Bradbury did howl, though, against “censorship and elitism.” This warm, informative biography depicts him as a thoughtful...
The second volume of the life of the esteemed science-fiction author.
Eller (English/Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis; Becoming Ray Bradbury, 2011, etc.), director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, bases his authoritative biography on extensive interviews with Bradbury (1920-2012), 60 years of correspondence with his agent, Don Congdon, and additional letters and manuscripts. The result is a thorough documentation of Bradbury’s career, beginning with the publication of Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Besides fiction, Bradbury’s literary output in the second half of his life included TV and movie screenplays, which gave him new visibility and fame. While he greatly admires his subject, Eller admits that some of the author’s later fiction was marked by “sentimental and nostalgia-driven impulses” and “descriptions verging on purple prose.” Congdon feared that Bradbury often was “trying too hard to be intellectual and philosophic,” perhaps a result of increasing invitations to speak and lecture. Although Bradbury refused to fly, he had become “a lay spokesman for the Space Age.” Eller identifies several men who had a large role in shaping Bradbury’s career: film director John Huston, art critic and historian Bernard Berenson, and actor Charles Laughton, who became Bradbury’s “last true mentor.” The mercurial Huston hired Bradbury to write a script for Moby-Dick, a project that took Bradbury and his family on their first trip to Europe, where they lived for eight months. Although working with Huston proved extremely stressful, the project made his talents coveted in Hollywood. While in Italy, Bradbury visited Berenson, who opened up an appreciation of Renaissance art that Bradbury considered life-altering. Berenson’s assessment of Bradbury is borne out in Eller’s portrait: “simple, easygoing, no inferiority complex, not shy nor on the defensive….Seems to have escaped the pseudoproblems that worry young writers, and make them howl to the moon.”
Bradbury did howl, though, against “censorship and elitism.” This warm, informative biography depicts him as a thoughtful and disciplined writer who helped make science fiction a respected literary genre.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-252-03869-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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