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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 The Road Nov 21, 2009
I read this book in almost one sitting, and if only I did not need to sleep I would have read it all at once. This was a spectacular read, with a poetic and unique style that conjured up emotions and goosebumps for me as I read.I loved the dynamic set forth by the author, and unlike some reviews I read that stated there was no story I beg to differ. There was a story that keep me turning the pages, and the relationship the book was about was remarkable and heart warming. I loved this and look forward to seeing how this is adapted to film.
0 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Shallow story, shallow characters Nov 21, 2009
This is a post-apocalyptic tale where a man and his son are in a hurry to get somewhere, but it's never made clear where they came from, where they are going to, or what disaster created their condition.
Shallow characters. You never learn the name of the man - who, I guess, is supposed to be the protagonist. You never learn the name of the boy - whose character is written so weak as to be pathetic. There seem to be some vague memories of a wife or a mother, but you never learn her name or get to feel the pain of having lost her.
Shallow story. Too often the writing is nothing more than a timeline of what the two characters do - they sleep under a tarp, they eat a can of pork and beans, they race down the road, they sleep under a tarp, again, and again. The writing seems very segemented and disjointed. A complex scenario or subplot never develops.
The writing at times is "eloquent" or "poetic," but it doesn't serve to develop the story or make a point. It just seems misplaced to me.
I really think the tags "father and son" or "survivalism" are misleading.
Skip this book. Way over-priced. This book will be perfect for a thoughtless Hollywood movie.
2 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Wish I could unread this book Nov 19, 2009
I suppose I should know better than to pick up a book just because it says that it won a pulitzer. Who decides who wins that prize? What were they thinking? I began and finished reading "The Road" yesterday evening. So, first of all, it uses some large type font and doesn't have a lot of content. Even considering the lack of content, I felt that toward the end even the author was getting worn down by the bleak picture he was painting. One page in particular read something like, "They woke up, they were hungry, the man coughed, they kept walking". OK, so I'm paraphrasing in a simplistic way - but it's not far from the actual content. I do not understand what people see in this book that makes it receive such rave reviews.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
An Astonishing Novel Nov 19, 2009
I finished "The Road" last night in anticipation of the movie release on the 25th. Afterwards, I lay awake half the night. When I did sleep, the novel slipped into my dreams - vivid and heartwrenching. Today I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Not since I read "The Grapes of Wrath" have I been so moved by a book. I hate to admit it, but I've been close to tears most of the day. This is an emotionally devastating novel.
The man and his son are simply surviving, with the same basic instincts as any animal: find food, find shelter. Yet through it all they struggle to maintain their humanity. The son, who's known no other world having been born after the cataclysmic event, is concerned with them being 'the good guys' which his father assures him they are. The world drawn by the authoer is the most grim, dreary and dismal imaginable, with ash continuously falling, creating a gray haze everywhere. There are no animals, and the only live vegetation in the entire book are a few Morel mushrooms they find. Yet in that simple discovery there is hope.
Nearly all of the end of civilization stories I've read over the years have encompassed the period of time just before, during and after the event and tell of the struggles to reestablish order, form a basic government, find survivors. In this story, it's 10 years after the events, and people only struggle to survive and have mostly forgotten what it's like to be human.
The writing style is not for everyone. One of the reviewers said if he could he'd give it half a star. That's fine, it's his opinion. My opinion? If I could I'd give it 10 stars. One of the most powerful novels I've ever read.
McCarthy's "Road" Nov 19, 2009
"The Road" is probably Cormac McCarthy's least ambitious book, but also his most accessible, and a very good one regardless. The setting is some time after a unspecified disaster has extinguished nearly all life on Earth. The survivors are few and nomadic, searching for food - and many of them are dangerous. An unnamed father and son are the book's main characters, and the story follows their journey south to the sea.
This sort of setting has been explored before, in film if not in literature, "Mad Max," "The Road Warrior," and "28 Days Later" being outstanding examples. In some ways the films presented the scarcity and, especially, the depravity in these situations just as searingly as "The Road." "The Road" in turn seems of all McCarthy's books the one most easily adapted to film. (We will see how well this was done when the film comes out later this month.)
The pacing is vigorous, the story emphasizing the persistence of the father and son and their strong bond, which exists not just because of the son's dependence on the father but his reciprocal dependence on his son, partly because the father must exist to provide for the son, but also because the son's questioning provides for the father some sort of attenuated moral grounding. In this regard the novel treats a theme that was integral to "No Country for Old Men," the importance of a personal relationship in difficult surroundings, but in "The Road" some of the complexity of those surroundings has been pared down. As is the style: It is recognizably the author's, but there is less of the mythologizing, incantatory diction, only occasional interior reflection from the father's perspective, and none of the ponderous metanarrative exploration that weighed down "The Crossing," for example. In the end, a very strong book, prepossessing while you are with it, but with a bit less staying power, relative to what I would consider to be McCarthy's two best novels, "Blood Meridian" and "No Country for Old Men." I would say that about just about anything, though, so we're still well into five-star territory here.
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