Patterson covers all the bases—an essential book for studious fans of Heinlein, with valuable lessons for anyone hoping to...
Second and concluding volume of Patterson’s wide-ranging biography of the renowned science-fiction author.
As Patterson (Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): Learning Curve, 2010) notes, Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) did not limit himself to what was then a small, if growing, genre of popular fiction. By the early 1950s, “he was in boys’ and girls’ markets, books, pulp, and film, all at the same time”—part of a concerted, thoroughly thought-through effort to free himself from the pulps while making a living as a writer. Patterson is well-versed in the Heinlein oeuvre, and a significant contribution of his biography is to place Heinlein’s works in the context of his life and the evolution of his politics. As Heinlein was writing his best-known books, among them Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and Starship Troopers (1959), he was making a political arc from beyond–New Deal Democrat to right-of-Goldwater Republican, a transformation helped by a second marriage to an activist conservative. Though he was friendly with L. Ron Hubbard, he resisted taking the path into invented religion and instead used his fiction to explore philosophical questions of meaning (one reason that Stranger became such a hit in the ’60s counterculture). The ’50s, Patterson reveals, were lucrative and satisfying for Heinlein in some respects, though the ground was always shifting; his Hollywood period closed with a thud when the production company he worked with closed its doors. He was on firmer footing in the ’60s, and though reviewers were often antagonistic (Patterson quotes a few, including some from this publication, that were friendly but more that were not), his books did well—encouraging fan mail that, as Patterson recounts, was full of detailed questions “about everything from economics to where Robert parted his hair.”
Patterson covers all the bases—an essential book for studious fans of Heinlein, with valuable lessons for anyone hoping to make a living with the pen.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1961-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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