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Summary: One of the best books I have ever read.
Review: Like most of the other reviewers, I too have read this book many times. There is some-thing about this story that stays with you. I can't say I have had the same feeling about any other book.
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Summary: Post-apocalyptic Must Read!!
Review: Lost Books -- Review Number 1 Earth Abides by George R. Stewart D. D. Shade 6/11/98 Had Isherwood Williams lived to see our day, with it's social and political decay, he might not have worried so much about "preserving" our culture. As it happens in George R. Stewart's book, the devastating viral plague that cleanses the earth of nearly all human life occurred approximately 50 years ago. Long before the assination of John or Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Long before the war with Vietnam. Before we put a man on the moon and then cut the space program. Before the pervasion of television and the computer revolution. Before the escalation of the cold war, AIDS, or most of the great serial killers. In other words, Earth Abides takes place in a time that many Americans with gray hair look back upon with nostalgia. The post World War Two years, when those of us between forty and fifty were born. The boomer years. A time of great prosperity. A decade that saw the birth of rock-n-roll, hamburgers, and Oreo cookies. Yet it was a time of great poverty for some. When restrooms, restaurants, and the seats in public transportation were separated by the color of ones skin. When equal pay for equal work was unheard of and a woman's place was in the home. A time when the word 'communist' was the dirtiest and deadliest thing one could call another. An altogether strange time, know as the fifties. It is into this world that Isherwood suddenly finds himself alone. Victim of a freak snakebite while out in the wilderness working on his graduate thesis and survivor of an even more freak accident, the development of a viral plague that wipes out humankind in a matter of weeks. It is altogether fitting that someone named Ish, this is how he signed his name to a hand scrawled will while delirious from the snake bite, should find himself alone in the world. Ish, David Pringle tells us , is a direct reference to the historic Ishi, a California Indian who became famous as the last living representativ! e of his tribe. Ish spends at least a quarter of the book searching for others. He finds a few, lucky people with great immune systems, and in the process stumbles upon the woman with whom he shares the remainder of his years. Together they try to build a community and at the same time rebuild civilization as they had know it. You will have to read the book to learn of Ish's heroic triumphs and failures as he tries to make sure the future has a heritage. Although following the traditional post-apocalyptic formula, that of the earth being cleansed by some means and leaving a few to rebuild civilization, Earth Abides offers some interesting commentary on some central moral questions of our/that time. One of those is racial unrest. Given the nature of European and African American relations in this nation in 1949, Stewart was taking a quite a risk when he developed one particular central character, Em. Ish chooses a strong willed, able, out-spoken, African American woman to be his mate. She was not the first female Ish found, nor was she the best looking, but she had within her the strength to become the mother of a new civilization. Ish recognized this and fell in love with her quickly. And Ish was right-Em alone had the strength and courage to bear the first child in the small community that had grown around them. There was no one who knew how to deliver a baby, and that was frightful enough, but the greatest fear was not knowing if children born into the world would inherit their parents immunity to the plague. Earth Abides is considered a classic by several sources but to my way of thinking, it deserves that exalted position in speculative fiction for having been a forerunner is demonstrating that black and white can live together. Stewart further shows us how important is the relationship between past and future. He does this symbolically through the vehicle of a 4-pound, single-jack hammer. At the beginning of the book, just before the snake bite, Ish is exploring a cave and finds this hammer. It is the! kind miners used in the old days when rock-drills were placed by hand. It is called a single-jack because it can be used with one hand. Ish notes the pleasure he feels when he finds the hammer because of its tie to the past. Even delierous from snake bit, he remembers to take the hammer with him. He keeps it with him throughout the book. As the community grows around Ish and Em, the hammer is used each year to chisel the numbers of the year on a big rock in the hills above where they live. It is always present on the mantel in Ish's living room. And at the end of the book, when Ish has grown old and the younger men, his and other's children, sense that he is ready to pick a new leader for the community, they wait in a circle at his feet for Ish to pick the next leader by giving them the hammer. The importance of tradition to the family and the community is symbolized in the single-jack. John Clute and Peter Nicholls feel that post-apocalyptic or disaster stories are so popular because they appeal to secret desires we all share: a depopulated world, escape from the constraints of a highly organized industrial society, and the opportunity to prove one's ability to survive. I choose the latter of the three. Post-apocalyptic speculative fiction provides a window from which to view the "stuff" of which humankind is made. The writer of a disaster or holocaust story can pit humans against the worst possible odds. The post-holocaust novel gives us the ability to perform an experiment that in reality would be unethical-to put a group of people in hell and record their progress getting out. Earth Abides is a moving, triumpal story of just such a group. No single character in Earth Abides has the stereotypic appeal of Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage, and yet I came to love them all and worry about their conditions because they were real people. People with many of the same problems and weaknesses I have. People whose actions made me stop and wonder what I would do in the same situation.
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Summary: WHAT A BOOK!
Review: I read this book over 15 years ago and to this day I still cannot get the story out of my head. I wish I can find another copy so I can read it again and even pass it onto my family and friends. What made this story so remarkable was how logical the story line flowed. Everytime I ponder that faitfull question of being one of few left on Earth, I try to take into account the possibilities of how Earth will "reset" iteslf around me. Would I want to stay in Florida, move back to California, or go on a quest to some distant land and build my own civilization? Anyway, I highly recommend this book for those who have ever pondered the question of being the "last person on Earth."
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Summary: A life long impression
Review: I first read this book at 11 yrs old (1965), and have read it 4 more times throughout my life. I continually think about this book and always recomend it to friends. I grew up in the desert with not much to do BUT read,when I finished it the first time I had to start over right away, Ive NEVER done that with ANY other book!!! have fun reading it!!!!!
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Summary: Fun Corny Sci-Fi
Review: It was a must read for my Physical Geography class. We were supposed mto read it from a Geographers point of view. My teacher prefaced it with "this book was written in the 40's and it is sexist - so ladies please don't let it irritate you." I however, didn't find it sexist I found M, the lead female charachter, a strong and wonderful woman. I also liked the fact that there was interracial marriage and poligamy. Forward thinking ideas in the 1940's. All in all it is a good weekend read. But, it is way corny! Especially all the text in italics.
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Summary: OUTSTANDING
Review: As a long time reader of sci-fi, this novel-EARTH ABIDESs is the single best story ever written. I have read it more than 30 times. From the time Ish begins his relent measures to understand what has happen, the start of rebuiding a social group, the developement years, and the final bridge location with Ishs' final thought of "Men may come and go but Earth abides" stirs thoughts of --how would you perform in a like setting.
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Summary: Ditto!!!
Review: What more can be said? Get it and read it!!! I first read it about 35 years ago and it has stayed with me. The book impressed me then and it impresses me now.
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Summary: This is one my all time favorites and I am not a sci-fi fan.
Review: When the protagonist entered the Bancroft library at the Univeristy of California, and the author described him handling the books and the care which was taken when he left, was so beautifly described I almost cried. Living in chaos but leaving in such a humanly way left a strong message of the power of books and libraries that needs to be an inhernt value to our culture.
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Summary: I read this book when it was first published and can't wait
Review: It seems like this book was super-great when I first read it about 40 years ago. I haven't been able to forget it. I am excited to see it is in print again---but why was it ever out of print? It is timely, provocative and just plain great reading for any age.
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Summary: Earth Abides reveals our own fragile links to civilization.
Review: I read the Earth Abides, after listening to a friend describe this story as one of the most impactful he had ever known. Several years later in the early 1980's, I stumbled across a slightly used copy in a bookstore. George Stewart tells a fascinating tale of a post apocolyptic vision staged in the East Bay section of the San Francisco Bay area. This story has stayed with me and endures as a valued set of images. The struggle to make sense of the horrific and nonsensical was intuitively accurate. The story revealed in human terms the everyday efforts of a small group of survivors, suddenly stranded and adrift. The beneficiaries of a hulking but hollow industrial infrastructure that no longer served those who remained and their succeeding generations. The unfolding "descent" of industriatized society as well as the marginalization of technology was at once fascinating and frightening. The ending left me stunned, yet wisened.
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