non-sports post- BOOK TALK!!!!!

one of the great tragedies of the american education system is that there is virtually no synergy between english and history classes in high schools. students who take u.s. history generally memorize a chronologically presented bucket of facts. i suppose that's the best way to avoid confusion; if people aren't going to learn anything meaningful anyway, then there's no reason to confuse them while they're in that process. let's not make that move.

so if you're lucky in this country, you get to read books like richard wright's native son, or maybe you got to read some steinbeck, or maybe you got to read something by upton sinclair. but chances are that your english teachers don't care to read books that are dominated by setting. i suppose that's fair; after all, we don't teach philosophy, latin, or any of the other things that make for well-rounded individuals, so literature classes really have to cover a lot of ground. but the whole process seems sad.

so when i finally got around to reading pat frank's alas, babylon!, i was 24. my memory of what happened in the 1940s and 1950s is now limited to a small sequence of historical facts that are loosely stored chronologically.


"let me see. there's world war II, patton, mussolini, yalta, the marshall plan, eisenhower and the cold war, baby boom, g.i. bill,"


i don't know anything about that time period. but after reading alas, babylon!, i learned something.


frank (or harry hart, depending on pseudonym fondness) writes of a u.s. that has been devastated by nuclear war. almost all of the major cities are destroyed by nuclear bombs, and thus there are areas in the country that suffer from nuclear fallout, which, as frank describes, is just as deadly as the bombs themselves.

to illustrate how tricky it would be to survive in such a u.s., frank creates a world in central florida where, despite bombings of orlando, tampa, miami, and jacksonville, there is no nuclear fallout (the characters keep referring to this as a 'lucky' event), and there is a relatively acceptable climate for survival. but survival is tough enough: since food won't keep (there's no electricity) and since food is scarce (agriculture isn't really going very well), people have to take measures to survive. as you might suppose, the measures are stark.

and of course, the book is made better by the enrichment of characters. self-actualization is a goal of almost every author, so we find the lead character, randy, a predictably flawed guy, in a situation where he has all kinds of information about the future but only a short time to act on it. helen, the wife of his brother mark, and her two kids are sent to live with randy, and he's not half the man that his brother is at the start, though at the end, he's pretty damn close.

so we enter a world, paralyzed by fear and desecration, where flawed characters need to survive and need to resurrect their survival skills from the past. danger is at every turn: whether it is radiation-filled jewelery, renegade bandits, or just random chance, we learn a little bit about what life might be like if things went south in this country quickly. and chances are, by reading this book, we might learn a little bit about our history too.

and if we're real lucky, we might just learn a little something about what it really means to survive.