Though we are reading of the last days of humanity on an earth made uninhabitable by radioactivity, no one in ["On the Beach"] gets very excited about it. Mr. Shute quotes T. S. Eliot's dictum that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper, but the last people on earth do not even whimper as they await the approaching radioactive pall. Calmly, they face the inevitable, knowing with certainty that death is only three or six months away, yet planting daffodils to bloom next spring, and studying shorthand for possible future jobs. Even the young American submarine commander stays faithful to his wife at home, emotionally unable to admit his rational awareness that she and their children are dead.

I believe "On the Beach" should be read by every thinking person. Nevil Shute has done an unusually able and imaginative job in depicting how people might act if there were a radioactive holocaust such as he envisages. The story is so well told that it caught my interest from the start, and held my attention to the end. All sorts of treatments of this problem are possible and Mr. Shute has treated the one he selected with extreme skill both from the scientific and the literary point of view. But I do wish those Australians hadn't taken it all quite so calmly, for there were a good many things they could have done to give humanity another chance. (pp. 1, 9)