An inquiry into the SF master’s mind that will interest only the most devoted of Dick’s fans.
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) sits on the couch for some deep analysis.
Arnold, a clinical psychologist at Coney Island Hospital, believes that Dick “grappled with madness” his entire life. He begins this highly detailed psychobiography in the publisher’s Inner Lives series with a story about an apprehensive Dick visiting director Ridley Scott on the set of Blade Runner. Dick had recently written a scathing review of Scott’s Alien. He loved watching some of the film—the only one made from a Dick book while he was alive—but was worried when Scott said he was leaving out most of the book’s spiritual themes. Dick felt they were central to this story, as they were to all his writings, believing he was a “mystical seer and prophet.” Arnold goes into great detail in his psychoanalysis of Dick, and he identifies key episodes in his life that were instrumental in providing the imaginative fodder for his profoundly autobiographical fictions. The first was the death of his twin sister, Jane; Arnold calls it Dick’s “origin story.” They were born premature, and she died a few weeks later. He constantly obsessed over the fact that she died and he lived. The theme of “deadly doubling” is common in Dick’s works. Then there was the event on 2-3-74 (as Dick officially called it) when he believed he was hit by a bright pink light he called Zebra; it filled his brain with mystical information. Arnold believes this event was actually a mental breakdown. Dick’s addiction to amphetamines, not LSD, Arnold argues, caused Dick’s paranoia. Arnold effectively describes how Dick’s psychological problems play out in some of his characters and stories, and more of this would have been welcome. There’s little here that doesn’t relate solely to discussing his mental state. The book is overly prescriptive in its telling, and the prose is dry and academic.
An inquiry into the SF master’s mind that will interest only the most devoted of Dick’s fans.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-974325-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
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