Mixed in with the bons mots and the gossip are true stories about Asimov's novels and short fiction that fans will cherish....
Asimov, knighted a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, was an eloquent raconteur; in fact, the book reads like a one-sided conversation, as he shares his opinions on surviving Star Trek conventions, other science fiction authors' egos, and, of course, his own career.
The bestselling author, famous for creating his groundbreaking Robot and Foundation series, conducts this merry chase in a chatty tone that is energized by his honesty. The same man who dwells on his devotion to his daughter and second wife also shares the discomfort he felt when he saw his first wife at his daughter's graduation. He even reveals that upon meeting Judy-Lynn del Rey, the late editor who would grow to be a dear friend and the inspiration for some of Asimov's award-winning stories, he was repulsed by her dwarfism. But Asimov's confidences earn our forgiveness. In fact, when he recounts his experiences with publishing houses—especially Walker & Company, Simon & Schuster, and, most of all, Doubleday—one can't help but laugh. Asimov spits no venom at the editors and agents who opposed him, but he never forgot any of their names or power plays either, and one after another is gleefully recounted here.
Mixed in with the bons mots and the gossip are true stories about Asimov's novels and short fiction that fans will cherish. Perhaps most gratifying of these is the confession of astonishment Asimov expressed upon reaching bestseller status, late in his life.Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-41701-2
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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