Not just for the obsessives so gently chided here. A warm and humorous exploration of a generation’s answer to Vonnegut—and...
Tales of frantic deadlines, obsessions with gadgetry and physics, and jokes told by one of history’s most amusing authors. If only all biographies could be this much fun.
Immediately ditching the cloak of scholarly reverence—and fortunately also eschewing a fan’s gushing mania—Webb dives into the messy life of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy impresario Douglas Adams, handling his subject with aplomb and not a little gentle ribbing. The large and ferociously intelligent Adams had a stiffly proper English education that he used to good effect: solid grounding in the sciences served him well in his sci-fi writing, and being so well versed in manners of British embarrassment and reticence allowed him to mock them amiably and with unerring accuracy. Webb deals with Adams’s childhood seriously but expeditiously, really hitting his stride with the author’s Cambridge years. Here, we learn about Adams’s little-known yen for theater and sketch-writing that would propel his postgraduate career. After a few years flirting with starvation and freelance sketch-writing—he was one of only two outside writers ever given credit on The Monty Python Show—the BBC agreed in 1977 to produce his radio play of Hitchhiker’s. A desperate period of overwork ensued as Adams also struggled to finish a few Dr. Who scripts, but soon the Hitchhiker novel was proposed, and once written, a smash success. While Webb’s affably irreverent tale downshifts as Adams’s celebrity climbs, there’s still plenty of good material here, mostly about the author’s infamous lateness (the best anecdote is from Sonny Mehta, who tells of locking himself into a hotel room with Adams, where Mehta wrung So Long and Thanks for All the Fish out of Adams, page by page). Adams’s death, in 2000, comes far too soon: you won’t want to let go of this gregarious and gangly master of thoughtfully comic science fiction.
Not just for the obsessives so gently chided here. A warm and humorous exploration of a generation’s answer to Vonnegut—and Einstein.Pub Date: March 29, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47650-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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