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The Death of Grass (Paperback)

by John Christopher (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Details

Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Sphere Books (May 26 1988)
ISBN-10: 0722122977
ISBN-13: 978-0722122976
Shipping Weight: 123 g

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Description

At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns out, the governments have been lying to their people. When the deadly disease hits Britain they are left alone, and society starts to descend into barbarism. As John and his family try to make it across country to the safety of his brother's farm in a hidden valley, their humanity is tested to its very limits. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

John Christopher is the pseudonym of Sam Youd, who was born in April 1922 in the village of Knowsley, near Liverpool. When he was aged ten, his family moved south to Hampshire, where he attended Peter Symonds' School, Winchester. Subsequently he has lived in London and Guernsey, and now lives in Rye.

He started taking writing seriously when, on leaving the army at the end of 1946, he was given an Atlantic Award by the Rockefeller Foundation. His primary target was the general novel, of which he eventually published ten. Additionally, under the stimulus of providing for a family which grew to include five children, he wrote genre novels - thrillers, light comedies, even a couple with a cricket background - under pen-names. As John Christopher, he wrote a series of books labelled "science fiction", including THE DEATH OF GRASS.

In 1966 he was asked to try writing for young people, and came up with the Tripods trilogy. He has since written many other children's books, including the Sword and Fireball trilogies and a "prequel" to the Tripods trilogy: WHEN THE TRIPODS CAME. His latest book, due for publication in 1993, is A DUSK OF DEMONS.

One children's book, THE GUARDIANS, received the Guardian Award in Britain, a Christopher Medal in the United States, and the Jugendbuchpreis in Germany. Except for DOM AND VA, all his books are still in print, in some cases after twenty five years.

The Tripods trilogy has been sold for publication in sixteen foreign languages, including Chinese, Russian, Malayalam and Babel.

John Christopher is married and has a son and four daughters, and four grand-children. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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5.0 out of 5 stars I love it when the world gets it!, Aug 30 2005

By	Jason Harris (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death of Grass (Paperback)

This isn't the latest book I've read but it is probably the best book I have read in a long time. It's a basic end of the world story. Some disease attacks plants of the grass family, eventually spreading across the whole world wiping out a pretty hefty portion of the world's food supply. So with no wheat and no rice things get a little tense, especially when all the livestock starve to death. And so it goes. All of it. And, like all such stories, there is a band of survivors seeking salvation; in this case a brother's natural fortress of a valley farm.

The action isn't particularly quick but I was on the edge of my seat pretty much the whole way through the book. It's not that it is suspenseful (I had figured the general shape of the story early on), it's how so normally some people approach this incredible disaster. Don't get me wrong, Christopher isn't a stilted writer and there are plenty of characters who act just like you would expect people to act in a whole-world-goes-belly-up situation. This story is about what happens when a bunch of people start thinking for themselves calmly and rationally about the titanic heap of crap they are in rather than wait for a festering mob of self-interested politicians to tell them what to do and that everything will be just fine. Then, these people start to act. They start tossing away social 'norms' like smelly old shoes as the situation worsens and brutality means survival. The protagonists don't actually become brutes themselves. They just figure out which brutal actions mean the difference between their next meal and going hungry. That's what kept me on the edge of my seat. The incredible tension that built up within and between characters as they consciously crawled down off the lofty moral peak of Western Civilisation into something less than barbarism, more or less intellectually intact. Christopher's writing delivers this tension right into your core.

Unlike my reviews, Christopher's descriptions aren't peppered with colourful simile and metaphor. They are crystal clear so that you really get the sense of the atmosphere. However, probably because he was writing in 1956, some events are kind of softened with contemporary euphemisms which kind of jolts the reader a little for their incongruity. But, it doesn't detract so much from the book as a whole and it's probably a better book for not having absolutely every detail of those events described with the same clarity as a grassless landscape. I enjoyed this book and will probably read it again.

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