Name: Alas, Babylon
ISBN: 9780062421036

Pat Frank

"Alas, Babylon." Those fateful words heralded the end. When a nuclear holocaust ravages the United States, a thousand years of civilization are stripped away overnight, and tens of millions of people are killed instantly. But for one small town in Florida, miraculously spared, the struggle is just beginning, as men and women of all backgrounds join together to confront the darkness.

A Novel

Alas, Babylon

The classic apocalyptic novel that stunned the world.

Tobias V. Langhoff

A nice read during the worldwide COVID-19 quarantine, this is an uplifting apocalyptic novel about the perseverance of the American spirit in the face of crisis. Although it shows its age a bit in its old-fashioned portrayal of the 1950s housewife, it still seems fairly progressive for its time in its handling of race and to some extent gender.

Janice Hopper

I listened to the audio version read by Will Patton. Patton really had the rhythms and inflections of Southern speech down well. He's an excellent narrator. 

The story is from the Bad Old Days of the Cold War. A nuclear exchange destroys many US cities but leaves Fort Repose, the novel's location, intact. They're not even seriously affected by fallout. The rest of the story is about the community's attempts to keep going after everything falls apart. 

I grew up in the 50s & 60s. I remember Conelrad radio frequencies (they were marked on the radio dials), "duck and cover", and the fear we all lived with. Those memories made parts of the book hard to listen to. But it's a fairly hopeful book on the whole, in spite of the "thousand years of darkness" the main character sees ahead at the end of the book. It also made me think of the movie "Testament", though the outcome in that film was much grimmer. (OMG, I sobbed &sobbed & sobbed when I saw it.)

A good book, a bit of its time. Women support the menfolk and don't have adventures. The main character is surprised when the African American boy on the farm next door comes over to take classes with the white kids. He ultimately decides that it's ok, but what a thing to worry about. O.o

I never read this before because I'm a bit squeamish about novels of nuclear war and it's aftermath. But it's a good story, read well by the narrator.

Alas, Babylon A Novel