Reading Arthur Clarke is exhilarating, to say the least. All that exuberant imagination, ebullient optimism, joie de vivre is strong medicine against current doomsdayers or Spengierians. This collection—mostly past lectures, television commentaries, or magazine pieces with fore- and afterwords—spans several decades. It ends on the eve of Clarke's 60th birthday, on which date he is to deliver a yet-to-be-written novel, "The Fountains of Paradise." Throughout, personal memoirs mingle with prognostications, sci-fi with sci-fact. One learns that heaven for Clarke is living in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in ancient times Serendip; that he took up deep sea diving in his thirties, finds the sea almost as compelling as space, and was party to the discovery of sunken treasure off Ceylon's south coast. There are anecdotes about Willy Ley or Vannevar Bush, accolades to Edgar Rice Burroughs or H. G. Wells, and good-natured kidding about friends Asimov and Stanley Kubrick, neither of whom will set foot in a plane. (That fact may preclude production of any Sons of 2001.) There are times when optimism and the technological fix venture beyond hyperbole—as per the use of oil to produce meat "indistinguishable from the natural product in taste, appearance, and nutritive value. . . " or the statement that "all pollution is simply an unused resource." But Clarke's definition of human beings as information-processing animals may not be hyperbole. Indeed much of the hope he sees for mankind is in the constructive use of space technologies to link individuals on earth and ultimately make cosmic connections. His discussions of the techniques available and the several essays in which he takes up the interrelation of knowledge with technology or speculates about life in 2001 make for some of the most stimulating parts of this personal/scientific potpourri.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1977
ISBN: 0345314417
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1977
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 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
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