Worthwhile reading for those interested in the origins of today's sci-fi fan culture and the still understudied subject of...
The intriguing life story of a pioneer in science-fiction publishing and fandom.
Nadis (Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America, 2005) successfully cultivates the gee-whiz aura of prewar American culture, where bright youngsters like Ray Palmer (1910–1977) saw the future within garish “pulp” magazines. The author notes that Palmer, whose devotion to the original sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories won him its editorship, became “one of the most controversial figures in science fiction history [due to] a taste for the unorthodox.” As with Ray Bradbury or Harlan Ellison (both of whom crossed Palmer’s path), Palmer thrust himself into the birth of sci-fi’s complex fandom in the 1920s and stayed through the explosive popularity of pulp in the 1930s and ’40s, the rise of paperback originals in the ’50s and then the decline of both industries (which for Palmer included a foray into smut publishing). Palmer, a loquacious, giddy booster of the genre despite terrible lifelong health problems, was both credited and blamed for driving the fusion of science fiction (which aspired to strict scientific principles in its early years) with mysticism and conspiracy theory. For instance, beginning in 1944, Amazing Stories introduced a bizarre serial concerning suppressed racial memories, the “Shaver Mystery,” named for its author, an eccentric with whom Palmer became close friends. Later, as the pulp marketplace contracted, Palmer began other magazines, starting with Fate, focused on early flying saucer sightings; he was also at the center of the controversies around Area 51 and Roswell, N.M. Nadis demonstrates how figures like Palmer and Shaver provoked convulsive, lasting literary movements despite their ostracism from mainstream letters. He produces a vivid cultural history, capturing subtle transformations in American attitudes through an examination of the voluble Palmer’s career and writings; however, the narrative style veers from droll to dry.
Worthwhile reading for those interested in the origins of today's sci-fi fan culture and the still understudied subject of marginal literary publishing.Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16054-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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 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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