The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2009) (Vintage International) |  | Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
List Price: $7.99
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Rating:  2292 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,313
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7 x 8.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0307476316
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307476319
ASIN: 0307476316
Publication Date: November 24, 2009
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 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
The Road is now a major motion picture based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, starring Academy Award-nominee Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see larger images.
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 foodâand 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.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 2292
 one the best books ever written September 8, 2010
jillybean
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I would give this book 10 stars if I could. After I finished reading the paperback, I went out and bought it in hardcover. Long after the Kindles (which I love) are obsolete and the paperbacks fallen apart, I will still have this yellowed but amazing book. This story makes you ask questions of yourself that you never contemplated before and is therefore a great selection for a book club. To be honest I have read some of McCarthy's other books (All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian) and didn't like them nearly as well. The writing style is classic McCarthy and the same as in all his other books. It is most effective, though, in this book. His writing is not flowery and flowing, but spare, clipped and the most spot-on descriptions with few very well chosen words. It is a talent sorely missing in most of today's bestsellers. This is a book that stays with you, haunts you, long after you have put down. It deserves a permanent place in everyone's library.
Love Fuels the Will to Survive September 6, 2010
Marc Axelrod (Potter, Wi USA)
The world has been burned in an apocalyptic like disaster, and the narrative of this book follows a father and son as they journey toward the ocean in the hope of finding a place of refuge, a place to stay, a place to live. Only the father's love for the son compels him to keep going forward.
The father symbolizes those who love for family compels them to wake up every morning and forge an existence in a dark, wasteland world. McCarthy contends that at the end of the day, love and loyalty and family are the things worth living for, even when everything else is gone.
The book is unrelenting in its bleak outlook on life, but readers will admire the father's determination to provide and care for his son in this otherwise depressing novel.
An inspiring tale of paternal love September 4, 2010
Ryan W. Schott (FL)
Being a new father myself I found this novel inspiring and full of love. The plot and story progression are truly tragic, but the love and tenderness the Man envelopes his son in creates a beautiful new world in his progeny that contrasts wonderfully with the bleak setting. The benevolent spirit of the Boy, in a time where cannibalism so profusely invades the cravings of the sole survivors, scribes the pages of the novel in calligraphic hope. Some with deaf ears may claim they neither learned nor enjoyed anything from the narrator's tome, but I left The Road with a new outlook on my paternal role, and will never forget the tone and theme of pure love found in the story.
perhaps the greatest work of art I've ever encountered August 29, 2010
DC gal
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Art is different from entertainment because art changes you, and this book affected me more deeply than any piece of art I've ever encountered. Not that I think it's perfect -- I see many flaws. But they don't matter. It accomplished its mission.
Cormac McCarthy has written the definitive literary depiction of the power of love. Although they were cold, dirty, starving, frightened, I was surprised to find myself at one point envying them, for they were nurtured from within by the power of love. Especially the father, as it's the nature of the parent-child relationship that the parent gives and the child receives. CM is saying, that when all hope is gone, love remains.
And he's done it so convincingly that during the days I was reading this book, when I had occasion to throw away some food, I found myself thinking "I wish I could give it to them." In some part of my mind, I felt convinced that these people really existed. That was how completely I entered into their world.
Caution: spoilers ahead!!
I have never cried so hard at any death in a movie or book. It started with the line: "when he lay down he knew that he could go no further and that this was the place where he would die. The boy sat watching him, his eyes welling. Oh Papa, he said."
I'm crying for the loss to the man, who showed so much courage, self-denial, sheer grit, and boundless love. We want to see that kind of all-out effort succeed and be rewarded, but life isn't like that. We know the horror the man must feel in leaving his son alone in that world, with nothing but a half a tin of peaches to sustain him. In his final gesture of love, the man declines the peaches and tells his son to save them for him -- for tomorrow, when he knows he'll be gone.
I'm crying for the loss to the skinny, starving boy, who has lost his smart, determined, vigilant and tender father -- the only thing standing between him and a horrific future as a catamite or cannibal's dinner.
And I'm crying for the loss to myself of the most inspiring character in the fiction world: a man with the strength to keep going, keep walking, keep searching, when almost all others have given up (like his wife) or given in to their basest instincts (the roadagents).
"The Road" left me knowing that love is all that matters, and determined to live my life out of that knowledge. I want to give up living from my mind and start living from my heart. Perhaps I will adopt a child. The story is more powerful than a thousand sermons.
Cormac McCarthy strips away all the superfluous stuff that has nothing to do with love. We don't know whether the man preferred to go out for sushi or steak, jazz music or country. Was he a lawyer, salesman or mechanic? None of that is essential to who he is. We don't need him to crack jokes or say profound things. All we know of him is what he does, and that's plenty. We see him putting his son's welfare first, over and over again. When they are hiding from the cannibals, he considers running to draw them away from the boy. That he himself will end up in that basement doesn't even figure in his decision not to do it -- only that he doesn't think it will work. His own pain weighs nothing when compared to his motivation to save the boy.
As for those who fault the man for not helping strangers -- I don't agree. Any morsel of food given to strangers is taken from the mouth of his son, or lessens his own chance to stay alive long enough to get his son south. He had to choose and he chose his son.
So the story had a deep emotional impact on me. But in addition, it is a story of ideas. How low can man go? What darkness beats in the heart of men, only thinly veiled by our (currently) abundant society? At what point is life no longer worth living? At what point should the strong drive for self-preservation be ignored, if it means committing atrocities on others? And lastly, to what extent am I taking life's current luxuries and comforts for granted?
I'm sure many a reader of "The Road" has collapsed into bed after a night of reading and felt immense gratitude for their cozy bedroom, their clean sheets, their fridge and a tasty midnight snack.
Things that troubled me about the story: I wanted them to stay longer at the bunker. At least to make full use of those provisions and take the time to fatten up and rest before heading on. They could've hauled a load of groceries off a mile or two and pigged out for a few weeks before coming back for more. The more weight they put on, the less crucial it would be to find fresh provisions when they finally did leave.
I wanted to see him make a major effort to find a way to disguise the trap-door to the bunker. It had gone undiscovered for almost ten years, if it was well hidden perhaps it could go undiscovered for at least a few more months.
Setting off the flare gun was irresponsible. They wasted a flare and announced their position, perhaps drawing the thief.
But those are minor quibbles. After finishing "The Road," I felt profoundly blessed, and cleansed from within from the tears shed. I knew I was in the presence of greatness. Cormac McCarthy has given mankind an immense gift, for which I paid only $7.99. Thank for Cormac McCarthy.
 Depressing With No Plot or Story August 27, 2010
Katrina Bradley (Arkansas)
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
I almost gave up on this book several times because the road never went anywhere but deeper into depression. This was a terrible book with almost no plot and no good ending. By good ending I mean a twist or revelation or something to make you go "Wow, what a great ending!". I'm sorry I wasted my time finishing this one.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 2292
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