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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
