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A Canticle for Leibowitz | 
 enlarge | Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.
Publisher: Bantam Spectra
Category: Book
List Price: $7.50
Buy Used: $0.42
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Avg. Customer Rating:  229 reviews
Sales Rank: 74920
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0553273817
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553273816
ASIN: 0553273817
Publication Date: June 1, 1984
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Condition: ACCEPTABLE with noted wear to cover and pages. Binding intact. May contain highlighting, inscriptions or notations. We offer a no hassle guarantee on all our items. Orders are generally shipped no later than next business day. We offer a no hassle gu
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Amazon.com
Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. --Paul Hughes
Product Description
In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine of the Fallout Shelter.
In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for humanity's rebirth from the ashes.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 224 more reviews...
 Sci-fi that isn't July 11, 2008
Do you know many science-fiction books that quote Latin? Where the heroes are monks and abbots? Where the protagonists argue over illuminated manuscripts? A Canticle for Leibowitz has an appeal well beyond science-fiction fans.
Too much of it shouldn't be given away, but the story takes place after a nuclear war and concerns the fight to preserve what is left of human literacy and knowledge. Of course, this is about the need for spirituality and wisdom to balance progress in scientific pyrotechnics. But A Canticle for Leibowitz is first and foremost an utterly convincing political fable, interwoven with a host of private adventures and tribulations. And while nuclear holocaust may sound less likely today than in the 1950s, what is astonishing is that this book hasn't aged a bit, that it has none of the technological and contextual faux pas that makes so much of science fiction dated.
Walter Miller wrote with authority, conviction and humour. His dialogue between churchmen is jaw-dropping in its veracity; I couldn't believe afterwards that he was never a priest or a novice. The novel's politics are as credible as they are subtle. Miller creates a reality in which you will find yourself completely immersed without wanting to leave it, however harsh it may be. My only quibble, in fact a major disappointment is that, incredibly, Walter Miller never wrote anything else.
 Read this book, impress your friends. June 25, 2008
Theme of this fifty-plus-year-old book -- written with some sardonic wit -- is what happens when nearly all recorded history is lost, and survivors have to reconstruct civilization almost from zero.
To me, the book is a "heads up" for today. With our indifference to past events that predicted and create threats we now face, we could be headed to chaos similar to the destruction Mr. Miller wrote about.
Incredible May 7, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is still incredible and incredibly prophetic 50 years after it was written. Monks try to preserve what is left of a culture after a nuclear war. The three sections of the novel each follow a different era in the history of the monastery. But in style and content-a science fiction story about a group of people trying to preserve knowledge after the fall of civilization told over several generations- is very much comparable to the Foundation series(also excellent). The main difference between these two stories is that the former is very much imbued with a Catholic worldview while the other has a more secular scientific perspective. Miller spend much of his own novel considering that worldview. One of the themes seems to be this:technological progress and moral progress are not synonymous. The same science that gave us all our modern wonders also gave us the capability to destroy it all in a nuclear war. Of course, the same could be said of the church. Perhaps that is Miller's one fault in the book. The church almost seems too perfect in this book. While Catholics believe Christ is perfect, that doesn't mean the church itself is always perfect(thought it is always guided by Christ to perfect itself). The same religion that gave us monks who preserved and revived learning also gave us the inquisition. In science, religion or any field, humans can make mistakes.
One of the great post apocalyptic novels May 3, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
If a man were only to write one novel in his lifetime, there are very few that could top this. This is a very disturbing, funny, and angry piece of writing. It takes place somewhere in the Utah high desert in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The abbey in the Utah desert preserves what is left of the "pre-deluge" knowledge of mankind and the technological secrets that led to the apocalypse of a Nuclear War. This is not only great science fiction, it is great modern literature. The storyline is easy to follow in itself but there are symbols and allegories lurking just underneath the surface of the prose and descriptive narratives that bring the reader back again to study this book. There is a lot of Latin and the tradition of the Catholic church as a refuge for knowledge is part of the book's central theme. What lies beneath is a morality play; the medieval mentality that technology and knowledge are some how dangerous secrets reemerges in the aftermath of the apocalypse. "Lucifer" will rise again-"lucifer" being technology-a kind of Frankenstein's monster.
The book moves through time and starts in the darkness of the post-apocalypse. A young initiate to the Utah Abbey is spending a hermitage in the desert and finds, through the help of a wandering pilgrim, an old fallout shelter. Inside the shelter he finds some notes that were written by a Jewish Engineer (the mythical founder of the Abbey) who was part of the military industrial complex. His shopping list from his wife "Pound pastrami, can of kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma," becomes a kind of secret, cryptic document and his engineering scribbles become an ancient, secret tome. There is a kind of dark humor here that shouldn't escape the reader. Censorship and suppression of knowledge by the church is a central theme and it is very important to grasp some of the significance of this when reading this novel for the first time.
As the novel jumps through time, there is theme throughout of the circularity of man's fate in the world. Through his discoveries and technological gains, mankind creates the seeds for his own destruction. This book is a profound meditation on the dark ages and the idea that scientific knowledge can be dangerous is the central theme. It is best for the reader to familiarize his or herself with some Latin phrases and it is good to read this book with a dictionary nearby. Underneath all of the prose are hidden messages and underlying thematic currents that are masterfully conceptualized and presented.
This was the author's only novel during his life time and it is an expansion of some of his short stories that he published in the Sci-Fi Zines' of the 50's. This is definitely a period piece and hearkens back to the cold war and the threat of nuclear war which hovered over that generation. It strikes a chord for me in that when I was living through the end of the cold war, I was convinced that the end of western civilization was an inevitability. I started reading "The Road" and it led me back to this novel which I had read in my college days. This is a book that should be visited again and again. Within its pages lies a wealth of knowledge, incredible symbolism and allegory and it is an angry, profound piece of post-apocalyptic writing. It stands on its own with novels such as the Beach & the Road. I recommend it for all readers who are interested in this literary genre.
The monks reawaken May 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The monks of Medieval times spent much of their life copying manuscripts in philosophy and theology that further generations would read, thus maintaining lost knowledge after the decline of Western civilization following the fall of the Roman Empire. Through their efforts and Islamic scholars classical Greek thought was introduced back into Europe and facilitated the reawakening of Europe.
Now a nuclear holocaust has put humanity back into barbarism, and the monks are keeping blueprints of circuit designs and they have no idea what they mean, and a recipe of items that do not exist anymore. As time progresses humanity once again civilizes itself and the new scientists are interested in the data kept by the monks. It doesn't take long for one of the scientists to become at odds with the monks with his speculations.
This is a classic, tragic tale of how the hubris of knowledge without the humility to use for a moral end will always bring disaster. Walter Miller was a disturbed figure, and it shows reading this. It was probably his mental disturbance that lead him to know so well the foibles of human beings and how easy it is to bring about destruction though ego thinly rationalized as good intentions.
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