father and son to trek across in fewer words than I'd have thought possible. They make their way across a bleak and horrific world wiped out after a nuclear holocaust, a blasted world where people do anything they can to survive, even if it means consuming one another. I can't explain how this book grabs you almost immediately and how soon you begin to empathize with these two unnamed characters as they encounter horrors that would probably break most people had they been placed in this same situation. br / br /The two make their way towards the shore miles away, simply on the faith that its the right decision. And you'll be right there along with them for every treacherous step of the way. McCarthy creates a world that really is not too far out of reach, the apocalyptic world that we've heard about and been warned of for some time now but have managed to avoid, at least for the time being. The relationship between the father and son is a thing of beauty. In this world where men feed on each other and life as we know it has come to a sad death, it seems to be the only thing in existence that has any value to hold on to. I mentioned before that this book was a quick read. I purposely read it only a little at a time, just so I could hold on to these characters a little longer. br / br /This book managed to move me as few other books have. The book isn't an action packed bonanza but really a meditation on survival and perseverance in all forms. It does have some really tense moments and moments where just when its gotten as horrifying as it can be, the rug is pulled out from under you and something even more horrible is there for you to stumble across. I will say that any book that makes me tear up when someone finds a packet of grape flavored drink mix gets my vote. br / br /I cannot recommend this enough.
 Waste of Time November 17, 2008
K. Hawk (Savannah, GA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I just finished reading this book. I feel as though I have wasted 4 hours of my life. I refused to put it down until I finished because I thought there must be a pay-off at the end. I suffered through page after page of the same story. Ash, shopping carts, wrapping up in blankets, rain storm, look for food, hide on the side of the road, go through an abandoned house. Turn and page and repeat. The dialouge between the boy and the man was annoying. "Papa I'm cold". "I know". "Okay". "Okay". "Papa, I'm scared". "I know". "Okay". Luckily, I bought the paperback and only wasted $14 instead of $27!
 Dark with no salvation November 17, 2008
N. Hamlin (Marquette, MI USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Reading is, for me, instructive, uplifting, entertaining, or enlightening. To be dark without any of the other attributes feels like a waste of time. This book wasted my time. I already know how cruel humans can be, and how badly we treat the planet. I kept waiting for the moral to rise out of the ashes, but none did.
 The Road November 16, 2008
Cheryl Sheets (Massena, NY USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This month's book club leader chose it. Something I probably never would have read. That is what makes being in a book club and others choosing each month fun. It was an "interesting" book. I found it very slow at the beginning. As I got into it I could not put it down. I needed to know what was going to happen to the characters. The love between father and son was very strong. I feel the father would have done anything for the son and in a way did. He may have just given up if he did not have his son to protect.
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