“Imagine civilization picking itself back up after almost total atomic annihilation. To that end, a group of monks in a monastery in the southwest US, founded by a scientist-turned-monk named Liebowitz, preserves as much information and as many books as possible while the remaining scraps of population turn its collective back on knowledge, so that when civilization is ready for another scientific awakening it won't need to start completely from scratch.
That's all well and good. My main problem with the book, however, is that it's WAY more Catholic than I am, to the point that much of it was lost on me. For example, most of the latin--and there was a LOT of latin--was untranslated, so I just hoped it wasn't important and skipped it. It could have been fascinating to learn about the reconstituted civilizations that sprang up post-halocaust; it could have been a partial follow-up to Earth Abides, though they were written by different people. Instead it stuck to a meme that we're all roughly familiar with, monastery life, while sticking too heavy to the Catholic bits. I assume that if one was Catholic it would mean more, but to me it was distracting.”
Collin T wrote this review Wednesday, October 1, 2008.
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