Repetitious and flabby (Frank can't stay in a hotel without Brian telling us the room number), with the same Dune minutiae...
Son Brian, who’s continued dad’s most famous saga (Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, 2002, etc., with Kevin J. Anderson), chronicles in endless detail the life of a writer who scaled new pinnacles in SF.
Born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1920, young Frank didn't have much of a childhood; he was forced to care for a younger sister as his parents descended into alcoholism. At 19 he got a job on a newspaper, at 21 he enlisted in the Navy, was dumped by his first wife, and received an honorable discharge without seeing combat after a grotesque accident in 1943. Back in the Pacific Northwest, Herbert wrote for newspapers and politicians, drove like a maniac, and in 1946 married Beverly Forbes, a psychic of Scottish descent. He treated their three children (Brian was the eldest) with a curious combination of angry neglect and exquisite cruelty. Whatever he did, he did with his entire being, from uprooting the whole family to live in Mexico to single-mindedly acquiring information for his work in progress. From his modestly successful first novel, The Dragon in the Sea (1956), he developed the Dune vision, which consumed him for the next seven years. Twenty-three publishers rejected the completed text before Chilton published a hardcover edition in 1965. Chronically short of money, Frank wrote stories and novels and eventually extended the Dune saga. Four Dune movie deals fell through before David Lynch in 1984 completed a nearly five-hour film, gutted to two (and doomed) by a studio power struggle. During all this, Brian slowly and painfully endeavored to understand his father and build a relationship with him; clearly, however, intimidation and hero worship lingered until Frank’s death from a pulmonary embolism in 1986.
Repetitious and flabby (Frank can't stay in a hotel without Brian telling us the room number), with the same Dune minutiae endlessly recycled. Nonetheless, a fascinating picture of this furiously energetic, driven, determined, sometimes childlike genius.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30646-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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