September 2007 Adult Education Class

on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, led by Bev Asbury

Wednesdays, September 5, 12, 19, and 26
7:00pm to 9:00pm
Common Room, UUFG
 
Surviving the End of the World
 
Cormac McCarthy's best-selling, award-winning novel The Road will be the centerpiece for reflections and discussions in a class led by Bev Asbury, member of UUFG and long-time reader of McCarthy's several novels.
 
The focus will be on the meaning of a world without people—on the depths of human loneliness, what daily life would be like, how the “ending” would come, and what survival would entail.
 
Registration Required  Enrollment will be limited. Contact Cam Pierce, office administrator, to register for the class, at 377-1669 or e-mail him at uuf@uuf.org 

Participants are asked to commit to attending all four class days if at all possible. This isn't the sort of class to just drop in on for one or two of the sessions. Rather, it's a class experience significantly deepened by continuity of discussion from week to week, with each participant able to refer back to material from previous weeks.
 
Please read or re-read The Road before September 5. Paperback copies retail for under $15.
 
Besides the important insights McCarthy offers in his own right, this class should also be good preparation for Marilyn Kershner's October Adult Religious Education class on global warming.
 
Note: We are presently planning to offer this class only at 7:00pm and not at 11:00am. However, if 10 or more people will commit to attending the four sessions at 11:00, we will offer the class at that time. Express this commitment to Cam before noon on Friday Aug 31.

One reviewer called The Road, " a tremendous achievement, multi-layered, yet with enough surface story to attract mainstream readers. It resonates with classic allusions, simple parables, endearing moments, aphorisms, even some old testament language . . . ."

Another wrote: "Every now and then, when we need reminding, a great writer shows us one possible future for our species if we continue on the path to self-destruction. In 1957, Nevil Shute gave us On The Beach, and now, 50 years later, Cormac McCarthy has given us an eloquent new version of the same cautionary tale. We didn't listen then. Perhaps we can learn something now. I have rarely been so moved by a work of literature. To call this the most important novel of 2006 is an understatement. Read it and weep. Read it and be uplifted. Just read it—before it's too late."

Publisher's Weekly gave the book a starred review, noting, "McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out."

Critic Daphne Durham wrote, "Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year.
The Road has been popping up an many "Best of 2006" lists. The book was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and might win the National Book Critics' Circle Award (it is among the five finalists).

Facilitator Bev Asbury says, "I am better off my work on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I understand him now far better and in greater depth than ever before.  I have long hoped that he would be awarded the Nobel for literature, and I am more than ever convinced that he deserves it."

Here is a rare opportunity to engage with an important book—and one of its more passionate and intelligent readers.