What happens when an overachiever with almost perfect recall is let loose on autobiography? You get length, for a start. Documenting birth through age 34 enables Asimov to dwell lovingly on the minutiae stored in the temporal lobes, aided by diaries compulsively chronicling events (especially birthdays), habitats, typewriters or telephones acquired. You get excess. The writing persists in the look-at-me-I'm-cute/precocious/fat/erratically brilliant/flirtatious/honest style that marks Asimov introductions. You get cliches. The text contains lines like "we settled down in New York City's borough of Brooklyn where I was to spend my formative years," or "But it was off with the old and on with the new." The story itself, however, has a certain New York nostalgia appeal, Poor Jewish boy grows up in Brooklyn, Russian immigrant mom and pop run a candy store, work, work, work, eat, eat, eat, be the best. And of course Isaac was the best: skipped liberally in the lower grades, he went on to pimply-faced, skinny adolescence, rejection by the quota system from Columbia College (and later, by medical schools), always reading, doing things for himself, by himself: an erudite but totally sheltered existence. The familiar pattern of the first-born son pleasing a stern and demanding father (but there is affection) and a protective mother. There follow the Sad-Sack army days, the bliss of marriage, the beginning triumphs writing for the pulps, and finally the Ph.D. in chemistry, plus, at volume's end, a respectable assistant professorship at Boston University and renown as one of the luminaries of sci-fi's Golden Age. Of particular interest is Asimov's inside story of the evolution of that literary form, and the editors and agents who helped shape it. At half the length and with half the schmaltz, this 200th Asimov title would have been distinctly more memorable.
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1978
ISBN: 038513679X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
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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