Science journalist McAleer (The Mind-Boggling Universe, 1987; The Body Almanac, 1985) turns his attention to one of the giants of his own field. Arthur C. Clarke has been in the forefront of science fiction since WW II, and fans of his fiction will naturally be most interested in details of his sf career. But McAleer gives attention to Clarke's impressive credentials as a pioneer advocate of space travel, a stimulating science writer, and an underwater explorer as well. There's also much here on Clarke's childhood on a Somerset farm, tinkering with telescopes and crystal radios; his role in the RAF's development of radar during WW II; his days in the British Interplanetary Society, well before most reputable scientists believed in space travel; his short-lived marriage to an American woman; his settlement in Sri Lanka; and his sometimes exasperating collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. McAleer draws on anecdotes from Clarke's friends, family, and colleagues to make the portrait more personal, but, unfortunately, the external events of Clarke's life are not especially exciting. The most dramatic incident in the book—the discovery by Clarke's diving firm of a sunken Arab trading ship with a load of silver—finds Clarke himself on the sidelines, having little to do with either the find or the recovery of the treasure. And Clarke has never been especially articulate about his own writing. McAleer is sufficiently honest about his subject's imperfections (McAleer quotes unfavorable reviews, and details a squabble between Clarke and Robert Heinlein) to avoid whitewash, but, despite plentiful detail, he rarely conveys any sense of revelation about Clarke's life, or any real insight into his writings. Useful to specialists and students of sf, but likely to disappoint the more general reader. (Thirty b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8092-4324-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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
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