Alas, Babylon

Rating:
Summary: Classic in its Genre
Review: I first read this book 20 years ago in a high school literature class. It still hasn't lost its impact today. If you like adventure stories about ordinary human beings rising to an impossible challenge or of survival after doomsday, this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: A book required to read in some schools, and a good thing.
Review: Scrolling through these reviews most people would realize that most of them contain 4 and 5 stars. I can now understand why. "Alas, Babylon" is a classic novel about what would happen if we went into WWIII. It portrays the thoughts and worries that filled the minds of those living through the Cold War. When a small town is trying to survive amongst nuclear war, you get to read about the means of survival for these civilians. The creativity of Pat Frank is phenominal and it's one of the only books required for students to read that they will actually enjoy reading. I read the entire book before I was even supposed to read through the fourth chapter it was that good. You can't go wrong purchasing this book because it is EXCELLENT.

Rating:
Summary: SCARY AS HELL, BUT ULIMATELY UPLIFTING
Review: Given the current world stage, this book really scared the hell out of me. Frank wrote it in 1957, but there is very little about it that feels dated. A dogfight gone wrong sets the stage for global disaster, which we live through in our hero, a wayward ex-Army borderline alcoholic living in a serene Florida small town. The characters and situations that play out in the aftermath of total nuclear war are amazingly true and captivating. The attention to crucial survival details never flags (you'd never know how important salt would be until you really need it). But in the end, it's really a tribute to the human spirit and a testament that we are, by nature, mostly good at heart. I loved this book and wish there were more out there like it.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This book is set during the Cold War, The Soviet Union and the United States both attack each other with Nuclear Weapons. A community in Central Florida is caught inbetween the fallout of the nuclear weapons. Revolving around a family that has to survive on what it can find. In this book they deal with food shortages, no electricity, fear of disease, thugs and murderers, and all of the kind of things you would expect of a community that no longer has any rules. Man takes a step back into the primitive in order to survive. This is a great book, but it can get boreing occasionaly. Gives good insight on the fear of such attack during this time.

Rating:
Summary: I was and am here
Review: I had to read this book in junior high back around 1970. I gather from some of the other reviews that it is still required reading for school. What strikes me is that the book is viewed as inconceivable to today's children.

I grew up and still live only a few miles from where the fictional town of Ft. Repose was supposedly located. As a boy we had to take food and water to kindergarten in case our homes were hit by atomic bombs. We watched the troop transports roll south down US1 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Patrick AFB (which doesn't get hit in the book) was rumored to have atomic weaponry. The prospect
of nuclear war was very real to us and that made Pat Frank's book very believable. Frank also did a good job of making the story of survival plausible .

I still read the book every so often.

ofs

Rating:
Summary: The Politics of Scarcity
Review: "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank describes how Fort Repose, a Florida rural town, survives the aftermath of nuclear war. The world blunders into nuclear war: the Soviets perceive United States weakness, contact between opposing forces escalates, the Soviets launch a nuclear strike and the United States retaliates.

Post-cataclysmic survival is more interesting than the brief nuclear war. After the Bomb, paper money and electronic transactions *immediately* become worthless and *all* debt payments are suspended by Government. Deliveries of energy and commodities cease, gas pumps and store shelves soon are empty, then electricity ceases. Residents rely on wood heat for cooking and heating, and rely on leftover home heating oil for lantern fuel. A barter-based economy develops, liquor becomes a precious disinfectant and anesthetic, and some volunteer to share housing. Fort Repose's rural Florida location solves some problems: artesian wells provide running water without electric pumps; the river provides clean fish; the mild Florida winter is non-threatening with burnable wood located nearby; a small town's familiarity discourages wanton looting; and Fort Repose has a dedicated physician/surgeon. Shelter and food are the only issues -- nobody cares about politics or who won the war.

"Alas, Babylon" is relevant today. When deliveries cease, Fort Repose society evolves to accomodate shortages. Today's higher energy costs are forcing up *all* costs and creating affordability-based shortages. United States society is evolving to function in a era of shortages.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent and must read book, with a few inaccuracies...
Review: Pat Frank's "Alas, Babylon" is one of the best examples of fiction I know of.

Hopefully without giving it all away, the book describes the effects of nuclear war upon everyday people, and how they survived. The book discusses how the nuclear war began, and the escalating tensions between the US and USSR. The main character, Randy Bragg, lives in a small town named Fort Repose, not far from Orlando, FL. Randy's brother, who is in the Air Force, knows war is going to break out, and sends his wife and children to safety with his brother. Frank begins to describe the effects of supply shipments not arriving, the lack of electricity and other public utilities, the initial panic buying after news of a nuclear war reaches the town, the collapse of the financial institution in the town, and the failure, at least in the beginning, to maintain law and order. It shows the failure of the local civil defense, run by the local funeral director, to have done anything productive. The civil defense/funeral director never bothers in the beginning to make available civil defense pamphlets from the Federal Civil Defense Administration until the war has actually broken out. What were once trifles, like getting salt, suddenly have become a fight for survival.

However, there are several inaccuracies.

First of all, the author has invented such things as "contaminated zones." These zones are where fallout from the nuclear explosions have contaminated the area, and no one can remain in. In truth, there are no such things. Radioactive decay, upon which all radiation is emitted, will bring levels of radiation down to non-life threatening levels in about 2 weeks. Studies have shown levels of radiation will be down the extremely low present-day levels within a few years.

Secondly, several people in the book are killed when they wear jewelry that one person had brought with them from a "contaminated zone." The books makes it out as if the jewelry itself became radioactive, and is now emitting radiation, and as in the book, must be buried along with the bodies. There are several references to not bringing metal out of contaminated zones. In reality, metal does not become radioactive itself. It's possible the author methods of making some metals, such as aluminum, radioactive using laboratory methods, confused, and added it to the book as something that could happen in a nuclear war. So, this part is totally inaccurate.

Furthermore, it is also said that rebuilding cities on sites which were hit with a nuclear weapon could not be done because everything was radioactive, and they'd have to remove all the metal there, etc. This is also pure bunk. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed with real nuclear weapons, and yet they rebuilt less than a few years later, building larger than before. There are no roped off "contaminated zones" where the original cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stood.

Fourth, Fort Response miraculously escapes from the fallout that would come from the nuclear detonations. There is no mention of a 2-3 week shelter stay, or any actions taken to prevent fallout radiation exposure.

Finally, there is no mention of Electro-Magnetic Pulse, or EMP. EMP is one of the effects of a nuclear weapon, and is a fast moving radio frequency wave which fries anything with an integrated circuit. It isn't harmful to humans however. Given that EMP wasn't discovered until a few years before Frank's book was published, it could be said that the lack of mention for EMP could be chalked up to the fact it had been discovered fairly recently before the book was published. Also, many electronics in the time period when this book was written were essentially impervious to EMP, as they were either analog or vacuum tube electronics, so it wouldn't have mattered much anyway. Today however, with just about everything having a computer or other form of integrated circuit, it would be much different.

Other than these minor inaccuracies, this book is a must read. It is also exponentially better than the anti-nuclear propaganda book "On the Beach."

Rating:
Summary: For Cold War fiction readers with literary merit as well.
Review: Not being a big reader in 9th grade, we were assigned Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (this would have been when the Cold War was still a part of everyday life in 1985). This book was one of those during that year that convinced me that reading was going to be a part of my life forever.

The most interesting literary aspect is that it was written in third person limited. For those who could care less, very few books are written this way. Basically, as nuclear war breaks out, the reader is placed in one of the surviving communities, and you are only able to get outside information as the characters do. What happened? Who started it? Who got to the button first? Who survived outside of the present community?

In an almost unflinching way, the book's conclusion directs the reader to thinking about the Cold War during that time (as it continued) but still provides food for thought in retrospect.

This is one of the more nicely done fictional works dealing with the fears and consequences of living on the brink of global catastrophic annihilation for so long.

Rating:
Summary: A little inaccurate, but still a classic Cold War Novel
Review: Pat Frank, although something of an expert on Nuclear War, wrote this book before the concept of Nuclear Winter was discovered. For that reason, Alas Babylon is not terrbily accurate a book. IT details the aftermath of Nuclear War on a Florida town in between the Ground Zero's of many Nuclear Missiles. In truth, everyone would have died, but this was written in 1959, before a lot about Nuclear material in itself was discovered. Regardless, it is a very interesting story about how the people of this town, Fort Repose, must deal with what has happened. For a more realistic account of the Cold War, read Nevil Shute's On The Beach. For a gripping adventure story, read Alas Babylon.

Rating:
Summary: Hard-hitting, but Incredibly Outdated
Review: In "Alas, Babylon," Pat Frank has created what was once considered a highly realistic vision of rural America, as seen after a major nuclear war. At least he tried to get people thinking about this "unthinkable" topic, which makes him a better human being than most of us. However, readers today really need to think about how dated this story actually is.

The basic tale is of a small town in rural Florida, and how it is transformed by the sudden obliteration of our national economy. Due to a combination of wind patterns, geography, and unbelievable good fortune, radiation is hardly even an issue to the denizens of the lucky town. The only people who suffer radiation illness are those who foolishly venture too close to the cratered ruins of various vaporized cities. Because radiation is not a significant problem, this book should best be considered to be a study of how folks might cope in the event of an unprecedented Depression, with the added factors of total, permanent cessation of public utilities; decaying roads; and the advent of lawless behavior on a scale unseen since the days of the wild west.

The main character is a man named Randy Bragg, who is getting close to early middle age. He learns of the impending war by way of a telegram, from a brother in the armed forces. The telegram simply reads "Alas, Babylon," which to the biblically literate brothers is a pre-arranged sign, a signal that a major nuclear war is almost definitely on the way. He heroically starts trying to take precautions for his loved ones, by stocking up on supplies, but tragically lacks the foresight to understand that most of his supplies will be unable to be preserved, without electricity. As the story unfolds, we encounter further unpleasant, unforeseen situations -- no running water; no toilets; no way to keep insulin cooled, for diabetics; no smallpox vaccines; no spare food for dogs, or other ways to keep them from becoming feral; when a pair of glasses is broken, there's no way to get a new pair... the list goes on and on. Eventually, this story shows its stripes as a product of the 1950s, and develops a plot that could have been tailor-made for John Wayne. A group of highway brigands starts spreading havoc, and Randy Bragg and his fearless cohorts must stage an ambush. This plotline gives much of the feeling of a "story" to this sequence of events.

Although I salute Pat Frank for writing this book, I give it three stars only because it is hopelessly outdated for todays reader. I myself am no expert in nuclear war, but even I can see at least three or four major problems with this book. NONE of the problems are Pat Frank's fault in ANY way. They simply concern developments, in scientific understanding of nuclear war scenarios, that have come about since the 1950s, when this book was written. For example, how about the Electro-Magnetic Pulse, or EMP? In the 1950s, no one understood that a single large nuclear bomb, if detonated two to three hundred miles above the United States, would generate an electro-magnetic pulse which would turn every computer, every database, every electronic appliance in the country into junk. This event alone would destroy our economy - no electronic credit records would survive, no banking or medical records on databases, etc.

Or how about nuclear winter? No one in the 1950s knew anything about the topic. It hadn't been considered by scientists. What about increased ultraviolet radiation, from damage to the ozone layer? What about chemical changes in our very atmosphere, caused by toxic clouds from burning cities? Finally, I really have to take issue with the near-total lack of attention paid to radiation in this book. In a major conflict, it would be soooo much worse than this book implies.

If you'd like some better, more updated information about nuclear war, try reading Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott's "The New Nuclear Danger." It just came out a few months ago. For a book about nuclear winter, try reading "The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War," by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich. If you'd just like to read some realistic, modern fiction about life after a nuclear conflict, try reading "Warday: And the Journey Onward," by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka, which was highly praised by U.S. Senators of both political parties, when it came out in 1984. Finally, I would like to urge you in the strongest possible terms to seek out a copy of the video "Threads." "Threads" is an old BBC made-for-television docudrama, released in 1984, about the effects on an average little town of a nuclear war. You can usually find it on a major online auction house, by entering the terms "threads" and "war" in the search field.

Anyway, "Alas, Babylon" in ridiculously outdated, but at least it might start someone thinking. One tentative thumb up.