A Review of “Alas, Babylon” by Pat Frank

Review, Pages 2 (435 words)

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Imagine, you are living your life, putting bourbon in your coffee every morning and dating your neighbor’s rich daughter. Then, all of the sudden, you receive a message saying there is going to be a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. I think I would be absolutely terrified. This is exactly what happened to Randy Bragg in the fictional story Alas, Babylon written by Pat Frank. In this story, Frank explains the horrors of nuclear war and how it affects the people caught in it.

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He explains how people in the fictional town of Fort Repose, Florida work to survive this nuclear war.

Alas, Babylon is a story that explains what it would be like to survive a nuclear war in the United States. In this story, Randy Bragg is the brother of Mark Bragg. Mark is an officer in the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Mark sends a telegram to Randy telling him to meet him at noon and he also tells him that his wife, Helen, and his two kids, Peyton and Ben Franklin, are flying into Orlando.

He ends the telegram with “Alas, Babylon.” Randy immediately knows what this means. Those words were a family signal that Randy and Mark used and Mark told him that if there was going to be a nuclear war, to listen out for those words. Randy started planning for his brother’s family to arrive. A few hours after their arrival, the nuclear war begins. Tampa and Miami are taken out first and then Jacksonville and Orlando.

Fort Repose, however, was not affected by the nuclear missiles or the radiation left behind. Fort Repose was left without power and they were short on supplies.

This resulted in all of Randy’s neighbors having to work together to survive. Dan Gunn was the doctor in Fort Repose and also Randy’s best friend. Dan made house calls everyday to try to help the people affected by the war. Commotion breaks out when a group of men beat up Dan and steal his car and his medical equipment, the police chief is killed, and the bank president kills himself. Another issue is that Porky Logan brought back a piece of jewelry from a place that was affected from radiation and many people got radiation poisoning. Randy and Dan dealt with this by burying Porky Logan and the piece of jewelry together. About a year after the nuclear war happened, helicopters begin to show up to Fort Repose to rescue the people. Someone on the plane confirms that Mark Bragg had died in the war.