by Kyle Arnold ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2016
An inquiry into the SF master’s mind that will interest only the most devoted of Dick’s fans.
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) sits on the couch for some deep analysis.
Arnold, a clinical psychologist at Coney Island Hospital, believes that Dick “grappled with madness” his entire life. He begins this highly detailed psychobiography in the publisher’s Inner Lives series with a story about an apprehensive Dick visiting director Ridley Scott on the set of Blade Runner. Dick had recently written a scathing review of Scott’s Alien. He loved watching some of the film—the only one made from a Dick book while he was alive—but was worried when Scott said he was leaving out most of the book’s spiritual themes. Dick felt they were central to this story, as they were to all his writings, believing he was a “mystical seer and prophet.” Arnold goes into great detail in his psychoanalysis of Dick, and he identifies key episodes in his life that were instrumental in providing the imaginative fodder for his profoundly autobiographical fictions. The first was the death of his twin sister, Jane; Arnold calls it Dick’s “origin story.” They were born premature, and she died a few weeks later. He constantly obsessed over the fact that she died and he lived. The theme of “deadly doubling” is common in Dick’s works. Then there was the event on 2-3-74 (as Dick officially called it) when he believed he was hit by a bright pink light he called Zebra; it filled his brain with mystical information. Arnold believes this event was actually a mental breakdown. Dick’s addiction to amphetamines, not LSD, Arnold argues, caused Dick’s paranoia. Arnold effectively describes how Dick’s psychological problems play out in some of his characters and stories, and more of this would have been welcome. There’s little here that doesn’t relate solely to discussing his mental state. The book is overly prescriptive in its telling, and the prose is dry and academic.
An inquiry into the SF master’s mind that will interest only the most devoted of Dick’s fans.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-974325-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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