Repetitious and flabby (Frank can't stay in a hotel without Brian telling us the room number), with the same Dune minutiae...
Son Brian, who’s continued dad’s most famous saga (Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, 2002, etc., with Kevin J. Anderson), chronicles in endless detail the life of a writer who scaled new pinnacles in SF.
Born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1920, young Frank didn't have much of a childhood; he was forced to care for a younger sister as his parents descended into alcoholism. At 19 he got a job on a newspaper, at 21 he enlisted in the Navy, was dumped by his first wife, and received an honorable discharge without seeing combat after a grotesque accident in 1943. Back in the Pacific Northwest, Herbert wrote for newspapers and politicians, drove like a maniac, and in 1946 married Beverly Forbes, a psychic of Scottish descent. He treated their three children (Brian was the eldest) with a curious combination of angry neglect and exquisite cruelty. Whatever he did, he did with his entire being, from uprooting the whole family to live in Mexico to single-mindedly acquiring information for his work in progress. From his modestly successful first novel, The Dragon in the Sea (1956), he developed the Dune vision, which consumed him for the next seven years. Twenty-three publishers rejected the completed text before Chilton published a hardcover edition in 1965. Chronically short of money, Frank wrote stories and novels and eventually extended the Dune saga. Four Dune movie deals fell through before David Lynch in 1984 completed a nearly five-hour film, gutted to two (and doomed) by a studio power struggle. During all this, Brian slowly and painfully endeavored to understand his father and build a relationship with him; clearly, however, intimidation and hero worship lingered until Frank’s death from a pulmonary embolism in 1986.
Repetitious and flabby (Frank can't stay in a hotel without Brian telling us the room number), with the same Dune minutiae endlessly recycled. Nonetheless, a fascinating picture of this furiously energetic, driven, determined, sometimes childlike genius.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30646-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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