Rushing to Paradise - Hardcover

Ballard, J. G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031213164X ISBN 13: 9780312131647

Publisher: Picador USA, 1995

Synopsis

A slightly mad environmentalist named Dr. Barbara takes over a Pacific atoll and creates a utopian community, which quickly becomes a less than ideal place. By the author of Empire of the Sun.

About this title

About the Author:

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller `Empire of the Sun' won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His controversial novel `Crash' was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography `Miracles of Life' was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, `Extreme Metaphors', was published in 2012. J. G. Ballard passed away in 2009.

From Publishers Weekly:

In one of Picador's first hardcover titles, Ballard (Crash) offers another of his tautly imagined experiments with 20th-century pathology. Here he traces an environmental crusade from its media-driven invasion of a South Seas atomic test site to its establishment of an endangered species' sanctuary, to its metamorphosis into an atavistic cult. Ballard's futuristic characters are nearly always less individual personalities than mutating preoccupations, and this cast of environmental utopians who quixotically strand themselves to save an albatross colony is no exception. Sixteen-year-old Neil Dempsey, who is drawn into the expedition by the charismatic, inscrutable "Dr. Barbara" (Rafferty), is joined by a Hawaiian who dreams of an independent island kingdom, a Boston Brahmin missionary, an animal-rightist airline stewardess and a band of German eco-hippies. Amid Ballard's hallucinatory evocation of the island's native flora, imported endangered fauna and abandoned military and scientific installations, Dr. Barbara proves ready to sacrifice anything or anyone for her unstable cause, whether to the international media, the island jungle or her artificial paradise. Although the naive and uncertain Neil proves a comparatively weak narrative lens for Dr. Barbara and her spiraling projects, Ballard's story moves tensely along, an apocalyptic cautionary tale for the millennium.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 031213164X
• ISBN 13: 9780312131647
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238