The second volume of Asimov's blockbuster autobiography (begun with In Memory Yet Green, 1979) picks him up at age 34, teaching biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine and under fire as a sci-fi sensation, and leaves him, at 58, the Compleat Science Writer, dubbed by George Gaylord Simpson "a natural wonder and a natural resource." That accolade particularly pleased Asimov because it signaled recognition for a work in pure Asimovian style—the 1960 Wellsprings of Life—by the scientific community; in contrast, the also-lauded Intelligent Man's Guide to Science was and is abjured by Asimov because of heavy-handed cutting and rewriting by an editor. And that is not the only time we learn that Asimov will brook no blue-penciling, for the chapters here, with their brief numbered parts, are primarily accounts of what author Asimov was currently up to: who are the writers, editors, and publishers he's seeing; what rankles and what pleases, what brings fame or blame; and, not least, what he's earning (until the early 1960s, when he tops $70 thousand a year and draws the curtain). To be sure, wife Gertrude and the children swell a scene or two, and there are wry tales of suburban life and Jewish fatherhood. But writing is what the book is about, and to that extent it is more interesting and less self-indulgent than its predecessor. In a telling anecdote, Asimov acknowledges the insight of daughter Robyn who in little-girl fashion once asked what he would do if he had to choose between her and writing (and did not fail to note the slight hesitation in his voice, as he gave the inevitable reply). There are some interesting glimpses into how Asimov works—by plumbing the literature, we are told, never by interviews (a "waste of time"). And we learn of his compulsive need for concurrent projects: "There must be no endings. Several balls must always be in the air." In time marriage #1 dissolves, not without sadness and guilt, and marriage to Janet, the psychiatrist and intellectual soul-mate of many years, eventually takes place. In 1957, Asimov, overweight and overcommitted, suffers a coronary, which is described with typical objectivity and earns the reader's compassion. Asimov, ever admirable if exasperating, ends the book on the rebound, pounds lighter, and enthusiastic over projects to come—including (you guessed it) a fulfillment of the book's last line: "To be continued."
Pub Date: April 25, 1980
ISBN: 0385155441
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1980
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
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