For those Isaac Asimov fans who wonder if two long, detailed volumes of autobiography and a book of memoirs might have left any stone unturned, here is a largely mundane collection of comments to peruse. Stanley Asimov, Isaac's younger brother who worked for 40 years for Newsday until his death last month, has culled comments from thousands of notes and letters, most written between the mid-1960s and 1992, when Isaac died. Stanley has organized the text by subject, with, for example, one chapter devoted to fans, one to travel (which Isaac abhorred), and three to "science fiction friends." Letters and excerpts (it is impossible to tell which is which) obediently keep to their designated subjects; thus, not surprisingly, selections tend to be brief a few paragraphs or even, occasionally, only a sentence or two and give the text more the feel of a reference book of quotations than a life in letters. Occasionally such brevity leads to insipidity, as when, in a chapter on writing, Isaac's first entry says, in its entirety, "I find mysteries entertaining." Some letters refer to incidents already familiar to Asimov fans: One recounts Isaac's concocting of a humorous little verse while on the operating table for thyroid cancer an event also discussed both in his autobiography and his memoirs. Although sometimes informative, Stanley's comments can also be merely organizational. When Isaac says that his alma mater, Columbia University, "always seemed a little unhappy that I was there," Stanley gives no hint of his brother's sense of not quite belonging or the effort it took him to get into graduate school in chemistry. A journalist very nearly succeeds in producing a book devoid of news.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47622-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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