Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-11% $7.99$7.99
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$7.19$7.19
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Martistore
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Follow the author
OK
A Canticle for Leibowitz Mass Market Paperback – June 1, 1984
Purchase options and add-ons
In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for humanity's rebirth from the ashes.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSpectra
- Publication dateJune 1, 1984
- Dimensions4.1 x 0.92 x 6.89 inches
- ISBN-100553273817
- ISBN-13978-0553273816
- Lexile measure1000L
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Get to know this book
What's it about?
In a post-apocalyptic world, monks secretly preserve the relics and writings of Saint Isaac Leibowitz, as the story spans centuries of ignorance, violence, and barbarism.Popular highlight
When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.169 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
‘Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.’150 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
‘You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.’147 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Angry, eloquent ... a terrific story.”— The New York Times
“An extraordinary novel ... Prodigiously imaginative, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all ... simply such a memorable story as to stay with the reader for years.”— Chicago Tribune
“An exciting and imaginative story ... Unconditionally recommended.”— Library Journal
From the Publisher
Watched over by an immortal wanderer, they witnessed humanity's rebirth from ashes, and saw reenacted the eternal drama of the struggle between light and darkness, life and death.
From the Inside Flap
In the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: the relics of the martyr Isaac Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred shopping list. They may provide a bright ray of hope in a terrifying age of darkness, a time of ignorance and genetic monsters that are the unholy aftermath of the Flame Deluge. But as the spellbinding mystery at the core of this extraordinary novel unfolds, it is the search itself--for meaning, for truth, for love--that offers hope to a humanity teetering on the edge of an abyss.
A timeless and still timely masterpiece, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic that ranks with Brave New World and 1984.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
In the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: the relics of the martyr Isaac Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred shopping list. They may provide a bright ray of hope in a terrifying age of darkness, a time of ignorance and genetic monsters that are the unholy aftermath of the Flame Deluge. But as the spellbinding mystery at the core of this extraordinary novel unfolds, it is the search itself--for meaning, for truth, for love--that offers hope to a humanity teetering on the edge of an abyss.
A timeless and still timely masterpiece, "A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic that ranks with "Brave New World and "1984.
"From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
At last he broke the hinges, and the lid fell free. Small metal tidbits bounced from trays, spilled among the rocks, some of them falling irretrievably into crevices. But, in the bottom of the box in the space beneath the trays, he beheld--papers! After a quick prayer of thanksgiving, he regathered as many of the scattered tidbits as he could, and, after loosely replacing the lid, began climbing the hill of debris toward the stairwell and the thin patch of sky, with the box hugged tightly under one arm.
The sun was blinding after the darkness of the shelter. He scarcely bothered to notice that it was sinking dangerously low in the west, but began at once to search for a flat slab on which the contents of the box could be spread for examination without risk of losing anything in the sand.
Minutes later, seated on a cracked foundation slab, he began removing the tidbits of metal and glass that filled the trays. Most of them were small tubular things with a wire whisker at each end of each tube. These, he had seen before. The abbey's small museum had a few of them, of various size, shape and color. Once he had seen a shaman of the hill-pagan people wearing a string of them as a ceremonial necklace. The hill people thought of them as "parts of the body of the god"--of the fabled Machina analytica, hailed as the wisest of their gods. By swallowing one of them, a shaman could acquire "Infallibility," they said. He certainly acquired Indisputability that way, among his own people--unless he swallowed one of the poison kind. The similar tidbits in the museum were connected together too--not in the form of a necklace, but as a complex and rather disorderly maze in the bottom of a small metal box, exhibited as: "Radio Chassis: Application Uncertain."
Inside the lid of the carrying case, a note had been glued; the glue had powdered, the ink had faded, and the paper was so darkened by rusty stains that even good handwriting would have been hard enough to read, but this was written in a hasty scrawl. He studied it intermittently while emptying the trays. It seemed to be English, of a sort, but half an hour passed before he deciphered most of the message:
CARL--
Must grab plane for [undecipherable] in twenty minutes. For God's sake, keep Em there till we know if we're at war. Please! try to get her on the alternate list for the shelter. Can't get her a seat on my plane. Don't tell her why I sent her over with this box of junk, but try to keep her there till we know [undecipherable] at worst, one of the alternates not show.
I.E.L.
P.S. I put the seal on the lock and put TOP SECRET on the lid just to keep Em from looking inside. First tool box I happened to grab. Shove it in my locker or something.
The note seemed hasty gibberish to Brother Francis, who was at the moment too excited to concentrate on any single item more than the rest. After a final sneer at the notewriter's hasty scrawl, he began the task of removing the tray-racks to get at the papers in the bottom of the box. The trays were mounted on a swinging linkage which was obviously meant to swing the trays out of the box in stair-step array, but the pins were rusted fast, and Francis found it necessary to pry them out with a short steel tool from one of the tray compartments.
When Brother Francis had removed the last tray, he touched the papers reverently: only a handful of folded documents here, and yet a treasure; for they had escaped the angry flames of the Simplification, wherein even sacred writings had curled, blackened, and withered into smoke while ignorant mobs howled and hailed it a triumph. He handled the papers as one might handle holy things, shielding them from the wind with his habit, for all were brittle and cracked from age. There was a sheaf of rough sketches and diagrams. There were hand-scribbled notes, two large folded papers, and a small book entitled Memo.
First he examined the jotted notes. They were scrawled by the same hand that had written the note glued to the lid, and the penmanship was no less abominable. Pound pastrami, said one note, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma. Another reminded: Remember--pick up Form 1040, Uncle Revenue. Another was only a column of figures with a circled total from which a second amount was subtracted and finally a percentage taken, followed by the word damn! Brother Francis checked the figures; he could find no fault with the abominable penman's arithmetic, at least, although he could deduce nothing about what the quantities might represent.
Memo, he handled with special reverence, because its title was suggestive of "Memorabilia." Before opening it, he crossed himself and murmured the Blessing of Texts. But the small book proved a disappointment. He had expected printed matter, but found only a handwritten list of names, places, numbers and dates. The dates ranged through the latter part of the fifth decade, and earlier part of the sixth decade, twentieth century. Again it was affirmed!--the contents of the shelter came from the twilight period of the Age of Enlightenment. An important discovery indeed.
Of the larger folded papers, one was tightly rolled as well, and it began to fall apart when he tried to unroll it; he could make out the words RACING FORM, but nothing more. After returning it to the box for later restorative work, he turned to the second folded document; its creases were so brittle that he dared inspect only a little of it, by parting the folds slightly and peering between them.
A diagram, it seemed, but--a diagram of white lines on dark paper!
Again he felt the thrill of discovery. It was clearly a blueprint!--and there was not a single original blueprint left at the abbey, but only inked facsimiles of several such prints. The originals had faded long ago from overexposure to light. Never before had Francis seen an original, although he had seen enough handpainted reproductions to recognize it as a blueprint, which, while stained and faded, remained legible after so many centuries because of the total darkness and low humidity in the shelter. He turned the document over--and felt brief fury. What idiot had desecrated the priceless paper? Someone had sketched absentminded geometrical figures and childish cartoon faces all over the back. What thoughtless vandal--
The anger passed after a moment's reflection. At the time of the deed, blueprints had probably been as common as weeds, and the owner of the box the probable culprit. He shielded the print from the sun with his own shadow while trying to unfold it further. In the lower right-hand corner was a printed rectangle containing, in simple block letters, various titles, dates, "patent numbers," reference numbers, and names. His eye traveled down the list until it encountered: "CIRCUIT DESIGN BY: Leibowitz, I.E."
He closed his eyes tightly and shook his head until it seemed to rattle. Then he looked again. There it was, quite plainly:
CIRCUIT DESIGN BY: Leibowitz, I.E.
The name was written in a clear feminine hand, not in the hasty scrawl of the other notes. He looked again at the initialed signature of the note in the lid of the box: I.E.L.--and again at "CIRCUIT DESIGN BY. . ." And the same initials appeared elsewhere throughout the notes.
There had been argument, all highly conjectural, about whether the beatified founder of the Order, if finally canonized, should be addressed as Saint Isaac or as Saint Edward. Some even favored Saint Leibowitz as the proper address, since the Beatus had, until the present, been referred to by his surname.
"Beate Leibowitz, ora pro me!" whispered Brother Francis. His hands were trembling so violently that they threatened to ruin the brittle documents.
He had uncovered relics of the Saint.
Excerpted from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Copyright (c) 1959 by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Excerpted by permission of Bantam Books, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Product details
- Publisher : Spectra; . edition (June 1, 1984)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0553273817
- ISBN-13 : 978-0553273816
- Lexile measure : 1000L
- Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.1 x 0.92 x 6.89 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #45,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #476 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #742 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
- #1,075 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The book is a product of its time period. In 1954 the U.S. had completed the nuclear test on Bikini Atoll with a hydrogen bomb that yielded 14.8 megatons. The Soviets followed in 1955 with a 1.6 megaton test. In 1959 the Cold War was heating up. The two superpowers were racing towards mutual destruction.
Each of the three stories that comprise A Canticle for Leibowitz, take place approximately 6 centuries apart, at the Abbey of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, located in the American Southwest.
The first third of the book introduces us to the world that is left after the “Flame Deluge”, which was the nuclear war that laid waste to civilization. The Jewish weapons engineer, Leibowitz, founds a Roman Catholic monastery for the purpose of safeguarding and preserving human knowledge.
There is a lot of Latin in the story, which adds to the story, but does not detract from the story, if you just skip over those parts.
The second section takes place in the 32nd Century and shows humanity struggling to emerge out of the dark ages.
The third and last section takes place in the 38th Century. Humanity is again in full technological brilliance and seems ready to give the Earth another nuclear war.
Miller does a wonderful job of creating this world with believable characters. The story is dark, with pessimism, but there is also hope and optimism woven in. He examines art, society, the nature of war, the right to life, and euthanasia. This is not your ordinary science fiction story. There is much moral philosophy. It is a deep read, but not one to struggle through. The story carries you along. I highly recommend it.
The tale itself is bi-apocalyptic, in and of itself filling a very sparsely populated niche. Beginning with Francis, a young applicant to the Brotherhood of the Order of Leibowitz, fasting and praying in the post nuclear war ruins of what had 600 years earlier been the United States, and subsequently stumbling upon an intact fallout shelter, a story spanning many centuries unfurls. Technology reawakens, Lucifer in nuclear form begins once more to stalk the earth.
William Miller Jr. published his only novel (the sequel to Canticle was not written by Miller) in 1959. The date is important for context. The Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the closest that mankind ever came to nuclear annihilation, was a mere three years in the future. The threat of nuclear war was pervasive, a common topic in magazines as popular as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report was the building of fallout shelters; every major U.S. city had designated underground shelters for civilians stocked with olive drab square five gallon tins containing water, medical supplies, and survival biscuits that tasted something like a cross between dust and graham crackers. Virtually every school routinely went through nuclear war drills, in which the Civil Defense sirens would go off, the students would "duck and cover" under their desks to wait until the all clear signal was given. Daytime images of Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the lectern and saying "We will annihilate you" merged in my mind with the 2 AM growl and roar of the Strategic Air Command nuclear armed B-52's doing practice launches against the USSR from nearby Beale Air Force Base. Few books, if any, have captured the ubiquitous dread of those years as well as Miller's.
At the same time, the Catholic Church with its pre-Vatican II liturgy in full Latin throat, was at a peak in terms of mystery and majesty, long before its loss of priest and nun vocations, long before what atheist Christopher Hutchens refers to as the Church's "No Child's Behind Left policy" become a scourge of the Church's image. Miller's depiction of postulant training, the role of the Church in the preservation of pre-apocalyptic knowledge (including the mysterious sacred relic from St. Leibowitz himself that reads "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels"), and the Church's role in trying to preserve the gentle candle light of the soul side by side with the eyeball frying arc welder light of technology is mesmerizing, nuanced, and yes, brilliant, hearkening back to the role of the Church as protector and promoter of knowledge during the Dark Ages. If there is much that is dated (and there isn't much) about this tale, it is the idea of the contemporary Catholic Church as a beacon in the age of intellectual darkness.
There are other sci-fi tales that eschew space opera and military hardware to examine the role of religion in an age of nearly omnipotent technology, e.g. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow , a gentle but provocative tale of the Jesuits privately financing an expedition to make first contact with a nearby alien civilization. But there is something special in the intensity of the technology versus science duel in Canticle for Leibowitz, the awkward waltz that results when the two ways of knowledge WANT to dance, but can't avoid treading each other's toes into pulp. I suspect the articulate, profound, and tragic conversation on the topic is a direct reflection of William Miller Jr.'s own trichotomy: an excellent scientist, a man of liberal arts education, a person of great religious passion. It was no small struggle for Miller to resolve, who eventually took his own life.
Miller's quest in this book, though, is not to give us one more iteration of the potential conflict between science and religious faith (though he does address this), it is a bigger fish, maybe a Leviathan, that is at the core of his search: does the very nature of being human condemn us to endless cycles of destruction and redemption. Poignant, haunting, and uncommonly accurate in depiction, A Canticle for Leibowitz functions as a sort of Hubble Space Telescope turned towards the surface of the Earth, rather than towards the stars, with the resulting images no less spell-binding. Bravo, William Miller, Jr., and thanks for the gift you bequeathed to us.
Miller instantly drops the reader into a bleak, post-apocalyptic world of the distant future in which civilization is once again primitive and radioactive mutants roam the earth. The reader slowly learns more about the story’s first protagonist, Brother Francis, a thoughtful young man and aspiring member of the Order of Leibowitz, as he discovers sacred artifacts in the desert - bits of a preserved notebook that survived the nuclear war that ravaged the Earth centuries ago. The religious order that Francis belongs to venerates scientific knowledge, and its members have eagerly dedicated their lives to seeking out and preserving documents that weren’t destroyed in the “Age of Simplification” (read the book and this part will make more sense). The story moves slowly after Francis’ discovery, but Miller gives the reader excellent descriptions of the desolate world and developing society of the novel.
As soon as his readers think they’ve got a grip on the story, Miller yanks them forward in time (about six centuries, to be exact). From there, Miller introduces completely new characters and skillfully builds on what happened in the first part of the story. The new protagonists, Hannegan,Thon Taddeo, and Dom Paulo are believable, dynamic characters that exemplify the conflict between the church, which is derived from the Order of Leibowitz, and the state (sound familiar?). The vivid descriptions of the setting and the convincing characters created by Miller make this portion of the novel an easy read, for the most part.
Again, once the reader thinks he understands where the story is headed, Miller shoves him forward another six centuries into the futuristic Space Age. Atomic Bombs have been developed and overproduced by the two remaining world powers, and the threat of nuclear war is all too real. But, you get the drill: more characters, similar conflicts on larger scales, and the same themes: time, power, and recurrence. Though this part of the novel is well constructed, it’s much more emotionally impactful. Miller succeeds in grasping the reader's attention while, simultaneously, unnerving them with his dark vision of the future. It reminded me an awful lot of the movie Wall-E, minus the goofy, sentient robots, in that its depiction of the human race and our lack of foresight made me feel somewhat ashamed. Miller’s dystopian society of the future is heavily exaggerated, but his criticisms of the direction of contemporary society are clear, and to some degree, accurate.
Miller’s story not only commanded my attention, but made me consider human behavior and our responsibilities as individuals in an advanced society. For this reason alone I would recommend this book to anyone that loves to learn from literature.
BUT, if I were to give Miller one point of advice, it would be to eliminate the extra drama that is insignificant to the story and the novel’s purpose - it made the book boring and difficult to read at times. For example, when characters were locked in religious arguments that included lots of obscure terminology and references to even more obscure fictional events, I became annoyed and wanted to put the book down.