Rushing to Paradise: A Novel - Softcover

Ballard, J. G.

3.33

843 ratings by Goodreads

9780312134150: Rushing to Paradise: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312134150 ISBN 13: 9780312134150

Publisher: Picador, 1996

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Led by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists wins control over a small atoll in the Pacific and sets up a utopian community. Breeding other threatened species and among themselves, these homesteaders slowly transform an Eden of their own into a much darker place. A savage send-up of environmentalism, feminism, and extremism of all sorts, Rushing to Paradise is also a brave new exploration of that strange territory J. G. Ballard has illuminated over the course of his career.

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About the Author:

J. G. Ballard is the author of numerous books, including Empire of the Sun, the underground classic Crash, Concrete Island, and The Kindness of Women. He is revered as one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of twentieth-century technology. His latest book is Super-Cannes. He 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.

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