Upcoming Books:
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is reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz" written by Walter M. Miller, Jr. for September 25.
Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction novel, The Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. is a provocative, fascinating and disturbing apocalyptic novel told in three separate novellas set centuries apart. It was written in 1959 in the midst of the Cold War. This was a time of fear and anxiety that inspired a proliferation of armageddon tales filled with destruction and chaos. In Miller's novel each section revolves around an event that plunges the world into darkness and ignorance consuming most of humanity and its knowledge. The first occurs during about the time of the Dark Ages; the second the Renaissance; and the third is about 1,800 years later with the nations of mankind threatening nuclear war. It begins 600 years after a nuclear holocaust knocks mankind into a new Dark Age, with Brother Francis, the novice monk fasting in a southwestern desert. Brother Francis discovers an abandoned nuclear shelter filled with a treasure trove of artifacts surviving the "Flame Deluge" from the time of the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s. The monks guard what an electrical engineer named Isacc Leibowitz has left behind. Over the course of the novel, the knowledge found in the shelter helps humanity back on its feet only to repeat its own mistakes over and over again. |