RAY BRADBURY UNBOUND

Name: RAY BRADBURY UNBOUND
Author: Jonathan R. Eller
ISBN: 978-0-252-03869-3

by Jonathan R. Eller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2014

Bradbury did howl, though, against “censorship and elitism.” This warm, informative biography depicts him as a thoughtful...

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
REMEMBRANCE
by Ray Bradbury ; edited by Jonathan R. Eller

- BOOK REVIEW
BRADBURY BEYOND APOLLO
by Jonathan R. Eller

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.