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
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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