On The Road Again

You can't pin that Oprah down. On the heels of Sidney Poitier's "spiritual autobiography" The Measure of a Man, daytime's queen has chosen something completely different for her next book club selection: Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic novel The Road.

Of the reclusive novelist's latest outing, Powells.com said, "McCarthy takes such B-movie plot devices as an apocalyptic future, cannibalism, and scenes that could have been cut straight from Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to craft an existential moral debate about what it means to be alive in a dead world. ...The Road, like many of McCarthy's novels, features homeless males on the move. Only instead of horses, the unnamed father and son have an old grocery cart with one wobbly wheel, loaded with canned goods and dirty blankets. And their journey makes All the Pretty Horses look like a trip to Club Med."

Who knew Oprah's viewers were such survivalists? Next up, Martha Stewart visits Oprah to talk about making a fallout shelter out of an old bathtub, origami paper, and Meyer lemons. Stay tuned.