Rating: 
Summary: Chilling and moving
Review: After being forced to read this my junior year of high school in English class, one of my friends hated it so much that he wrote a song called "Nevil Shute Can Kiss My *#&." And my mother was so scarred after seeing the movie version as a young girl that she gets the creeps whenever she hears the song "Waltzing Matilda." Be that as it may, this remains one of my favorite books.Set in Australia, the book opens with a horrific situation--the rest of the world has been wiped out due to nuclear warfare, and Australians, who were completely innocent in the skirmish which touched off the world's destruction, are the last people alive in the last non-radioactive zone in the world. Unfortunately for them, the winds are slowly carrying radioactive particles further and further into the southern hemisphere, and the residents of the continent are simply waiting for the poison to bring certain death. Depressing? Sure. A chilling warning of what could happen to the human race if just one person pushes that proverbial red button? Absolutely. Nevil Shute does a great job developing the characters and making you identify with them, from a young married couple with a new baby and a lonely young single woman to an American officer who just happened to be in his submarine with his crew when the war broke out, thus saving their lives and forcing him and his crew to live with the knowledge that everyone they love is gone and their hometowns are uninhabitable. This story brings the reality of nuclear war home, and is as relevant in this day and age as it ever was.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting....
Review: I have read this book twice now - with a space of 14 years in between - and I found I got a lot more out of it and remembered quite a lot from the first time. It was and remains the only book I've ever read that caused me to have tears streaming down my face at the end. The realism with which Shute presents his plot and its concept - the immediate after-math of an atomic/hydrogen war and the slow spreading of a radioactive envelope in the earth's atmosphere toward the Southern Hemisphere - is scary. With the approaching radioactivity comes the DOOM of the main characters of the story who live in Melbourne, Australia and who include among them a displaced U.S. submarine captain. What Shute offers us here is the ultimate "what-if". What if this REALLY happened? How would any human being react if he/she could literally see the End coming and could not stop it? Shute's characters are haunting in that they are so REAL themselves just in the way they lash out in anger and moral injustice or recoil in overwhelming despair or even just succumb to numbing apathy. It is the infinite care and love with which Shute creates and develops them and portrays them to us that makes this not a hysterical sermon but a human story. Then he leaves them to die. As a reader you are devastated because you are left with nothing. Each of the characters in the end has to find their own way to die and the very last one is the one who seemed to have the most life and the most promise and the most vitality. Do I recommend this book? YES. You will never forget it.
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