Dan Rather

No one has asked, goodness knows, but as 2006 drew to a close, here's my pick for book of the year: Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

This is not one of your reporter's ventures far out on a limb; "The Road" has appeared on any number of year-end top-10 lists. In a year that saw the publication of so many important nonfiction books (Bob Woodward's State of Denial comes to mind, as do numerous others), perhaps my pick should be qualified as 'novel of the year' - but no, let it stand as book of the year, full stop.

The Road is, like any work of art turned out by an accomplished hand, impossible to summarise without referring to the thing itself. If its meanings could have been contained in a sound bite or a short pamphlet, then Mr. McCarthy would not have had to write the 241 pages that tell the story of a man, a boy and the road of the title.

Big subjects

That said, some of the things that the road is "about" are faith, humanity, God and the will to live. You could say that this is one book that does not shy away from the big subjects.

It is a philosophically heavy book, but the experience of reading it is anything but ponderous. That is because its weighty subjects are borne along by a narrative that is as hair-raising and compulsively page-turning as anything from the work of Stephen King: A man and his son fend for survival and brave endless dangers in a world seared by apocalypse.

The narrative never makes it explicit, but it seems clear enough from various hints that we are reading about some of the few survivors of a nuclear war. Town and countryside alike are scarred by fire. A gray ash covers all. Nothing grows and nothing lives save for the scattered and pitiable remnants of the human race.

For all I know, The Road's setting and the challenges it poses might be intended as pure symbolism. But given Mr. McCarthy's rare skill for limning the details of a landscape, it is hard not to take the insuperably bleak picture he paints at face value. It is absorbing, fascinating and nothing short of terrifying.

It is the nightmare we have largely forgotten. But it has not forgotten us. Thousands of nuclear-armed missiles still stand, waiting, in Russian and American silos. And every year, more nations join or strive to join the nuclear club. Nations such as last year's infamous debutante, North Korea. So it might be worth noting that a study presented at last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union asserted that even a regional nuclear war, such as that which might occur between, say, India and Pakistan, could have catastrophic, deadly effects worldwide.

'Nuclear proliferation'

Our politicians and our media are not blind to these threats. But "nuclear proliferation" and the other words they use to describe them are so paper-dry, so bureaucratic and legalistic, that it is all too easy to forget the horror that lies behind them. Maybe if we spoke instead of "the fire that could kill you, your children and everything on the planet," we would come to a renewed understanding of how much these weapons threaten everything we hold dear.

And if we all read The Road, we would feel this viscerally. In its intent and its effect, it is far from a scholarly treatise on nuclear war, but it should probably be required reading for any leader who has at his disposal the power to unleash the most destructive weapons on Earth.

Dan Rather is an American television broadcaster.