Bradbury did howl, though, against “censorship and elitism.” This warm, informative biography depicts him as a thoughtful...
The second volume of the life of the esteemed science-fiction author.
Eller (English/Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis; Becoming Ray Bradbury, 2011, etc.), director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, bases his authoritative biography on extensive interviews with Bradbury (1920-2012), 60 years of correspondence with his agent, Don Congdon, and additional letters and manuscripts. The result is a thorough documentation of Bradbury’s career, beginning with the publication of Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Besides fiction, Bradbury’s literary output in the second half of his life included TV and movie screenplays, which gave him new visibility and fame. While he greatly admires his subject, Eller admits that some of the author’s later fiction was marked by “sentimental and nostalgia-driven impulses” and “descriptions verging on purple prose.” Congdon feared that Bradbury often was “trying too hard to be intellectual and philosophic,” perhaps a result of increasing invitations to speak and lecture. Although Bradbury refused to fly, he had become “a lay spokesman for the Space Age.” Eller identifies several men who had a large role in shaping Bradbury’s career: film director John Huston, art critic and historian Bernard Berenson, and actor Charles Laughton, who became Bradbury’s “last true mentor.” The mercurial Huston hired Bradbury to write a script for Moby-Dick, a project that took Bradbury and his family on their first trip to Europe, where they lived for eight months. Although working with Huston proved extremely stressful, the project made his talents coveted in Hollywood. While in Italy, Bradbury visited Berenson, who opened up an appreciation of Renaissance art that Bradbury considered life-altering. Berenson’s assessment of Bradbury is borne out in Eller’s portrait: “simple, easygoing, no inferiority complex, not shy nor on the defensive….Seems to have escaped the pseudoproblems that worry young writers, and make them howl to the moon.”
Bradbury did howl, though, against “censorship and elitism.” This warm, informative biography depicts him as a thoughtful and disciplined writer who helped make science fiction a respected literary genre.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-252-03869-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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