Keenan's Book Reviews: Search results for autobiography

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Sunday, July 10, 2016

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

When I was a kid, my interest in science fiction was fed by reading many short stories from the heyday of science fiction magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. I particularly remember reading I, Robot, a collection of stories written by Isaac Asimov. (The book is still in bookstores after more than four decades. Will Smith is on the cover; his 2004 movie of the same title was based on one of the stories.)

Asimov wrote an extensive autobiography. The first volume, In Memory Yet Green, covers the first 34 years of his life. As you would expect, his life in that timeframe was similar to many other. He grew up, completed his formal education, started his career and started a family.

Like other famous people, Asimov had fortunate timing, talent, and willingness to work hard to achieve something. He is best known for his achievements as a science fiction writer. Writing was not his sole profession during this part of his life, but he was a fairly prolific writer and was well known in science fiction circles. He had a reputation in science fiction fandom before he ever published a fiction story. He was a fan of the early science fiction magazines and regularly wrote letters to them. He made friends with other fans, several of whom became successful writers along with him, particularly fellow Futurians.

As he put time into writing stories, his participation in fandom waned. His other career as an academic chemist also took up a lot of time. Though it is well known among science fiction fans, others may not be aware that had a Ph.D. in chemistry and was a professor at a medical school. He co-wrote two biochemistry textbooks during this period.

The book covers many aspects of his life, both professional and personal. He begins with his birth in Russia and ends as a husband (to Gertrude) and father (to David) on the verge of a career transition. In between he lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, and many other upheavals of the first half of the 20^th Century. Asimov shares his experiences and views of these events.

Asimov’s style in his autobiography is much as it is in his other writings: straightforward and often jovial. He is not shy about his accomplishments, but he is often humorously self-deprecating and willing to confess to his boneheaded moments.

The book will probably appeal mostly to science fiction fans. Asimov got in on the ground floor. He knew many of the other writers, editors, and publishers of his generation including Ian and Betty Ballantine, John Campbell, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester Del Rey, Robert Heinlein and Frederik Pohl.

If you’re interested in reading this book, you may also be interested in

The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

Asimov, Isaac. In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

Friday, April 17, 2009

What I Read

Back at the end of 2004, I received from my wife a small journal in which to record the book I’d read and a few notes on them. I didn’t record in this journal every book I read since, but I’ve recorded those that seemed especially noteworthy or interesting to me at the time.

I’ll be reproducing that journal here, in a web-enhanced version. You might think of these notes as micro-reviews. I hope you find them useful and interesting.
Date: February 15, 2005
Title: Zig: The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar Author: Zig Ziglar
Thoughts: I enjoyed See You at the Top and Over the Top. I’m encouraged that he learned this over time and overcame setbacks—some surprisingly recent. I hope soon to put aside being a “wandering generality” and start living the life God made for me.

Date: February 17, 2005
Title: No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days Author: Chris Baty
Thoughts: I’m not sure I’ll undertake this challenge. I do need a kick in the pants to jumpstart my creativity. I hardly do anything anymore simply for the joy of doing it. I need to get some fun back in my life and do some thing I like doing.

Date: March 1, 2005
Title: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Author: Dale Carnegie
Thoughts: “Therefore, do not worry saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father know you need all these things” (Matthew 6:31-32).

Date: March 3, 2005
Title: Independent Consulting
Author: David Kintler with Bob Adams
Thoughts: This is one of the books I read while preparing to start a consulting and training business.

Date: March 7, 2005
Title: Forever Ruined for the Ordinary Author: Joy Dawson
Thoughts: I read this book quickly, but there is much in it I’d like to ponder.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

When a book is entitled Amazing Fantastic Incredible, Stan Lee must be involved. That is the title of Lee’s graphic novel memoir, co-written with Peter David with art by Colleen Doran, about his long career in comic books.

Lee has a career in comic books going back the Golden Age. He started working in comics soon after they became a popular medium. Few people have had a career in comic books as long as Lee’s, partly because he is still working. No one has been the public face of comic books, or a spokesman and promotor for the medium, as much as Lee.

Because Lee’s career in comics is well known, at least among fans, some of the more interesting parts of the memoir deal with other aspects of his life. He depicts himself as being crazy in love with his wife, Joan, even after decades of marriage. He recalls himself as a lonely kid during the Great Depression, who took refuge in books and the world of his own imagination. He retelling of his army service during World War II, mostly serving as a writer stateside, is mostly humorous.

I suspect Lee’s humor has a lot to do with his popularity. He comes across as self-aggrandizing with a self-deprecating wink.

Even so, Lee’s status as a comics celebrity has sparked criticism in some circles. He was the face of Marvel Comics, and so has taken the heat for the way the publisher treated the artist who worked for him (comics publishers treated artists shabbily for decades). Maybe he could have done more for the artists who worked for him, and maybe he would have been unemployed if he tried. Lee doesn’t get into this matter much, but when he does he shifts the blame to publisher Martin Goodman.

Lee addresses some of his most famous characters and the artists who co-created them. Some might see his recognition of co-creators as a defense against detractors who say he has claimed too much credit. I think the book presents the situation the way Lee would like to remember, and the way he would like others to remember it. I think he genuinely liked and admired many of the people he worked with. Throughout the book, Jack Kirby is depicted as handsome, powerful and dynamic, almost like a superhero, even when there was a rift if their personal and professional relationship.

This is a memoir, not an autobiography. Lee and his collaborators do not attempt to independently confirm memories, though they straightforward about some memories being fuzzy. A few scenes a clearly constructed to present information in a manner more interesting than direct exposition, though they may have had some root in an actual event. Lee’s conversations with his boyhood self are plainly fictional; I thought they tended to be the weakest parts of the book, though they were functional.

Fans of Lee will probably enjoy the book. Someone who wants a brief and easy history of comics, and isn’t too concerned about the lopsidedness that would naturally come with Lee’s perspective, might also like it. Lee would know, he was there.

Stan Lee also wrote Spider-Man with Steve Ditko. Peter David also wrote Writing for Comics with Peter David.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Lee, Stan, Peter David & Colleen Doran. Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir. New York: Touchstone, 2015.

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

As I get older, I start noticing some strange connections. If Peter Parker aged naturally, he’d be the same age as my father. I also learned that Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders (one of my favorite bands), is only three years younger than my parents. I can hardly believe it, though there is an unreliable part of my mind that seems convinced that I’m still in my early 20s.

This bit about Hynde’s age is hardly the most interesting thing in her autobiography, Reckless. You find many things you normally find in autobiographies. For instance, her early childhood in Ohio was surprisingly and pleasantly normal.

Things get more interesting in her teen years. She became a teenager in the 1960s and she was swept up into the youth culture of the time. She had two loves, music and drugs.

Hynde did a lot of drugs. She doesn’t dwell on the term addiction, but she doesn’t hide that she clearly was addicted. She subjected to herself to may dangers and abuses for the sake of getting high. A person would not do that if she was thinking straight, but addicts don’t think straight.

Unfortunately, drugs got in the way of the music. Drugs took the lives of many innovative musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and Hynde mentions many of them that she knew. Two members of the Pretenders, Jimmy Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug-related causes. It seems that there are several occasions in her story, before the Pretenders, when her dream of being in a band was interrupted by drugs, either her own pursuit of them or her potential bandmates’.

Hynde was adventurous. She traveled far from her childhood home in Akron to Canada, Mexico and France before settling in London. London became her home, largely because of the music scene. There she finally put together a band, though an unusual British band with an American lead. She met an amazing number of other musicians, famous then or later, who were there. It may seem like name dropping to discuss the Clash or the Sex Pistols, but these were people she knew and she lived their ups and downs with them.

The final section of the book, covering the career of the Pretenders, is surprisingly short. Admittedly, the original line-up did not last long due to the deaths of Scott and Farndon.

Hynde’s tone is not nostalgic. She has nostalgia for a Midwestern urbanism that was almost dead by the time she came along. She speaks frankly about her own days. She expresses a strong sense of agency and does not blame anyone for the way they treated her or depict herself as a victim. She seems to regret that the drugs people thought would set them free did not, and that as addicts they kept using drugs long after they knew it was a trap.

If you’re interested in rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and punk), you’ll likely enjoy this book. Hynde clearly loves this music and was around when it was undergoing much innovation. She was friends with some of the first stars of punk. He story is also an interesting section of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, she was a student at Kent State University and witnessed the protests and other events that led to the National Guard firing on students.

If you’r interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hynde, Chrissie. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott’s little book on prayer, Help, Thanks, Wow, is not a theological work, it is a personal essay. Of course, there is theology. Lamott suggests prayer is important whatever your conception of god, be it something from a formal religion or just a notion of something bigger than ourselves. Even an atheist can pray. Prayer is communication for our hearts to something else, something greater.

As the title suggest, she considers three prayers particularly important. The first is, “Help.” Praying “Help” is a way to admit we don’t have the answers or power to solve a problem. We let go and trust that something bigger has good answers and power to achieve good results, even if it is not exactly what we want. I see in this prayer not just a reaching out for aid, but a practice of humility. It is amazing how near we can find God to be when we are humble.

I have written elsewhere that I consider gratitude to be essential to a happy life. Lamott’s second prayer is, “Thanks.” It is an important courtesy to thank those who help us, and if you seem to receive mysterious, improbable help from strangers, or no human agent at all, maybe a prayer of thanks would be in order. Lamott suggests that we pray our thanks even when we don’t get what we want. We should be thankful things were not worse. We should be thankful that things are somehow okay even though we didn’t get what we want, even though something bad happened. Gratitude is a path to peace and character.

The final prayer is, “Wow.” It is an expression of wonder and awe. Sometimes we experience something that blows us away: the beauty of nature and art, the love of others, the changes we see in ourselves, and other wonders. Wow is a great prayer because it shows we can still sense and appreciate the amazing things around us.

As I mentioned, the book is personal. It is not a detailed autobiography. She tells enough of a story to illustrate a point, often that life sucks sometimes, and moves on. The book has a very informal, conversational tone. Lamott doesn’t come across as someone making an argument for the importance of prayer, she is simply talking about something that is important to her and explaining why she finds in meaningful.

Lamott, Anne. Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. New York: Riverhead, 2012.

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Saturday, April 7, 2018

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s autobiography, collected under the title My Inventions, originally appeared as six articles in issues of Electrical Experimenter in 1919. It is a surprisingly thin book, especially in light of the several biographies that have been written about him, and the possibly greater volumes propounding the mythology of an almost demi-god genius.

To be fair, Tesla was a very creative and productive inventor. His AC motors, and the power systems that support them, enabled a new level of industrial power and automation. In many ways it was the technological foundation of the power grid we have today.

Tesla was ahead of his time and he realized it. He knew that the success of AC motors was greatly aided by coming about at the right time. Even so, it took many years from Tesla’s design to become a prototype and for that to become a commercial product with an infrastructure to support its use. At the time he wrote My Inventions, the value and practicality of his later inventions were still hard for many to see.

One of these later inventions was the radio. Tesla didn’t use that term “radio.” It’s probably fair to say that he misunderstood the phenomena he was working with. Even so, he could produce radio transmissions and put them to practical use. As a demonstration, he built radio-controlled boats. It’s a stretch to say that Tesla envisioned smart phones, but he foresaw the possibility of using radio to transmit many kinds of data and signals, sometimes to devices “not bigger than a watch.”

“The pressure of occupation and the incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness thru all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways,” Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

These articles were written at the end of World War I. Tesla reflected on the potentials of technology in peace and war. He imagined that wireless communication could shrink the world, leading to the kind of cultural exchange, common ground and commercial connections that would reinforce peace. He also imagined a rocket that could be guided to its target by radio control or internal mechanism; we could call it an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Though visionary, he was not an infallible genius. He held to notions of physics that were not supported even by the science of his time. He had some wild ideas about psychology, biology and other fields, though some of these were no more far-out and off the mark that many that were popularly accepted by his contemporaries.

Tesla wrote very much from his own experience and perspective. Though he speaks of his upbringing in eastern Europe, his education and his career in Europe and the United States, he spends little time reflecting on the places, cultures and broader events he experience. You’ll learn more about Tesla’s peculiar ailments than about the life of youth in late-19^th Century Croatia. Perhaps that wouldn’t have sold many issues of Electrical Experimenter.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. 1919. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995.