The Passenger was the last novel Cormac McCarthy wrote before his death in June 2023.
I found it interesting that an author who is, perhaps, the best of his generation, and who wrote prolifically about the American West, chose to write about a deep sea salvage diver named Bobby Western, a man plagued by guilt over his father’s creation (the atomic bomb) and today’s America where soulless IRS agents and a government, unquestioned and unanswerable to anyone, stalks him over an inheritance granted him by his late grandmother, and a lawyer obsessed with the assassination of President John Kennedy.
These themes, along with McCarthy’s masterful writing, resonate with me because it’s my belief that post-Kennedy-assassination the United States changed profoundly and, in many ways, began to resemble its decades-long archenemy, the Soviet Union. I think it was Norman Mailer who wrote, “If you fight an enemy long enough you tend to become that enemy.” True. True.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“McCarthy returns with a one-two punch...a welcome return from a legend." —Esquire
Look for Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series.
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western…
Garreau’s book highlights the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies—and what it means to be human.
In this, the 21st Century, AI, cloning, robotics, mind-enhancing drugs, computer chip implants, and bio-engineering pose the stark alternatives of a real-life Utopia or a Brave New World where the very definition of what it means to be human comes into question. Collectively, these scientific breakthroughs will produce “the biggest change in 50,000 to our environment and ourselves as human beings".
Garreau has managed to put these complex concepts into everyday terms and anecdotes that lay people can understand and grasp the consequences of.
Taking us behind the scenes with today’s foremost researchers and pioneers, bestselling author Joel Garreau shows that we are at a turning point in history. At this moment we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetic, robotic, information, and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls. Radical Evolution reveals that the powers of our comic-book superheroes already exist, or are in development in hospitals, labs, and research facilities around the country–from the revved-up reflexes and speed of Spider-Man and Superman, to the enhanced mental…
To Hunt a Holy Man cuts across the cultural landscape of Vietnam and Thailand circa the 1960s when war raged and everyday Americans drafted into the army became acquainted with drugs, killing, and madness.
Fleeing circumstances impossible to bear, a US Army Catholic priest goes AWOL in search of spiritual fulfillment and a Buddhist monastic life far from death and the battlefield. Enter Fletcher’s protagonist, Mordechai Goodcut, tough, devoted to military discipline, cut off from human emotion, and charged with the pursuit and capture of the priest-deserter. The hunt for the Holy Man is on!
Who could know that Mordechai would, himself, embark on a spiritual journey that would change both of their lives forever?
"To Hunt a Holy Man brings to mind the likes of Graham Greene and Brian Moore. Readers will be moved by the depth of characterization and plot which is as intriguing as it is important." –Ron Felber, bestselling author of A Man of Indeterminate Value
Leaving the raw battlefields of Vietnam, To Hunt a Holy Man, cuts across the rich cultural landscape of Buddhist Thailand. Its characters are enmeshed in war-born adventure, danger, sexual encounters, and spiritual quests. Both Hunter and Holy Man have everything to win-but someone has to lose.
On the night of October 21, 1989, nine glowing objects appeared over an empty stretch of the Mojave desert—and turned a young couple’s quiet weekend into an unearthly nightmare of terror.
Elise and Tom Gifford were held captive in their camper by nonhuman creatures—and through love and prayer were able to survive physical and psychological torture as their captors manipulated their minds with telepathic power. The Watchers hovered over them for a day and night, bringing them to the brink of madness. Hours later they were alone again—alive but the nightmare wasn’t over!
