Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Monday, 30 April 2007 | 408 readers so far
I’ve read Alas, Babylon several times over the years. It is always worth picking up again. Pat Frank writes with a distinct style that accurately captures life in 1950’s Florida.
His work starkly highlights how different our racial attitudes, sexual mores and cultural taboos have become since those days. The writing is entertaining, compelling and full of rich characters.
Perhaps most importantly, Frank was one of the first to chronicle a threat that is still with us, the threat of nuclear conflict. In Alas, Babylon, the threat is between superpowers. The bombs of that era pale in comparison to the bombs that exist today which only serves to make the imagined reality of life after nuclear war more sobering for a reader in the year 2007.
Frank knew what he was writing about because his real name was Harry Hart, and Harry Hart was a journalist, government consultant and ultimately a talented writer. I highly recommend spending an evening or two with survivors of Fort Repose, Florida. Alas, Babylon is one of those rare novels that completely transport me out of the room I’m in and into the author’s imagination.
1 May 2nd, 2007 at 9:50 am
kitanis says:
Good Book, read it first in my wanning days of Junior High back in the 1970’s. Have had a copy of it on my bookshelf ever since.
2 May 3rd, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Elizabeth says:
I agree with what you are saying, in the fact that it certainly is a good book and can lead you out of the room & into the author’s imagination. Also it allows us to look at the way our government functions and makes us more aware of what could possibly happen. For instance the Great Depression was also as stressful and the banks failed most of the time throughout the United States. So in the book when it says that Edgar Q. committes suicide, when the banks were going to fail and money no longer is the bartering system, then what would we do? Would we go back to the old days and try to get by with no electricity and no substance of currancy? I think that we probably would go back into the decades and see what worked then and try to use them today if that ever happened. I think the author’s ideas in the book Alas Babylon is very good in portraying this.
Anyhow if you haven’t red the book it is very good in making you think on what could happen. Trust me I never knew until I read it, what could possibly happen if the countries or even the world would go into nuclear warfare.
3 May 3rd, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Trevor says:
Elizabeth,
If a nuclear war happened in 2007, it would be much more damaging than Pat Frank’s imagined war of the 1950’s. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen. Globalization has made all the supply chains and infrastructure we rely on for our basic subsistence much more complex and vulnerable to attack. Our population is more urban and less rural. People who know how to live “off the land” are rarer.
Thanks for dropping by!