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The Road (Oprah's Book Club) | 
| Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Vintage Books
Category: Book
Rating:  1613 reviews
Sales Rank: 311
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
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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
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1608 more reviews...
Is it just me...? November 22, 2008
A. Cosentino (New York City)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
...or does McCarthy totally overuse the word "okay" in almost every exchange of dialog between the man and the boy? It actually gets annoying after a while. Nobody says okay that much!!! Aside from that, it is a very good and disturbing novel that portrays exactly the world that humanity will deserve after a nuclear war.
 Plowed November 22, 2008
Jon From STL
I'm not really big on reading novels. Outside Hemingway, Vonnegut, and a handful of others, I find most of today's fiction full of clever prose, but ultimately spoon-feeding and ponderous. However, I found this book not ponderous, but ponderable. And the pondering comes from me. With every page I found myself filling in the all the blanks. Agonizing over what would I do at this point? What if my child saw that? Would I be that courageous? Or would I cave? This story puts you front and center into a meditation of hopelessness. Unenviable, but cathartic. The Man in the story is the ideal of the best we could ever hope to be. That we would be strong enough to save that which we love so much. Messianic in the most human sense. Trudging imperfectly into a full on hell, armed with nothing but a single bullet and his hope against hope for nothing else but the sake of his child. I know some didn't think much of this story, and I respect their opinion. I only hope the upcoming film does the story justice, so maybe those who couldn't take something true from the pages will find what's meaningful to them in a more visceral environment. I actually had to stop about six pages from the end to gather myself, which I have never done. I was caught completely off guard, that a book could ever bring me to such a place. But when all you have done for nearly 300 pages is carry your own child through the nightmare of nightmares, then getting to that place comes pretty easy.
Pure November 21, 2008
Craig Clark (The Great Northwest)
I don't normally review products or books on Amazon but there are a few here and there that seem to force my hand. I am not sure where 'real' critics or Cormac McCarthy himself would rank this book but to me its right there at the top. In most of McCarthy's books the protaganist has a singular thing that seems to drive them, "the fire inside". And for those that understand "it" it is an amazing thing to behold. For the father of this story "the good guys carry the fire", this thing that he finds and nourishes within his own son, at every step afraid of its extinction, and even at the end succeeds at keeping it alive in a landscape where it shouldn't even exist.
A book that somehow captures what every parent feels for their children and no where is it more poignant than in a situation where the stark realities have driven it to be abandoned by almost everyone else.
Truthfully, an astonishing read.
Deeper than you'd think November 21, 2008
Shimon Hova (Bronx, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just finished this book after two days of frenzied reading. I knew it was going to be good, as it was very highly recommended, but I didn't realize how good a short book without a single quotation mark could be. I know that there is a movie coming out, I saw the stills as I started the book. While I think that the casting is perfect, I cannot see the dreamlike narrative of the book translating to the screen as well as it deserves.
I was eagerly anticipating the ending of the book, and while I think that it was a bit awkward (it should have been a BIT shorter or a BIT longer), I was very happy the author didn't see fit to go into a metaphorical allusion involving the boy and his father (trying hard to avoid spoilers). A good example of a classic work going to metaphorical and not enough physical is Albert Camus'es The Plague. I enjoyed The Road much more for this reason, while there is little doubt that the simple plot and characters can fit a large number of stand-ins, the book is much more readable and easy to follow.
Carrying the Fire Through The Darkness November 18, 2008
Gary F. Taylor (Biloxi, MS USA)
1 out of 2 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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