I’ll be interested to see what kind of discussions come up around the movie, “The Road” (released later this month). The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”). An excerpt from a review by Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”):
“Cormac McCarthy sets his 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…. 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.
In The Road, the 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’m sure the film version will necessarily be Hollywood-heavy on the action, but the novel itself is a really great read (excerpts at [ame="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307387895/ref=s9_k2a_gw_ir01?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1S1MF1H16KH8QFSR8NPF&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846"]Amazon[/ame]).
“Cormac McCarthy sets his 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…. 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.
In The Road, the 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’m sure the film version will necessarily be Hollywood-heavy on the action, but the novel itself is a really great read (excerpts at [ame="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307387895/ref=s9_k2a_gw_ir01?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1S1MF1H16KH8QFSR8NPF&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846"]Amazon[/ame]).
