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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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