Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307387899
ISBN: 0307387895
Label: Vintage Books
Manufacturer: Vintage Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 287
Publication Date: March 28, 2007
Publisher: Vintage Books
Release Date: March 28, 2007
Studio: Vintage Books

---

Related Items:

• No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)
• Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
• Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
• The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (Oprah's Book Club)
• All the Pretty Horses
• see more

Alternate Versions: Click to Display

Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display

---

Editorial Review:

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.




Rating: - Are you kidding me?
This must have been a slow year for Pulitzer submissions if this book won the prize. The book is a slow moving rip-off of S.M. Stirling's "Dies The Fire" series (minus the plot, character development, dialog and punctuation).

The "story" (and I use the term loosley) follows an unnamed man and his son down a road. We know nothing about the man or the boy, not even their names. We know that the boy is hungry because he tells the man "I'm hungry" - - we know the man also knows because ... Read More

---

Rating: - This won the Pulitzer for...what?
I'm not going to say this book was awful, but seriously, what was the point? It just feels so unfinished and lazy. I was expecting a surprise ending or something, but nope, nothing. Though I wasn't bored while reading it, I can't say I enjoyed the book all that much. Hopefully the movie will be better.

---

Rating: - Interesting concept, but lacks backstory to make it feel real
Although I did find this book to be thought provoking, ultimately I think that its shortcomings outweigh the concept. Many others complained that it is depressing, which it is, but that doesn't bother me. I love reading WWII stories and have read almost every survivor account I could get my hands on. When comparing this story to real life collapse of civilization that has happened throughout history it lacks realism and depth. No realistic motives are given to either the "heroes" or the "villains" of ... Read More

---

Rating: - Overwrought and Over-reviewed
I was compelled by the genre that this book purported to fall into coupled with the fact that it won the Pulitzer Prize. I because of the later, I wasn't expecting "The Road Warrior" or anything, but what I was expecting was something of worth. That's most definitely not what I got.

The entire narrative left me with a handful of words consistently popping to mind, in no particular order: grey, okay, ash, cart, cold, starving. There are more, but they are equally as dreary.

Much ... Read More

---

Rating: - The Good and the Bad
Its a beautifully written novel and the two main characters are interesting and they do have some unusual encounters in what is essentially a world in ashes. I cant fault the author in his style and the main idea but I found the last 50 pages to be lacking. I couldnt help but feel let down by the ending. That was it? Not to spoil it for anyone else but the author made some odd choices in what he would describe at length, in great detail, and then almost rush past others, in particular the ending.
So ... Read More

---