Heinlein (1907-88) was one of the most renowned and influential science-fiction writers of the modern era; his selected correspondence—first with famous magazine editor John W. Campbell, later with his agent, Lurton Blassingame—is here edited by his widow Virginia and loosely organized into categories: Early Days (the Campbell era), Juvenile Novels (a highly successful series), Writing Methods (he wrote at length, then pruned vigorously), Fan Mail (and other distractions), Sales and Rejections, Building (his own house), Travel (worldwide), Adult Novels, and more. Up to the mid 1940's, Heinlein, under his own name and various pseudonyms, was Campbell's main talent; inexplicably, their friendship waned ("just another casualty, probably, of World War II," Virginia notes feebly and unhelpfully), and by 1963 had turned hostile: "offering copy to John Campbell, having it bounced. . .and then have to wade through ten pages of his arrogant insults, explaining to me why my story is no good." Elsewhere, about editor Horace L. Gold, a notorious meddler, Heinlein remarks, "there is hardly a paragraph which he has not 'improved'—and I am fit to be tied." Another editor, Scribner's Alice Dalgliesh (she edited Heinlein's very successful juvenile sf series) knew nothing of sf, construed everything in Freudian terms, and blue-penciled accordingly. One chapter details the protracted, difficult genesis of Heinlein's extraordinary, iconoclastic novel Stranger in a Strange Land; another describes the equally remarkable fallout after the book became popular—in some circles Heinlein was regarded as a guru, in others as a cultist and subversive. Eclectic, provocative, and opinionated, just like Heinlein's fiction, the text assumes a fairly detailed background knowledge, which is fine for the fans. However, for the wider audience the book is certain to attract, it should have been reedited by someone more curious and less personally involved. It desperately needs an index. There are photographs, mostly boring.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1989
ISBN: 0345369416
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1989
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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