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Title: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart ISBN: 0-449-21301-3 Publisher: Fawcett Books Pub. Date: 12 September, 1986 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.28 (169 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Post-apocalyptic Must Read!!
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderfully written
Comment: This book reaches across time and avoids the technology trap. It hits home in many circumstances and is an excellent read. I liked its energy and symbolism. It avoids being grim and actually gives you hope for a disastrous future.
Rating: 2
Summary: Sorry, I just didn't get it.
Comment: I see many people loved this book, but having just finished it, I just don't get the appeal it has for so many people. I found it incredibly boring and tedious. I do not exaggerate when I say I spent an afternoon struggling with it, nodding off to sleep every two or three paragraphs. To his credit, Stewart raises a number of issues about science and human nature, but it is done in the context of an uneventful story. The first book in years that almost made me abandon it halfway through, but I fought it out to the end. I remained disappointed.
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