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Jeremiah Tomines jeremiahtomines — I read this in the original German.

Rachelle Beardall rachellebeardall — I have struggled to decide what I think about this book, having to give it a couple of days before reviewing. In my mind, I have gone from rating it 3 stars to rating it 5 stars (finally ending up with a compromise of 4). It is beautifully written, terrifying, frustrating, infuriating at times. It called me on some of my basic beliefs, which was rather upsetting, but also to which I should tip my hat. This is a post-apocalyptic saga written in the late 1940s. The vehicle of the apocalypse is a disease which wipes out most of the world's population, and was apparently a strong influence for Stephen King in writing The Stand, given the many details that seemed to be directly ripped off from it (the secondary kill, the wind-up record players, preventing the mentally disabled from producing halfwit children, etc.). Our hero is Ish, a young male ecologist/geographer, who manages to overcome the disease because he had rattlesnake venom in his bloodstream at the time of infection. I related to him immediately--his tendency to observe rather than participate in society, his curiosity in seeing the disaster aftermath unfold (for which an old boyfriend claimed I was a terrible person; at least I know there is one other person like that out there, fictional may he be), and of course his profession. The beginning of the book was highly entertaining for me, as Ish gets his bearings in the new world, interspersed with poetic descriptions of what is happening biologically in the world, now that man's influence has been mostly removed. One of my favorite lines: "During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens." Great stuff! The story follows Ish over the decades as he finds a wife and starts a tribe of survivors. He wrestles with the wisdom and necessity of keeping up the old ways of civilization, as the children born to the tribe are increasingly resistant to them. After 20 years of a happy, simple life of scavenging canned food and lounging around, Ish starts to worry that his tribe will have no survival skills for when all the goods run out, and that maybe he should have enforced his reading and writing lessons more thoroughly. This is where my brain began protesting, for a couple of reasons: 1--I would have thought that as a scientist, Ish would have been less lazy about this, and extremely concerned about preserving all of the knowledge built up by humans over their tens of thousands of years of existence. Certainly, civilization has its downsides that could stand to be discontinued, but also in that knowledge base is contained information about past mistakes and successes that could guide the survivors in reestablishing their society. By not enforcing literacy in his tribe, Ish was dooming all of this gathered knowledge to obscurity, and making their lives unnecessarily difficult in the end. 2--I am not a social scientist by any means, but I found it incredibly difficult to swallow the survivors' rapid "de"-volution and ignorance of the very recent past. Sure, Ish asserted that the other survivors of his generation were not the brightest bulbs in the shed, but you would think that they would continue to read books to their children, educate them in some way, and tell them about the world prior to the disaster. By the time Ish was an old man (about 70 years post-disaster), the young people already thought he was a god, that the "Americans" created the Earth and the sun, and there was no longer any written language. I find this preposterous. Or maybe, I just do not WANT this to be the case. My other major, major problem with the book was its treatment of women. It was almost like reading the Bible, with how small a part they played and how they were regarded. They were for the most part empty-headed vessels expected to bear children. Even Ish's own wife, whom he commended for being courageous and peaceful, was dismissed as being stupid. The sharp, religion-refusing Jeanie was dismissed as being adorable and feisty. When pondering the future of the tribe and who might be its leader, Ish never even considers any of the daughters. It makes me wonder whether Stewart really was this dismissive of women (it was the 40s, after all), or if he really thought this is the way society would be after a disaster, reverting to its caveman days. In the end, Ish lets go of his preoccupation with maintaining the norms of our previous civilization and is at peace with the fact that humans will evolve and find their way, as they always have. Though I was still sore at the whole illiteracy thing, I had to admit that this was a well-fitting end.