Geisingermedicallabs.com Review:
Geisinger Medical Laboratories: Dedicated to Laboratory Excellence - Geisinger Medical Laboratories. Dedicated to laboratory excellence, patient safety, quality assurance, service improvement.
Country: North America, US, United States
City: 17822 Danville, Pennsylvania
- Norman L. Mooney "Veganscream" - I love the size of product and amount of storageI love this little hard drive as it fits conveniently into my Pelican laptop case. I bought this one because I had a 500gig Seagate that has lasted me for years and is a great product. I wanted to free it up so I purchased this one. I didn't realize I needed to plug this one into an AC outlet but that was my oversight. Otherwise, this product is not much bigger than my old one so that is a big plus.
- Jeanne Ball "mountain girl" - bean bagWhat's all the fuss about the taste! Don't people know how to doctor the taste? Just add a few dates or a banana, cardamon and blend it. It's fine. Sometimes I also add cashew butter. If you soak the dates overnight, they blend faster.
- Dr Tariq Mudassar - `Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it'An unexplained cataclysm. A barren landscape. The Man and the Boy trudging along the Road. They have no names. These do not matter anymore. The clocks stopped at 1.17. That is all we know. The ruined world has long been plundered. Tinned food and good shoes are the ultimate aspiration. Many have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: 'Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances ... and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each'. Every night, the Man and the Boy leave the Road to hide amongst the dead trees until the morning. Then they continue to push their salvage in a shopping trolley.
But this is also the story of a father and his young son. The mother has already committed suicide, soon after she gave birth: `She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.' If caught, they will both be slaughtered and eaten. The father plans to shoot his son with the pistol if that were to happen. They trudge slowly through the grey nuclear winter, `like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world'. They make hidden campfires, explore ruined houses, survive on shrivelled apples. They sleep beneath filthy tarpaulins. Occasionally, the father remembers images from a lost world. Smells. Colours. Relationships. But these are distant memories. What awaits father and son is a metaphysical hell: 'The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true'. One night, the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, and he weeps, not about the obvious but about goodness and beauty, 'things he'd no longer any way to think about'. But the obvious is still there. For those on the outside looking in. The son does not truly understand and this adds to the poignancy. His innocence comes through in his questions:
Can I ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
In response, the father's words are at once distressing and comforting. At another place, the father says simply: 'My job is to take care of you'. The father's extraordinary love and tenderness is harrowing because of the unavailability of sustenance, shelter and social contact. And yet the father depends on the son too. When floored by weakness and despair, he sees his son 'standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle'. But still they carry on: 'No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you'.
This is the devastating world of unrelenting anguish that McCarthy paints in this remarkable novel. The desolation is complete, the despondency all-consuming, the pain achingly unbearable: 'The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees.' And yet, you will read on. Set piece after set piece, mesmerised by the events that unfold. No chapters. No crucial apostrophes. No hiatuses. No time to catch breath. Till the shattering climax which you hope will never happen, but know deep down is inevitable. The son calls out the father's name again and again, but we do not hear it. Nameless they remain. The climactic event will leave you feeling exhausted after the events that have preceded it. The Road is a masterpiece of fictional prose and an emotional tour de force. It is both bleak and exhilarating. It is an eschatalogical novel of transforming power whose story will leave its lingering, haunting, agonising footprints etched indelibly on the memory. It is a terse cautionary tale of consummate misery, and would remain so were it not for its stunning, savage, heartbreaking beauty.
Frank Kapka once said that `the purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.' This is nothing short of Parnassian brimstone.