War With the Newts

Description:

Originally written in 1936, two years before Capek's death and three years before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, War with the Newts is considered by many to be Capek's greatest book. Working in the "fantastic" satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut, Capek chronicles the discovery of a colony of highly intelligent giant salamanders off the coast of an Indonesian island. Capek sardonically details all the reactions of the civilized world - from horror to skepticism, from intellectual fascination to mercantile opportunism - and the ultimate destruction from which it (and the newts) might not escape.

Selected Reviews:

"It is splendidly done. The mere verisimilitude of the account, the vivid detail that so accurately suggests the whole of the contemporary scene, is in itself an achievement; but the great merit of the book lies in its scathing irony. The methods practiced in the name of politics, economics, education and all the rest are pilloried, and discomfited by the slings and arrows of outrageous wit. It is magnificent, and if it is not war, it is a massacre, anyway, of the far from innocent."

--Christian Science Monitor