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Summary: Hidden meanings abound in book ostensibly about nuclear wint
Review: This is not a book about nuclear war and its aftermath. It is about death coming as a certainty. At every turn the reader must examine his or her own feelings about the imminent fate of him- or herself. That's what really makes this book so incredibly powerful. You won't find any techno-thriller stuff here, and you won't miss it. It's about us, now, as we seek to find a meaning in life while trying to live it. This book will be around for a very long time, not because it describes so heartbreakingly the nuclear winter that is our potential future, but because it describes our life -- and our death --even without such a disaster. Read it. Savor it. It is the stuff of life.
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Summary: ASTOUNDING
Review: I first picked up and read this book when I was 12 I am 21 now. This book is probley the only one that stands out in my mind. The book lets us know what would prob. happen if there was a nucler fallout. The thought of it is scary but it could happen . NEvil Shute has once again out did himself. The depth alone that this holds is remarkable.
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Summary: Couldn't put it down
Review: Wow, very good book. A glimps back at the paranoia of the eary 60's at the beginning of the arms race. I kept thinking 'why don't they go underground?' and I remembered that during the first part of the cold war people were told to Duck and Cover, the general public did not know about radiation. In other words they didn't know what we know know. A very good look back.
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Summary: Amazing
Review: From the opening paragraph to the final words, Nevil Shute presents a captivating story of survival in a world where survival is impossible. A heartbreaking tale of what things could have been, or may even be, someday in the future.
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Summary: Recall it after 30 years as the introduction to the 1960s
Review: The review by Dahlgren99@aol.com, of a first reading of On the Beach is remarkably descriptive of my own response in the early 1960s, reading the book at its initial popularity, and seduced by Nevil Shute's presentation of human extinction into believing it probable, perhaps inevitable, in just the way he described it. Be careful with this author's power over your emotional responses, for he looks into individual souls of his characters (who include his readers) and gives them a post-hypnotic suggestion that what he said is true. Test it out. Read Trustee from the Toolroom. You will never be the same
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Summary: Still frightening almost forty years later
Review: I mostly picked up this book because I thought it was science-fiction. I had heard of the movie, but it was a little before my time and besides, I heard it wasn't that good anyway. So, I picked up this book, opened it to read and found myself captured by something more realistic than anything than science-fiction could ever create.
I, for one, am far too young to remember the days of the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear disaster hung over our parents' heads like a grim spectre. But upon reading this book, I found a sick feeling beginning to form in my gut, an old fear, perhaps a memory of those gone before. I got the sense that this still could happen, and I read faster, with growing intensity.
On the Beach grabs you and never lets go, even beyond the end. The characters, all detailed, could be someone living next door to you, and the way they go through their motions, even as they know the rain is heading nearer and nearer is frightening and all too human. The tone of the novel, the narration, is calm, resigned, as if the narrator has come to grips with his fate, even if the characters haven't yet.
There is no hope in this book. As a science-fiction reader, I am accostumed to last second saves and plot twists from nowhere, but even as I got closer and closer to the end I realized with foul certainity that there was no surviving. But the people, they don't struggle, they merely make plans for things that will never be done, not looking for a way out, because there is none.
Nevil Shute is not a literary writer like Pynchon or Joyce or Gaddis, and his prose is not lyrical, but it is always calm, uncluttered, the exact meaning never failing to reach you. This was easily the most powerful novel I have ever read and when I closed it, I shut it with a shudder, emerging finally from the dark world of a nuclear winter.
Still as true today as forty years ago, everyone should read this book and perhaps learn something from it. Before it's too late
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Summary: Outstanding
Review: On the Beach is one of those rare books that evade categories. Science Fiction because of its backdrop (nuclear war), it should be placed in a category with literature that defines what it is to be human. The story, as I saw it, was not about humanity facing extinction (atomic or otherwise), but about how each character faced personal extinction with others in the same situation. Duty, hope, fear, anger, mortality, acceptance, all present; all dealt with. Death could have come to the characters in any fashion, from AIDS to old age and the feelings would be the same. What is amazing to me is that Nevil Schute managed to craft a book to deal with these feelings/reactions in such a short amount of actual print. My suggestion is not to read this book as science fiction. Read it as you would read To Kill a Mockingbird, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lord of the Flies, or A Tale of Two Cities
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Summary: an amazing, very compelling, and in fact frightening tale
Review: A marvelous novel relating, indeed evincing, the imminent perils of nuclear war and the immanent hamartia of humankind, deplorably destined perhaps to suicidal massacre. Nevil Shute's literary artistry is particularly manifest in how he superbly hews His characters, weaving them into truly believable forms that serve to illuminate inscapes into those things We all share, We all feel. With the setting, they draw You inexorably into their world, Your world, a pending situation so threatening, so real, that ignorance is obviated and altogether impossible. Mr. Shute presents such a credible story of verily apocalyptic proportions on a general, mundane scale, and of cataclysmic complexities on a personal, emotional level, something with which We can all relate. It is an extraordinary novel, not only recommended by me, but advocated, i trow, by human nature and tendencies collectively. Yeah, it's really that good
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Summary: The most compelling book ever on nuclear war and humankind.
Review: Forty years after its publication, "On the Beach" remains the most compelling book ever written on nuclear war and humankind. Not a "technothriller", it offers only a stark contrast between human indencency and decency in the quiet chronicle of the end of our existence, as the radioactive aftermath of nuclear war spreads inexorably from the warring countries to the remainder of the globe, reaching the last survivors of humanity in southern Australia. The struggle to face dispair without embracing it gives this book a power and depth seldom found in modern fiction. For anyone who has lived through the "cold war", and for anyone who has not, "On the Beach" is a book you must read. Its relevance is perhaps greater today than when written, for the spectre of nuclear madness, although more plausible than ever before in the face of almost uncontrolled proliferation, is less
believed than at any time past. Nevil Shute's masterwork will disturb your complacency.
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Summary: An interesting vision of the end of life as we know it.
Review: Nevil Shute gives us the unique opportunity to be a fly on the wall of a community that has the distinction of being the last community left on earth. How or why that community comes to this distinction is nowhere near as important as how it deals with that distinction. On the Beach is a tour de force of emotions and feelings felt by realistic characters as the last six months of human life on earth is played out in a large Australian city; that because of its southern location has managed to survive a worldwide nuclear holocaust. Now it must face what the rest of the world has already experienced. The inescapable radiation that is drifting down from the already dead northern hemisphere. The story, although science fiction, is of the individuals that must come to grips with who they were, who they are now, and what they will do, now that the end is almost inevitable.
Mr. Shute is very good at weaving a story even though it was more plausable when it was written over thirty years ago. But his real genius lies in the timeless account of the many individuals we are introduced to, and are slowly dying with. There is no real pain, only that which we each create as we live and eventually face death. This community is a mirror we see ourselves in, and the view may be eye opening indeed, for we are not out from under the nuclear dragon yet. A timeless tale.
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