Watership Down

Watership Down ...by RichardAdams.

Hardback: ISBN 068483605X , paperback: ISBN 0380002930 or ISBN 0060935456 Adams' comfort zone, in a whispery fluffy-wuffy language, revolves around epic sagas of primitive spiritual folks. This, his most popular work, reveals the Exodus of a group of pilgrims who flee their ancestral home after receiving a vision of its destruction. They endure the rigors of crossing a land remade by humans, seeking a new home in a safe place. Along this road they lose their innocence encountering the horrors of lapine capitalism, and of lapine communism. But they win thru by learning from their experiences & reusing these in new combinations, and by forging mutually beneficial alliances with other creatures along their way.

Interesting how this review never mentions that the pilgrims are anthropomorphic rabbits (the cover should make it a bit obvious as does "lapine", like hares and rabbits). The political interpretations of this book are fairly obvious to many, and it became something of an intelligensia hit for that reason... The book has become something of a favorite of Libertarians, with the societies they encounter tending more to extremes of decadence and passivity to rigid and authoritarian, rather than along socio-economic lines.

Adams also performs the Tolkienian feat of introducing a new language, so well that towards the end we understand what the curse silflay hraka u embleer rah means without even realizing it. -- PhlIp

Adams didn't introduce a whole new language; just a few dozen words. -- BrentNewhall

Made into a not-half-bad animated movie, and a not-detestable cartoon series.

Watership Down -- you've read the book, you've seen the movie, now eat the pie!

The sequel to this book, _Tales From Watership Down_ is pure treacle, and not worthy of the original book (and frankly not worth the space on the shelf either).

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