Mark Bragg warns his brother, Randy Bragg, that he believes nuclear war is coming son. Mark sends his wife and two children down to live with Randy in Fort Repose in Florida, which seems to be a relatively safe place in the face of nuclear attack.



Not long after his guests have arrived, the bombs come down. From then on, Fort Repose, cut off from the rest of the world, must find a way to become self-efficient, and Randy finds that he has become a leader. A new way of life springs up, where people huddle around a small radio for news on the war and save their food and wonder about the possibility of radiation.



Randy has many problems to tackle in his mini-civilization, including bands of criminals known as highway men, hunger, and sicknesses without medicines to cure them.

I loved reading about all the ways that Randy solves the problems. Books based on pure survival always intrigue me - I like the way the characters come up with interesting ways to use everything they have. It's like a multicharactered version of "Castaway" minus the island and the volleyball. Also, the regression of the town into a little trading society is interesting to read about.

I felt like I had everything after I read what they went through.

Pat Frank is the pen name of Harry Hart. He wrote more than one book that relates to nuclear effects and government.

It is just very entertaining to read.

Here are some quotes I liked:



"...he cursed man's scientific devilishness in inventing H-bombgs and supermarkets, cursed Mark, and swore he would rather starve than endure this again."



"Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies."



"It was strange that a Negro could be an officer and a gentleman and an equal below Parallel Thirty-Eight, but not below the Mason-Dixon line."



"Within the pillar and the cloud, fantastic colors played. Red changed t orange, glowed white, became red again. Green and purple ropes twisted upward through the cloud.

The gaudy mushroom enlarged with incredible speed, angry, poisonous, malignant. It grew until the mushroom's rim looked like the leading edge of an approaching weather front, black, purple, orange, green, a cancerous man-created line squall."



"...yesterday was a past period in hiostry, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Rome's. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else...So one strange on the roadside meant nothing, particularly with a blinded child, his blood kin, dependent on his mission. With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan."



"Some nations and some people melt in the heat of crisis like fat in the pan. Others meet the challenge and harden."



"They created and lived in an environment of paper profits, and when paper returned to paper they had to kill themselves, not realizing that their environment was unnatural and artificial."



"The economics of disaster placed a penalty upon prejudice. The laws of hunger and survival could not be evaded, and honored no color line. A back-yard hen raised by a Negro tasted just as good as the gamecocks of Carlton Hawees...There were two drinking fountains in Marine Park, one marked "White Only," the other "Colored Only." Since neither worked, the signs were meaningless."



" "The world changes...People don't..." "



"...man was a naturally gregarious creature and they were all starved for companionship and the sign of new faces...Man absorbed strength from the touch of his neighbor's elbow...faith had not died under the bombs and missiles."

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Created Feb 22, 2003 at 12:14pm • Submit your own review...