A Canticle for Leibowitz

In the new Dark Ages at the end of the twentieth century, I. E. Leibowitz, a security-risk scientist, founded a monastic community to preserve the few books that survived the first Atomic Deluge and the Age of Simplification. This isolated community in the desert was later to be known as the Albertian Order of St. Leibowitz—and the little store of knowledge that the monks kept intact leads man into a new Renaissance and a new age of technology. Then, through the compassionate and troubled eyes of the Albertian monks, the reader sees man stumbling once again toward destruction, barely able to discern his last chance for redemption.

This is a chronicle of beauty and tenderness, of violence and hatred, of despair and humor ; of such incandescent characters as gentle Brother Francis, who spends fifteen years making an illuminated copy of an electronic circuit design by the Blessed Leibowitz ; Lazarus, the quizzical wandering Jew who searches through the centuries for the One who called him from the grave ; the impudent Poet with a removable conscience; and Rachel, green - eyed innocence flowering in ultimate destruction.

The conjunction of day-by-day life with the sweep of centuries, of individual characters and masses of men—all viewed under the aspect of eternity—makes A Canticle for Leibowitz a unique experience in faith and adventure, in raw humanity and in the exploration of the spirit.