Rating: 
Summary: Classic Nuclear Dread
Review: This 1950s novel tells a very simple story. After a nuclear war has devastated the Northern Hemisphere (who knows how it started), the people of Australia have seven to eight months to live, while the radioactivity drifts into the Southern Hemisphere. As the radiation slowly advances, they die, either by messy radiation poisoning, or by their own hands. Somewhere in between, the characters try to cope with their own mortality.Why does this book stand out? Certainly not because the characters are believable, but because it broke new ground in the literary world. Written some fifty years ago, during the Cold War, it paints a vivid and bleak picture of humanity's last days from an Australian perspective, where everyone dies. It holds up the specter of what could happen. Given that this book was written in a time when the Civil Defense was prompting civilians to build bomb shelters, "duck and cover," and to resume a normal life after a nuclear event, this book seems groundbreaking in retrospect.
Rating: 
Summary: more allegorical than realistic
Review: The book was extremely powerful and very haunting. I didn't read it, I heard it on audio book, read with absolute brilliance by Simon Prebble. A couple of very minor irritants were, as another reviewer observes, the peculiarity of strangely switching from Miss - to 'honey', and I thought the grand prix event went on too long. I suppose it had some allegorical significance, but i'm not exactly sure what that was, or maybe Mr Shute just loved Ferraris and auto racing. Minor complaints though. Great book. It will stay with me.
Rating: 
Summary: The Last Horizon
Review: One approaches a classic carefully. Rather than a novel experience, the reader brings preconceptions, prejudices, awe and maybe a whiff of resentment to a well-known book that is not entirely new to him. Mr. Shute delivers a slow-starting novel, liturgically paced with an inexorable conclusion that is with us from page one. This is the power of "On the Beach." It has the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. The characters and the reader self-deceive, twist, hope, pray and promise-all to no avail. I would not call "On the Beach" timeless. The behaviors seem quaint and dated fifty years after the writing of the book. I doubt the characters had much believability even in 1957. Moira Davidson goes from dissolute debauchery to saintly status without even a pause for proper redemption. I can see the lovely Ava Gardner as the Jezebel, but it is quite a stretch to imagine her as St. Bernadette. Mr. Shute casts an American as a central character, but unfortunately he has not much an ear for American speech. For some reason, he believes American men, when addressing marriageable aged women leap from "Miss Davidson" to "honey" and then never call her anything else. (I don't know, maybe "Moira" is hard to pronounce.) Also, I fear Mr. Shute had little affinity for our youngest humans. The Holmes' baby girl Jennifer, was always referred to as "it" by Mr. Shute. These were small irritations, but jarring. Nevertheless, the power of the book is undeniable. There is a certain rightness that the events are larger than the humans involved. The humans respond with an orderliness that is astonishing, but perhaps Mr. Shute was trying to be kind in a very unkind world. Grade: 3-1/2 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Pulls even at the Sociopath's Heartstrings
Review: If you are looking for twists and turns in a wild plot this isn't the book. Go back save yourself. Work in your garden. Live. However if you want a book that has some profound capability to incite empathy, this is the book. I don't know how Nevil Shute did it, but some how this author was able to paint a picture of a world about to end, and how humans react to this. The stoics will feel their eyes shrink-wrapped in tears, the emotional will cry uncontrollably, and paranoia will ensue. The one day I didn't read On the Beach, I had a dream I was in the same situtation as in the book except time had run out. How I reacted, how my loved ones reacted provided an insight in this dream that was truly enlightening. That has to be a good book, rarely does a book infiltrate my dreams. This book is a must read for all people and decesion makers that have the power of nuclear weapons. Shute is trying to teach us a lesson, let us not close our eyes and ears. Be outraged by nuclear policies.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book Was Really Awful.
Review: This book had the most BS I have ever read. Cobalt bombs only exist on paper. Frankly, I think it is wholly unrealistic and dangerous for it turns people away from civil defense measures which could save their lives. Mr. Shute was a great writer of fiction, but this book, as far as realism is concerned, completely missed the bullseye.
Rating:
Summary: Bleak and Stunning Perfection
Review: Both the novel and the film (which is extremely faithful to the novel) are moving and unforgettable. They tell the story of an American submarine crew stranded in Australia right after a global nuclear war. The atmosphere, the rain, the oceans, and the clouds are loaded with radiation that has already killed most of the Earth's population, and will eventually get them all. What do you do with your time when the world is ending? That is the question to be answered by these ordinary, decent people. They answer it to the best of their ability, and the results are a story that cannot be forgotten. Like "Alas, Babylon", "On The Beach" takes humanity's worst-case scenario and moves forward with it. When I was a child, a global nuclear war did not seem implausible. It now seems less likely, but who can say after 9/11/01? Read or watch "On The Beach" and think. Hopefully, this story will forever remain fiction.
Rating:
Summary: More compulsory reading for politicians
Review: On the Beach is a book about good people caught in an impossible situation. Set in Australia, it tells the story of a diverse group of characters who are waiting to die. The whole Northern hemisphere has been obliterated by nuclear war and the clouds of fallout are drifting slowly southward. While they wait, their characters are gradually revealed, like a painting appearing as years of accumulated grime are carefully wiped away. When this book was written it had an enormous impact. People really believed that a nuclear holocaust was likely, if not inevitable, in their lifetimes. For some years, the threat receded but the events of September 11th 2001 have brought those fears back. The weapons are still in their silos, the submarines are still on their stations. We can but hope that sanity will one day prevail. In any case, this book should be read for its poignancy, its beautiful yet simple plot and its optimism in the face of tragedy.
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Summary: Happy Endings Are For Hollywood
Review: This will be the most desolating, tragic novel you'll ever read. There's no happy ending: everyone dies. Hero and heroine, they both die. Supporting characters, they die. Everyone--and that's *everyone*--else, we all die, too. Let's get that out of the way. No extraterrestrial rescue-ships, no juvenile wish-fulfillment Tom Clancy endings, no elegant James Bond saviours, no immaturely puerile left-wing/right-wing nonsense. Just the bleak fact that everyone dies in the end, leaving only human structures to moulder into complete decay--which is going to to take a long time as the radiation from the northern hemisphere thermonuclear war has killed most of the decay bacteria. Sure, you can quibble about the science of the radiation transport-mechanism, but that was the thinking of the day, and the nuclear winter which would ensue would be just as lethal. Because everyone dies, even the sense of tragedy seems sterile and wasteful. Human civilisation isn't replaced by barbarism, but vanishes entirely. This is the story of the last people to exist in the pathetic ordinariness of their last days. And that is where the Shute novel enters greatness: describing their stories. You can make allowances for fifty years' worth of changes in attitude and world politics, but the theme remains current: even if the end is marked six months from now, we each still have to live life one day at a time, filling those days with the familiar and habitual. It is the divergence between the day-to-day and the ever-approaching inescapable doom which gives this novel its main impetus and power, and Shute is unflinching in his regard of it. So, by making the abstract actual and day-to-day, Shute has written perhaps the bravest novel ever written about the possibility of nuclear annihilation. As I said, no Tom Clancy here. Shute's characters are decent, stoic 'stiff-upper-lip' characters because that's what was the Brit ideal of the time, and it wasn't too far off the truth of the time, that to be decent and accepting was more important than an undignified hysteria. That's how most Brits (who had just survived a murderous war) actually *were* then. Second, there's not much action because Shute was a member of the old school of story-tellers which believed in craft rather than jolts (maybe the difference between British and the more excitable American readers). When reading a Shute novel, typically, you can spend the first twenty pages wondering why you're bothering, and the next hundred pages trying, unsuccessfully, to put it down--that's called storytelling, folks, and Shute, for all his potboiler plots, was a master of the innocent-seeming spinning of webs which eventually bound you to the characters in his plots, which almost invariably presented ordinary people with extraordinary circumstance, so closely that you had to finish the book. On The Beach is no exception to Shute's usual subtle entrancement (one reviewer at the time said the novel held 'a cobra fascination' for him); also, I found it fascinating that the greatest book about thermonuclear war was not, as one would expect given the large number of doomsday novels published at the time, a US or Brit science-fiction writer but a 1950's British professional romance-writer. A bleak, desolate masterpiece.
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Summary: For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these,
Review: For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'. - John Greenleaf Whittier I wept openly at the ideas of loss this book showed me. It reminded me of the dark nights of childhood when I thought that "the day" would inevitably come.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: To gauge the impact of this book, consider this: I was watching an anti-war protestor on a video biography of Ronald Reagan - a "Dr. Helen Caldicott" - who erroneously stated on film at a huge anti-war rally that world-wide nuclear war would create a 'condition known as 'On The Beach'', as if this were some sort of scientific phenomenon, rather than a novel. Yes, it's a well written book, and provides an interesting insight into one alternative of the end of the world. But it's been used by the anti-war movement to scare people to support their agenda, which isn't necessarily anti-war at all. Having said that, don't let the propaganda and overblown misquoted statements discourage you - it's a great book. But so was Ronald Reagan's arms buildup. That actually ENDED the Cold War. Without it, Nevil Shute's vision of the future was quite possible.
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