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Sep 20, 2011

Stephen rated it:

Odd as it sounds, this is hot toddy, warm blanket comfort food for me. Admittedly, that’s not the typical description of this cynical, bleak-themed, post-apocalyptic SF classic. However, the easy, breezy style with which Miller explores his melancholy material manages to pluck smiles from me whenever I pick it up. This go around, I listened to the audio version which was recently released it was as mood brightening an experience as my previous read through.

Despite dealing with dark, More...

31 comments like (62 people liked it)

Apr 27, 2008

D_Davis rated it:

A Canticle for Leibowitz is Walter M. Miller's post-apocalyptic science fiction masterpiece. It is wholly unlike any post-apocalyptic book or film I have ever read or seen. It is not populated with disparately armored road-warriors fighting for gasoline, or mutant-monsters blood-thirsty for human flesh, or clans of horsemen waging war on one another in barbaric and violent fashions. While there are rumors and mumblings of these sorts of actions and cliche, Leibowitz is, smartly, devo More...

16 comments like (47 people liked it)

Apr 26, 2009

Manny rated it:

I'm not a Christian, but I live in a Christian society, and it's all around me. Reviewing on Goodreads brings home how many authors can be classified as some kind of Christian apologist. I have very different reactions to them. At one end, I can't stand most of C.S. Lewis - I feel he's there with his foot in the door trying to sell me something, and I'm just hoping that I can get him to take his foot away without being openly rude. At the opposite end, I think Dante is a genius, and that The Div More...

12 comments like (43 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2008

Aerin rated it:

A Canticle for Leibowitz is Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s only novel. He was an Air Force engineer who was involved in the WWII bombing of an Italian monastery. Later, he converted to Catholicism, wrote this book, and eventually committed suicide.

Given the context of Miller's life, it's difficult to believe he could have written any other story. Canticle is a millennium-spanning, quietly epic novel that addresses mankind's constant cycle of self-destruction, barbarism, renaissance, and More...

2 comments like (35 people liked it)

Oct 14, 2010

Jon rated it:

Excellent weekend spent pondering man, God, science, religion, death, life, despair and hope. Miller's award winning novel stands the test of time (over fifty years now) and justifiably deserves to be continuously in print.

So many questions to ponder, presented through Miller's monastic brothers preserving the last scraps of our civilization and an undying Jewish hermit (assumedly the Wandering Jew of legend) searching for Him who said 'Come forth!' Never once did I feel preached More...

6 comments like (8 people liked it)

Nov 29, 2011

Simon rated it:

"Nature imposes nothing on you that Nature doesn't prepare you to bear" quoth the abbot Zerchi in the final part of this book, not long before we are to find out humanity, in contrast, seems quite capable and determined to impose on its self that which it is not prepared to bear.

Are we in an endless cycle in which we build up and then destroy our civilization in our relentless attempt to restore our place in Eden? In our dark ages must he church gather and protect knowledge a More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jun 18, 2008

Sandi rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Sep 16, 2011

mark rated it:

bleak themes with a light touch. although not an easy book to get into, once i realized the effort was a worthy one, it became an increasingly absorbing read. the structure in particular was interesting, challenging - and distancing. novels with religion at their core are often absorbing to me personally, and this novel is all about the impact of religion on the building and rebuilding of society. i appreciated the humanist values and found myself agreeing with the at times progressive, other ti More...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Oct 11, 2011

♥ Cheshire Catt ♠ rated it:

Some really good stuff here in this one. In its simplest form you can say it is a story with the theme of "history will repeat itself" and that it is a cautionary tale against nuclear weapons. Written in three distinct chunks we learn the history of several hundred years as the world recovers from one nuclear world war - rebuilds itself - and then falls again in another war. This is all told from the point of view by monks of the Leibowitz order who formed shortly after the first wa More...

6 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 01, 2007

Dave rated it:

I remember reading an old first edition paperback as a teen and having my cousin's confirmation teacher disapprove of it. Want to make a curious teen read something? Act scandalized by it. Anyway, it kind of blew my world and acted as a sort of seed that bloomed into a giant agnostic blossom in my brain years later.I was excited, but a little fearful when it was reprinted a few years ago because I hadn't read it since my early teen years. It was like going to meet a friend that you had lost con More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 02, 2008

Dustin rated it:

Yeah, its preachy. Yeah, most of the plot happens off the page. Yeah, its light on action and heavy on a secular vs. religious debate. But it has a two-headed woman and an immortal Jew, medieval warfare AND rocket ships. Dude.

Also, I liked the structure. Supposedly the three sections were different novellas that Miller linked together to form this novel, which gives it a stop-and-go sensation that he uses to good effect in spanning over a thousand years of story, dropping and pickin More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jan 14, 2009

Erica rated it:

Hauntingly beautiful. I loved the cyclical nature of the world. Death, rebirth and ultimately destruction occurring over a plodding time frame, where each life is a drop in the bucket of generations.

I enjoyed the book because it dealt with a future of nuclear annihilation. Most stories dealing with fallout seem to focus on the aftermath, with people who still remembered a different life, life before the holocaust. In A Canticle for Leibowitz the flame deluge is a distant memory reme More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Yael rated it:

Where do I start? A Canticle for Liebowitz, first published in 1960, is one of the greatest English-languge novels. I first read it the year after it was introduced to the public, when I was 16, and it drove home an understanding of just what global nuclear war was likely to do to the world. Somber, heart-wrernching, the novel is nevertheless written with wry, sardonic humor that counterbalances the horror of what has happened to the world . . . until it dawns on the reader that what is sardo More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 31, 2008

Nicholas rated it:

With all the dystopic literature coming out of the collective 20th century psyche of post-Hiroshima anxiety and the realization that as of now we, literally, can 'bomb ourselves back to the stone age,' Walter Miller's contribution runs with that very idea and tosses you into a world at once both familiar and foreign. Through three successive time periods spanning some 1,000 odd years from the 26th century onwards, Miller's protagonist becomes the all-observing spectre of time as the reader More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 02, 2008

Tedb0t rated it:

I read this immediately following another well-known 1950s apocalyptic / nuclear holocaust novel "Alas, Babylon." That book, which I gave 4 stars to, was an excellent story and made no pretensions to literature; its prose was plain and transparent. The novel in question, "A Canticle for Leibowitz," turned out to be one of the most irritating kinds of genre sci-fi: one with ambitions to beauty and importance that falls far short of the mark.

Now, I hate to put it More...

2 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jun 15, 2008

Rob rated it:

Without a doubt, A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the classic post-apocalyptic novels. That it strikes so mercilessly at so many of our deepest fears, it is no wonder the tale has held up well over time. There is a fantastic interplay here of innocence vs. corruption, of reason vs. faith and intuitions, of hope vs. despair... The novel was significantly more emotional and gut-wrenching than I'd expected.

The novel is certainly worthy of a thoughtful and detailed review but I fear More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2008

Eli rated it:

Though told through the lens of the Catholic Church as it survives centuries after nuclear holocaust, this book is less about faith and more about human reason as it clashes with the forces of xenophobia, greed and ignorance.

We see a picture of the church as a giant institution, slow to change and long to deliberate, and an order of scholarly monks who sometimes bump against this inertia. Within the order are disparate personalities kept together by the code they've adhered to and t More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 23, 2011

Ron rated it:

Excellent story, well told--in the didactic style typical to early SF. Despite it's late-1950s origin, the science fiction holds up well. (Modern authors take note: it is possible to avoid glaring technical errors even if your crystal ball is cloudy.)

Younger readers may not appreciate the fullness of the text because Miller could assume a level of reader literacy about things Christian--especially Catholic--which may no longer be true.

"Benjamin" was cute, but un More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 02, 2009

Melanie rated it:

Three novellas make up this sci fi classic, that is as much about religion as science. In fact, it's probably the most sympathetic to organized religion of any sci fi book I've ever read, addressing questions of the course of science when it's not tied to any moral or ethical structures. That makes it sound boring, and it's actually a pretty lively read.

Walter Miller was in the air force during World War II. He was in the squad that bombed Monte Casino in Italy, the destruction of wh More...

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 05, 2008

Brandon rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 09, 2008

Nicolas rated it:

J'ai donc terminé ce bouquin, qui nous raconte l'histoire de l'ordre de St-Leibowitz, de sa fondation à sa fin.
Il s'agit clairement là de SF classique, par son thème et son
traitement. Par son thème tout d'abord, car il est avant tout question dans ce roman des conséquences de l'usage de l'arme atomique. Dans son traitement ensuite, car il me semble avoir déja vu bien des histoires traitant de ce thème.
Pour être honnête, je trouve ce roman plutôt bon, mais seulement pour son épo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 24, 2008

Werner rated it:

Following the destruction of 20th-century civilization in a nuclear war, Jewish nuclear scientist Edward Isaac Leibowitz converted to Catholicism and founded a monastic order charged with salvaging the books that record humanity's heritage of literature and knowledge. Though the novel opens centuries after his death, his influence lingers throughout it, as the Order of Leibowitz fulfills its mission (like their monastic predecessors after the fall of the Roman Empire) to preserve written cultur More...

7 comments like (7 people liked it)

Mar 25, 2008

Sara rated it:

This is such a clever and well-crafted book. Brilliant and philosophically rich for anyone who loves sci-fi, especially post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi, medieval history (strangely enough), and history in general (in an academic sense - the preservation and intergenerational communication of knowledge and epistemology as a whole, the march of time and the accidents of cultural transmission). The premise hypothesizes a nuclear holocaust and a subsequent anti-intellectual fervor which decimate More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2009

Mr. Mike rated it:

This wonderful 1959 classic about the aftermath of a nuclear war is crammed with "history as the future" commentary. As happened at the end of the Roman Empire, monks gather and store the remnants of civilization during the new Dark Age. The Order of Saint Leibowitz the Engineer in the Utah desert is the guardian of the saintly founder's blessed blueprint, sacred shopping list and the holy shrine of Fallout Shelter. The book is divided into three parts. Each of which is 600 years later More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2009

Patrick added it

I really enjoyed this book, at least the first two parts. Like the Foundation books, it's made up of three smaller novellas that each take place over a different period of time, hundreds of years apart. But instead of taking place in a galactic empire, it tells the story of a group of Catholic monks trying to make their way through life in a post-apocalyptic America.

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 25, 2008

Greg rated it:

Finally, a post-apocalyptic book that doesn't feature neo-cavemen cruising around on vehicles stolen from the set of Junkyard Wars! It reads as three short stories (which is a bit of a shock when the first one ends, if you don't know it's coming). I really enjoyed the gradual change in tone from warm to downright chilling as the book progressed. My only real gripe is the... ah... flying thing at the end (what?), but it does raise questions about what may have happened during the events preced More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 06, 2011

Zach rated it:

Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

First: this book is atrociously written. Painfully so.

Second: the only meaningful female character doesn't show up until page 275 or so.

Those two caveats aside, though, I really enjoyed this-how could I not, with such a ruthless indictment of humanity?

Some day I'll read this back-to-back with Deus Irae-there are some interesting parallels there r More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 26, 2010

Mike (the Paladin) rated it:

Interesting book (I say that a lot). I found myself wondering if he confused the legend of the "Wandering Jew", based on a scripture where Jesus asks Peter "what it is to him" if Christ wishes John to stay alive until He returns, therefore starting a legend that the Apostle John was still alive, with Lazarus whom Christ resurrected from the dead. Did he do it on purpose, or did he just confuse the two?

This is a sort of episodic future history of a post-apocalyptic More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 13, 2011

Nancy rated it:

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller[return][return]Mary Doria Russell wrote in the introduction,[return][return]"I am sufficiently fed up with my species to share Walter Miller's resigned amusement at this bleeding world, which would surely convince sentient vultures that God created it for them."[return][return][return][return]The priest kept wondering how it was possible for such a youth (not particularly intelligent insofar as he could determine) to manage to find occasions or More...

0 comments like

Mar 26, 2009

Cara rated it:

Picked this up by chance at a bookstore in Todos Santos, attracted by the promise of 'in the tradition of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.' I wouldn't say it's anything like those books. It does take place in the future, however, after a nuclear explosion pretty much ruins the earth. The books spans thousands of years as humanity rebuilds itself and is told from the points of view of various members of a monastery founded by a scientist called Leibowitz (though you never find out much More...

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