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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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