This was a great book to drive home how terrible the dustbowl was. How did people survive? Egan's writing is always so descriptive and really describes the details of people's lives. Unfortunately, the book seems to lack a cohesive story, so parts of it start to feel repetitive. However, a great nonfiction read.

This book sucks. It was awful; horribly disappointing. It dragged and dragged and dragged, and I finally finished it and returned it to the bookstore. I will never read it again and would not recommend it to anyone. There were a couple parts that were interesting, but most of it was mind-numbingly dull. Egan went into great (and in my opinion, needless) detail of the history and mundane details of many of the families, but not the kind of detail that contributes to the message of the book or develops the characters. There were too many narratives incorporated into the book, and it was difficult to keep the different families, individuals and cities straight, especially since many of their stories were so similar.

It says it is "can't-put-it-down history" on the cover, but that is a complete lie. I honestly can't believe I finished it, it was so boring and I literally was able to read only 10 pages at a time because it was so utterly BORING. I expected more from this book. It read like a too-long chapter from a junior high history book. I have no doubt that the story of the dust bowl is fascinating, so I was very disappointed by this book.

well done! a great romp through history. this is the first book i've read of larson's (while waiting for the library to have 'devil in the white city') and i'm impressed with his style. comparable to, say, 'professor and the madman'.

Fascinating minute by minute of a hurricane.

The Galveston, Texas hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900 is still the deadliest hurricane in history. The man on duty at the Galveston weather Bureau that fatefull day, Isaac Cline, did not predict the disaster that was on the way. After the storm, however, he said that his warnings had saved thousands of lives. Isaac's Storm, by Erik larson tells the real story of what happened & what could have been prevented.

This engrossing disaster book concerns the Galveston hurricane of 1900, still by far the high-water mark in American natural catastrophes. Like the Johnstown Flood that occurred 10 years earlier, nature's wrath was aided by man's obliviousness. Larson highlights two central actors in the drama: the hurricane itself, beginning with its origin in Saharan westerly winds, and Isaac Cline, the Weather Bureau's sentinel in Galveston. Setting the stage, Larson depicts a wealthy, optimistic Galveston, unconcerned by its site on a barrier island scant feet above sea level, blithely ignorant of the storm heading its way. Enroute to destiny, the hurricane previously walloped Cuba, but a Cuban forecaster's intuitive prediction that Texas was the next landfall was not permitted to be telegraphed out by the Weather Bureau's man in Havana. Skeptical of intuition, he believed in meteorological facts, which convinced him the storm was fizzling out east of Florida. For the main act, Larson reconstructs Isaac Cline's day on 8 September 1900 and ratchets up the tension as clouds gather, the effective device being the sequence of perceptions that disaster was inescapable. Were the rolling waves worrisome? If not, the splintering of the boardwalk concentrated Galvestonians' attention--but, by then, the single railroad out was cut. A further mark of Larson's depth as a writer is his ambivalence about Cline, who may not have acted as heroically as depicted in his own memoir. Although the subject is grim, this telling is a deftly told fable of folly and fate.

Just when we all thought the Robert Heinlein canon was complete, along come notes and an outline for an unfinished manuscript that his literary estate decided to have completed and published. This is a novel begun more than fifty years ago, when one of its coauthors was seven years old, and completed more than thirteen years after the death of the other coauthor.


It's also a pretty darn good book. It's not true Heinlein, but it's not a cheap imitation of Robert Heinlein either. Spider Robinson was specifically told not to try and 'do the literary equivalent of a Rich Little impersonation of Robert Heinlein.' He took Heinlein's outline and turned it into something very special indeed: a story set in Heinlein's well-crafted Future History but not necessarily a typical Heinlein piece. So we get the universe populated by Venerian dragons and three-legged Martian mystics, farmers on Ganymede and cities built deep inside the Moon, and fusion-powered torchships plying the spaceways throughout the solar system and beyond.


And then Robinson goes and destroys it all. The 'Variable Star' of this story turns out to be our own Sun. For reasons unknown, the Sun goes nova and incinerates the entire solar system, leaving behind a few dozen far-flung interstellar colonies who are themselves in jeopardy once the wavefront from the explosion reaches them.


Just ahead of the wavefront is the CSS Charles Sheffield (named for another of the few authors who quite possibly could have played in Heinlein's universe with credibility); aboard is Joel Johnston, a musician who narrowly escaped marrying into the uber-rich Conrad family and having the remainder of his existence--and his identity--dictated to him. Six years out on its way to Brasil Novo, a colony world 40 light-years from Earth, the Sheffield has already had its share of problems.


Since the ship is traveling just below the speed of light, and the wavefront is traveling at the speed of light, death seems all but a certainty for the colonists. Or is it? Joel's business with the Conrad family (and his ex-fiancee Jinny) is not yet finished. They have the means to rescue him, but Joel's survival may come with too dear a price. Even the Devil gives something back in exchange for your soul. The Conrads aren't entirely as generous.


Most of the story is constructed around Joel's decision to depart Earth forever and the society that he helps build aboard the colony ship; the actual payoff comes in the last third of the book. Joel is anything but the typical omnicompetent Heinlein hero: he's a very gifted musician and was brought up as a farmer (one of an ironic few who are being sent to found an agricultural colony) but he makes serious technical and interpersonal errors that impact his life and the lives of others. Indeed, this character (unlike most Heinlein characters) is running from his mistakes rather than confronting them. Ultimately he must confront himself in order to ensure not only his survival but the survival of the human race.


It would be a mistake to say that Heinlein shelved Variable Star completely; several of the ideas he developed in 1955 showed up in later novels. The use of instantaneous telepathy as a means of interstellar communication appears in Time for the Stars (1956). The notion of time travel (in the form of relativistic time contraction in this case) to bring an older man and a young girl close enough in age to become lovers first appears in The Door Into Summer (1957) and shows up in many other Heinlein stories. The spunky young female protagonist who thinks nothing of giving the finger to the system shows up first and best in 1963's Podkayne of Mars. Even Johnston's rebellion against the Conrad clan to make his own future, though hardly unique in literature, is echoed in 1959's Starship Troopers. Many, many other ideas in Heinlein's later work can be found in Variable Star.


There are updates from the 1950's incorporated into the story, but not as consistently as I would have hoped. This is still a universe where Leslie Lecroix, not Neil Armstrong, was the first man on the Moon, and where Jupiter's moons are habitable (the radiation environment at Ganymede would fry anything and anyone living on its surface; no hint is given of alternate techonology that would have permitted colonization). The moving highways Heinlein predicted would replace the interstate highway system in the late 20th century are still in use more than a hundred years after Heinlein's original history predicted their obsolesence. Heinlein's famous three-legged transcendent Martians (as seen in 1949's Red Planet and 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land) and Venerians from 1951's Between Planets exist, but contact with them seems to have had no impact on human philosophy, theology, or politics whatsoever. Indeed, the Martians--who had destroyed the planet now known as the Asteroid Belt and had contemplated destroying the Earth just for the sake of art--may even have been responsible for the whole thing, but nobody considers that idea.


The 9/11 attacks still happen and the United States responds as in our timeline. This does eventually put an ultra-fundamentalist government in charge of the United States as in Heinlein's original Future History (especially in Revolt in 2100) and the consequences are about as Heinlein had developed. However, I have a hard time believing that Osama bin Laden and Valentine Michael Smith--or the beings who raised him--could exist in the same universe. Osama would find himself sent 'elsewhere' as soon as he proposed someone hijack a plane and fly it into a building. For that matter, the security apparatus of the United States and other nations seems much more efficient in Heinlein's Future History: at its best, the United States has become a near-dictatorship, causing the best and brightest to leave for the stars. At its worst, a homegrown hybrid of Ayatollah Khomeini and Jerry Falwell is in charge and people can be made to disappear. I doubt al Qaeda could even function on a meaningful level in such an environment.


The inclusion of 9/11 was probably necessary but seemed forced. I would have had an easier time believing that Nehemiah Scudder's operatives caused the attack and framed a foreign group, thus setting the stage for him to take control of the country. The same analogies Robinson drew to support the point he makes (brilliantly) could have been drawn while staying more consistent with the Future History.


This is the book's biggest weakness. Robinson has put a great deal of work into coming up with a convincing retcon but doing so weakens much of Heinlein's original vision. It's a good enough book on its own, but how much is Robinson and how much is Heinlein? An annotated version, including Heinlein's original eight-page outline, would be very welcome. Shared visions are great, but knowing who's contributing what is even better--I'm inclined to read more of Spider Robinson's considerable body of original work because of this book.


Is it worth reading? Definitely. It's not Heinlein but it is Heinlein's playground. And it's good to know that the playground is still open. But anyone expecting to hear the Master's voice as more than a whisper into another talented writer's ear is going to be disappointed. Approach this book on its own merits. The vision persists even if the voice has been silenced.

In this post-apocalyptic novel, a man and his son travel the existing roads, looking for food and trying to avoid the nasty things that society has fallen into. The father seems to believe that the boy is some kind of prophet or voice of the new world. The man is ruthless but the boy is kinder.
Interesting portrayals of the fallen society, but ultimately depressing and without any commentary about our society. I suppose it's supposed to tell us what we could become, but I don't know.
I also found it unbelievable that humans would survive and there would be nothing else left living, not even bugs and plants and stuff. He tells of a totally dead world.
A bit of horror and a lot of boring stuff. Not my general kind of book.

I set out on a journey with the first words of this book and was continually pulled down the road. Sometimes with trepidation, sometimes wanting to hold my hands over my eyes to avoid the horror, but always with hope that came from an undying faith in the virtuous part human nature -“the good guys.” This is a book I will never forget!

This book has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize!

A young boy and his father are traveling through a post-apacalypic America. A very bleak and intense book. You will find this one impossible to put down.

Bleak. Depressing. Amazing, and hard to put down. The beginning was slow for me, but this book just outdid everything I've read lately. While there's next to no action, I was riveted. I could not put this book down, from the middle on. Haunting, and this one will not be easily forgotten by anyone who reads it.

I finished this one on 7/16/07. It's a pretty quick read about a father and son who are traveling an existing road in a post-apocalyptic society. As the 'good guys' they traveled in search of warmer weather, food, shelter and other necessary supplies (including weapons), while constantly trying to avoid the 'bad guys', who were the personification of all the bad that can come from the desperation involved with survival.

The man seems burdened with his own survival, which is obviously very difficult in those circumstances. As his health deteriorates he has to debate whether or not to let the boy go on without him.

In the end, the man dies and the boy respectfully continues on and vows not to forget. I think that somehow symbolizes the death and rebirth. Some good ideas and a moving scene at the end, but overall it just wasn't a page turner.

Cormac Mccarthy writes very spare prose and this book will simply scare the bejesus out of you because the world seems to be on the edge of disaster on a grand scale yet again.

The world has suffered a nuclear disaster and it is a wasteland through which a boy and his father travel. This book is about love and hope in the face of unimaginable disaster. People do go on no matter what happens. They survive, they love unconditionally and destroy what scares them.

This book infers the existence of books that don't currently exist through references to them. The books he considers "lost" include those that we've just never found copies of, manuscripts that were destroyed, and manuscripts that were never written.
People say I'm incorrect in feeling that today's media is less ephemeral than it once was, but I can't help feeling that way.
An interesting book, although lots of the authors I had never heard of and those parts kind of dragged a bit.