In this September 23, 2019, video, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg chastised world leaders for failing younger generations by not taking sufficient steps to stop climate change. “You have stolen my childhood and my dreams with your empty words,” Thunberg said.
In The Road, a father and son traverse a bleak landscape after the apocalypse. The father knows he is dying. He knows they can’t survive another winter so they head south through California toward the coast. All of Cormac McCarthy’s great fiction is grim—All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. But no other book by McCarthy is so unremittingly grim as The Road. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adopted as a film in 2009.
This superb post-apocalypse novel compares well with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but is somehow less unremittingly grim. The protagonist Hig has survived the pandemic that killed everyone he knows. He lives in a small abandoned airport with his dog and one other man, a veteran sharpshooter. Then he finds a woman he loves.