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| The Road (Oprah's Book Club) | 
 enlarge | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Vintage Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $4.88
You Save: $10.07 (67%)
New (109) Used (169) from $4.88
Avg. Customer Rating:  1528 reviews
Sales Rank: 59
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 287
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
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
Condition: slight edge wear
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Amazon.com
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 1523 more reviews...
 TItle of the book about as imaginative as the plot. September 1, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've been trying to read this book for about six months, and I can never get more than 1/3 of the way through. It's frusterating because I have yet to read a negative review, so I assume it must just be because I am stupid that I don't like the book.
It's the end of the world and a father and son are traveling down a road. That's it? Yes, that's it. Maybe if the father's narrative used proper grammar and actually said things that made sense, it might have had more meaning, but as it is it is just meaningless garbage.
Every other page is a description of them building a fire and burning a tin can of food, and almost every paragraph ends like this: What is it, Papa? I don't know.
Eventually, I decided not to waste another minute of my life reading it and built a fire with it, keeping myself and my child (each the other worlds entire) warm as we ate from a tin can. What is it, he asked? I didn't know.
Depressing, but good September 1, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
No technology, no living animals except man (and much of mankind is little more than animals), no living plants, the world in the midst of a prolonged winter. It's depressing to think the world could come to this. The book still sends chills down my spine weeks later.
 Scary, Supensful, Truly Unique Book August 31, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Road is an excellent book. Through a unique writting style the author allows you to live the simply raw terrifying experience of a father care for his on a post apocalytpic america. It stirs and meddles in our most basic instincts of protection of our young vs. a scenario of complete dispair.
A great read ... August 31, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Cormac McCarthy grabs you in the very beginning, and doesn't let go. This somewhat dark, yet heartwarming story of a father and son struggling to survive against all odds will give you a lot to think about.
A Dreary Road Weaving Through a Bleak Future August 29, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I finally got around to reading what is already acknowledged as a modern day masterpiece and I found it to be lyrically beautiful and profoundly disturbing at the same time. "The Road" is Cormac McCarthy's haunting vision of a post-apocalyptic world where values are confused, goodness is debatable, and love remains the central value worth living for.
McCarthy's beautifully spare prose is captivating in its simplicity yet his words haunt the reader long after putting the book down. Readers who value structure in a novel will be uncomfortable with "The Road" because it is written in a free flow stream of consciousness style that just begins on the road to the sea and ends on the road by the sea. The two main characters are unnamed and referred to only as the man and the boy. Questions about what happened to cause the apocalypse, who the man is (was), why are they going where they are going arise throughout but are seldom, if ever, answered. The answers are --it doesn't matter--but that may be too nebulous for some readers. Our job as readers is to get on board with the father/son journey on "The Road" and experience life and death, good and evil through their eyes.
Simply summarized, a father and his son (maybe 9 or 10 years old) are following a road toward the sea. The world as we know it is gone through some apocalyptic event and the world they face is grim and dreary covered in a post nuclear winter where gray ash covers all, no life is left in the sky or the seas, and those who continue to struggle for survival seem split into those of some goodness who mainly hide from those who have embraced evil as marauders and even cannibals.
"The Road" is a study in contrasts...the contrast of good versus evil, but also the contrast between what we say we are and what our actions say we really are. It is a study of the perseverance of faith and love and how that reflects one's goodness and continuing spirit. We are left to ask ourselves, would we have the inner spirit to do what the man does out of love for his child while inwardly coming to believe the journey is doomed for one or both of them? And if we felt we were ultimately doomed, what would our responsibility be to our young child who would be left alone in this devastated world?
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