About this title: Set in the future, this book portrays an England where human infertility has spread. By 2021 no babies have been born for 25 years - the aged are being driven to despair and suicide, the final generation are beautiful but violent and cruel and the middle-aged are trying to sustain normality.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: Book Club Edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780679418733ISBN:0679418733
Description: Good in very good dust jacket. Nice hard cover, lightly read, slight shelf wear to dust jacket, small marks on top edge, stk #2529o8. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780571168439ISBN:0571168434
Description: Good. Spine is smooth. Covers show wear at the edges and corners. Good reading copy. Binding is Trade Paperback. Pages beginning to tan. Used books may have price stickers. Most orders ship on the next business day. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Warner Books
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780446364621ISBN:0446364622
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Cover has light wear, spine is creased, pages are unmarked. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. 0446364622 This mass market paperback book is in between very good & good condition! ! FIRST EDITION! ! FULL NUMBER LINE 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1! ! ! Some creasing of the spine. Standard signs of wear from reading. SMOKE FREE HOME! Do not settle for worn, torn, throwaways. Pay a few pennies more for a nice copy! Different cover. read more
"Un libro che va letto, dai significati profondi e non facili da interpretare ad una prima lettura. Ambientato nel futuro 2021 è un libro che fa molto riflettere sul presente e sul passato. Improvvisamente la razza umana ha perso la capacita' di riprodursi, la fertilita'; è facile immaginare che con un tale prospetto, le speranze e i sogni dell'uomo vadano scomparendo: le persone più anziane danno il via a suicidi di massa, i più giovani tornano alla violenza e alle barbarie dei rituali di sangue. I più sono alla ricerca di piaceri immediati che possano riempire il vuoto lasciato dalla persa speranza.Se le pellicole di hollywood ci hanno ormai abituato ad immaginare ogni tipo di catastrofe che l'umanita' potrebbe trovarsi ad affrontare nel breve termine(nuove glaciazioni, meteore enormi che inesorabilmente puntano la terra, catastrofi nucleari) questo libro immagina invece una catastrofe lenta e inesorabile, che non termina nel giro di qualche mese, ma aspetta gli anni necessari affinche' anche la vita dell'ultima persona rimasta si spenga di naturale vecchiaia.Nota di disappunto sul finale(si P.D. James continua a non convincermi sui finali) lasciato al caso e all'indefinito: la narrazione si chiude bruscamente facendo supposizioni e collegamenti non affatto scontati o certi.Nel complesso un libro da consigliare ai riflessivi e agli amanti del genere catastrofico realista."
"I found this story dull. I almost stopped at several times but pressed on based on the high ratings of friends. It wasn't until the final chapter that I really cared what happened. However, I have a feeling the story & the message behind it will stick with me a VERY LONG time. So often we refer to a birth as the "miracle of birth" but how often do we really see it as a miracle. Modern medicine and technology has removed so much of the risk for so many people. But the fact that we are still able to have children at all is a miracle. If our world was plagued with an illness, possibly even unknown to us, that prevents insemination how long before we recognized the problem. I found it interesting that when the births in the story started to slow people thought it was a good thing, overpopulation and all. Would we too feel that proper birth control was at work until it was too late? Scary thought really.
I am finding it hard to rate this book. My initial thought was it's a 2 or 3 star. Boring book. But as I think about the ideas contained within it I feel the book deserves a much higher rating. Is it a 4 star or 5 star book? I'm still unsure & will probably waffle back and forth depending on my mood from here on out.
My first sentence of this review totally conflicts with my rating & I realize that. My feelings on this book morphed as I wrote the review to be honest. I've learned a valuable lesson that a dull story can be a moving story. I wasn't necessarily moved by the words, prose, or story-telling as much as the thoughts, feeling, fears & ideas it produced within me while reflecting upon it.
A must read for everyone! Just don't expect an action packed, read it on the edge of your seat kind of book"
"Though it's been sitting on my bookshelf for years (my wife's copy), and though I quite enjoyed the movie, I didn't get around to reading "The Children of Men" by P.D. James until recently. I found it to be an easy read, but enjoyable written. James has a nice command of the language and manages to put together fairly dense paragraphs that nonetheless don't bog the reader down. I read the book essentially in two sittings -- the first 100 pages on a plane, and the rest of it in an afternoon in a hotel room.
I went into the book knowing it was very different from the movie, so I was unsurprised by this fact, but it still bears repeating. There really is only a skeleton of James's vision in the final film. The premise: that humanity has endured roughly twenty years of sudden-onset, incurable sterility, is fascinating. James does a good job of painting a picture of an England in which personal and social freedoms are slowly being drained away, and very few people care. Even the protagonist - a character who is not fully likable but more human than many heroes - is caught up in the general ennui that, James seems to posit, stems from the need for a defense mechanism against the terrible knowledge of humanity's impending extinction.
Needless to say, his view is slowly changed as events unfold, culminating in a race against both time and the dictatorial English government. I found myself engrossed in the story and horrified by some of the things which occurred. Unlike the film, which literally starts with a bang, there is very little violence on display through the first half of the book. This makes the first instance of such - particularly given against whom the act is performed - supremely disturbing to both the reader and the protagonist. In effect the violence is more powerful because there is less of it. This continues throughout the book: the vast majority of atrocities being committed in the world, both inside and outside of England, are only hinted at. The violence we're allowed to see is deeply personal.
The novel unravels a bit near the end, in my opinion. Some decisions are made that seem to happen more for the convenience of the plot than for the characters. There is a gun with a single bullet prominently involved in the second half of the story, and there is very, very little doubt about who that bullet is intended for. Also, it becomes increasingly more heavy-handed in its Christian overtones, which isn't really my thing. Still, I enjoyed it quite a bit and highly recommend it."
"I wanted to love this book, I really did. I have a very large soft spot for the P.D. James mysteries that I'd read and Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of this book was beautiful, dark and easily the most wrenching apocalyptic film that I can think of. If only the source material lived up to the grandeur of the film.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a remarkably bleak book. It's set in the year 2021 and the last child born to humankind, twenty-five years previously, has just been killed. Somehow every person on the planet has been rendered infertile. Humanity is on track to becoming the sixth mass extinction in planetary history. Theo Faren is a history professor with no new undergraduates to instruct and a cousin who has become the absolute ruler of England. Hoping to make use of this connection, a ragtag group of idealists convince Theo to meet with his cousin in the hope that he can alleviate some of the crimes that are being committed against the less fortunate Britons. One thing leads to another and soon Theo finds himself safeguarding the first pregnant woman in a quarter of a century, trying to keep her from becoming a pawn in the power struggles between his cousin and the revolutionaries.
What a fantastic premise! How could you go wrong with this? I think that, had I read the book prior to seeing the film, I would have enjoyed this book far more. Yet where Cuaron painted a landscape falling into ruin and humans at one another's throats even as they fade into the long memory of history, James gives us empty churches and mad women raising kittens as children. Cuaron's gray and faded world is matched against James' impending eternal Spring, where the sun shines down on a green world recovering from the blight of humanity. Both are compelling views of a world facing a slow death and the sure knowledge that this is the last generation of humanity, but I think that I am just drawn more to the bleakness of the film than I am to James' portrayal."
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