Survivor: A Modern Adventure

by Robert Steele Gray

Book Overview

Mark Lewellyn is an overweight, forty-something couch potato leading a life dominated by computers, television, and an array of other electronic gadgets: in other words, the typical modern man.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312193408
• ISBN13: 9780312193409
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 2.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Don't Miss This One!

Having recently enjoyed the movie "Castaway," I was a little skeptical that this book would be almost a rehash. Of this I was totally wrong. Mark Llewellyn, a middle age couch potato is thrust back in time about 1800 years. It takes him several days to realize this and he wanders around looking for a way back to civilization. It doesn't take long for he preservation instincts to kick in to the point where he is putting his hand in the carcass of dead animals to eat some of the innards.He stays away from the people he encounters, fearing that any encounter would cost him his life. He finally meets an old man living on a mountainside. The old man allows him to stay but makes him do grueling work. They go on hunts together and little by little they get to trust each other. Though Mark is virtually useless in most things, he tries, with crude materials to introduce some of the later inventions to the old man. The rest of the book is great too and I don't want to spoil it by giving away too much. When you get to the last twenty pages you wonder how the author will resolve everything with so few pages left, but he does a wonderful job of it.

fantistic

THANK YOU,MR.GRAY FOR PUTTING INTO WORDS EVERY LITTLE BOYS DREAMS,THE WHAT IF I COULD GO BACK IN TIME.I STARTED READING AND COULD NOT PUT THE BOOK DOWN. GREAT STORY,GREAT CHARACTERS.I WISH IT WAS 100 PAGES LONGER.

CHANGE YOUR PACE --- READ THIS!

I bought this book as an after-thought not really expecting anything special. This book is excellent! A very easy to read and sort of different type of story that most should really enjoy! It is a clean well written adventure that holds your attention to the very last page. And a bonus as a great training manual, YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU MIGHT BE SENT BACK IN TIME!

Excellent pre-historical fiction

Robert Steele Gray's "Survivor" was a fascinating and unusual read. Those seeking an intricately woven adventure novel--Clancy in prehistoric setting--will either set the book down halfway through or find themselves as transformed as the protagonist, having fallen in love with the pursuit of history that clearly motivates the author.The fantastic premise, a lightening-induced return of a modern man to prehistoric times, is a rather bitter pill Gray must have us swallow in order to frame his modern perspective on pre-history. He does so quickly and painlessly at the beginning of the novel, thus betraying his true passion for the history which he endows with his real energy and skill.A series of somewhat choppy bouts with disaster leave Mark, the time traveler, in a relationship with Um-See, his number two character. Here Gray skillfully begins to give his readers taste after taste of real prehistoric life. The caves of what would later be Arkansas provide an excellent (and of course, historically accurate!) setting both for details of Indian life and for interpersonal relationships.It is in the relationship between Um-See and Mark that Gray most surprises us and most stretches his own writing skills. With a number of English words you can count on one hand, Um-See nonetheless becomes a warm and full character. Of course Gray uses the relationship to speculate on how communal life amidst the harsh environment of pre-history might have operated, but his efforts to do so are hardly stilted or forced. Mark's relationships with women--his first and second wife--are not so compelling, but luckily, these are neither central to the main story nor essential for the historical education the reader is receiving.Technophiles like myself will enjoy speculating with Gray about the introduction of warfighting technology and tactics. The bow and arrow production and training are thoroughly enjoyable to read, and yet quite informative. The real depth is in the details. Gray answers the reader's every question from Mark's perspective. He paints in our mind a color photograph of subsistence, war, economy, politics, and perhaps appropriately to a lesser extent, love, in the lives of these prehistoric Indians.Gray should be pictured as a historian who has turned to fiction to reach an impatient American public with the same material briefly covered in the first chapter of history books they didn't read in high school. His ruse worked. I'll forever see much more in the hills of Arkansas than dubious politicians; and I shall never again pass so quickly by the stale, ill-clad mannequins huddled around the painted campfire in the first room of the natural history museums. These people now have life, breath, and emotion; Gray has put it there.

An entertaining, exciting story that provides good escapism.

This was just plain good reading. The author came up with a novel storyline taking a 20th century character back into the stone age. The character (Mark Lewellyn) is challenged to survive. The historical aspect of the stone age as described by Gray is fascinating. You find yourself cheering to yourself as Mark confronts and overcomes each challenge. It certainly makes you pause and wonder how YOU would fare in similar circumstances-would you be a SURVIVOR? This was fun to read with surprises around every corner.