This will quite likely go down as grandmaster Bradbury’s magnum opus in lieu of an acid-free trove by Library of America....
Ray Bradbury, now 83, selects 100 of his most celebrated tales from a lifetime in print twice the length of Poe’s.
This will quite likely go down as grandmaster Bradbury’s magnum opus in lieu of an acid-free trove by Library of America. Many wonder-bearing pages, awash in rural nostalgia, sentiment and charm, are redeemed by a sprightly motion forward in the storytelling, which comes as naturally to Bradbury as breathing. Are these his best work? Well, in the short form, yes. But his best ever may remain in novel-length (the flawed but morally forceful Fahrenheit 451, 1953) and the memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), about his scripting Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland while finding the Irish much like his own fantasy figures and monsters. In Bradbury, the fantastic weaves through the banality of everyday life while the supernatural is infected with the same stuff you and I face in kitchen and living room, though not the bedroom. His linked stories transporting Middle America to Mars in The Martian Chronicles (1950) gave him his biggest boost to fame, and though these shady-porch tales today may have a cheesecloth quality to their poetry, they remain his bubbling first masterpiece, with the present volume their bookend.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-054242-X
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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