Nevala-Lee's warts-and-all look is a welcome contribution to the study of popular literature.
A laser-sharp study of science fiction's golden age, the product of a small circle of writers and their guiding editor.
Many classic-era science-fiction biographies and memoirs, such as Isaac Asimov’s three-volume memoir and William H. Patterson Jr.’s two-volume life of Robert Heinlein, make generous mention of the pioneering editor and publisher John W. Campbell, whose Astounding Science Fiction was the flagship magazine of the genre for decades. Sci-fi practitioner Nevala-Lee (Eternal Empire, 2013, etc.) does a solid job of situating Campbell at the head of modern science fiction, a vanguard figure who, though himself a spinner of robots-and-aliens stories, “never became as famous as many of the writers he published.” However, Nevala-Lee adds, “he influenced the dreamlife of millions.” Generous with dollars and advice—Asimov worriedly informed him that he’d paid too much for an early story, but Campbell had awarded him a bonus—Campbell also was an early champion of Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, and L. Ron Hubbard, becoming involved in Dianetics, the forerunner of Hubbard’s Scientology. Nevala-Lee shrewdly writes that after a long absence, Hubbard returned to sci-fi in the 1970s after the release of Star Wars, “even if it owed more to Joseph Campbell than to John.” The author’s history of science fiction as it developed under Campbell’s aegis is first-rate. Campbell himself is problematic, since he was a notorious racist who rejected Samuel Delany’s early work, with its African-American lead characters, and who said of Harlan Ellison, who was Jewish, “he’s one of the type that earned the appellation ‘kike.’ ” Those views, as Nevala-Lee observes, eventually “began to infect the magazine,” worrying even the far-right leaning of his authors, especially Heinlein. That politics caused a schism in the community as profound as the magazine’s transition from Astounding to Analog, of which Asimov wrote, “I have never quite managed to forgive Campbell for the change.”
Nevala-Lee's warts-and-all look is a welcome contribution to the study of popular literature.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-257194-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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