Less engaging than Asimov’s autobiography, which remains a standard, but still a welcome account of the development of an...
First volume of a two-part biography of legendary sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988).
It may surprise readers schooled in Heinlein’s stern, even quasi-fascistic visions of the future to learn that their author was a sometime liberal Democrat involved in postwar party politics in his adopted California. It will not surprise them to know that Heinlein, on the road to a lifetime’s service in the Navy until being drummed out for medical reasons, was infamous among subordinates as a by-the-book disciplinarian of a Captain Bligh—or perhaps Queeg—bent. By Heinlein aficionado Patterson’s account, he discovered science fiction early on, but initially took to it as a means of having to work a real job. World War II robbed him of that escape, but he worked intently to write stories for pulp magazines that criss-crossed the genres of science fiction and fantasy until building up the skills and stamina to begin the huge novels for which he would become famous. “Just before Pearl Harbor,” writes Patterson, “he had intended to raise his sights…to the slick magazines and book publication, which pretty much implied then that he would leave science fiction behind.” Yet science fiction would flourish after the war, with its futuristic visions as wrought by contemporaries such as E.E. “Doc” Smith, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp. Patterson pays fitting homage to those writers as mentors and competitors, also giving due to longtime editor John Campbell, who advised Heinlein of what would work (plenty of plot complications) and what wouldn’t (leave religion out of it). The author clearly has a handle on every moment of Heinlein’s life, including the unpleasant (a nasty divorce) and controversial (trash-talking L. Ron Hubbard) episodes, but sometimes trips over awkward, overworked locutions.
Less engaging than Asimov’s autobiography, which remains a standard, but still a welcome account of the development of an important popular writer.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1960-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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