A Canticle for Leibowitz is very much a novel of the Cold War — not because it engages in the partisan polemics of the time, but because it transcends those causes to address a higher issue, the precarious survival of human life in the Nuclear Age. The novel assumes a devastating nuclear war that has nearly destroyed civilization and goes on to explore humanity's attempt to rebuild the world. As society progresses from a Dark Age to a second Renaissance and finally to a new age of nuclear confrontation, the same flaws that nearly destroyed humanity before emerge once again and culminate in a second, even more destructive conflagration. The great question posed by Miller in A Canticle for Leibowitz is the question that continues to haunt the contemporary world: for all man's knowledge, for all his power, for all his scientific and...