William Golding, Lord of the Flies

William Golding won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and most of us probably read this classic in school. I know I did, but it had been probably close to twenty years. So I picked it up again, and I'm glad I did. This well-told story is quite a study of human nature, as a group of stranded kids develop their own "society" and struggle to form and maintain some semblance of structure and norms as things devolve into something between tyranny and anarchy. It is certainly a fleshing out of a Christian understanding of humanity's tainted nature, "the darkness of man's heart" (286), whether he intended it so or not. I was also intrigued that just as the violence was reaching it's crecendo on the island, the boys were rescued by a military cruiser. So even as "civilization" comes to the rescue, we see that the picture on the island isn't so different from the civilized world of today. Certainly a thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.