Customer Reviews

Bradbury Speaks : Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Reading these essays, anecdotes, love letters and diatribes is like sitting in the room with Mr. Electrico himself. For Bradbury fans this is a sweet bottle of dandelion wine from the vintner himself. Much less formal than his usual writing, but much more personal because he just shoots from the hip here, and from the heart.

This new book was a pleasant surprise; 37 essays by Ray Bradbury, all labours of love, and all very breezy to read through.

Despite the fact that they are essays, they are written in Bradbury's usual poetic, flowery style which some love and some are annoyed by. Those who are annoyed by it probably are the type of people who never look at anything beyond it's face value and can't stand to watch a film that doesn't include constant, unnecessary yapping, but I digress.

The topics Bradbury covers range from the origins of his books, his thoughts on his city (Los Angeles), movies, other writer's books, history, and his friendships (with Walt Disney and Gene Kelley of all people!), and hapiness.

It helps to be a dedicated Bradburian to read this, and dedicated Bradburians are probably the only ones who'd buy it, judging from the Amazon sales rank, but it's engaging no matter who you are.

Ray Bradbury has perhaps been the most author who has most influenced my own writing. When I saw this book, I had to have it. What a wonderful glimpse into the mind of a man who can turn language into music, who can make prose sing like poetry. From the first time I checked out one of his books at the library--when I was around nine or ten years old--he taught me that it's possible to transcend the the borders between genres. What a wonder to get a glimpse into the years that make up his life. The only reason I put four instead of five stars is that I'd like to see a true autobiography, in his own words, that looks over the eighty-plus years he's walked the earth.

This book is filled with fascinating stories of his life, his writings, the towns he loved, Paris & Los Angeles, in a series of short familiar essays "in which the writer draws on personal life experience, ideas and the world around him." The one he wrote in 2004, "Remembrance of Books Past," is especially interesting. It's about a fan letter from the great French Renaissance art historian, B. Berenson, and his novel FAHRENHEIT 451, which connected them fifty years ago into a remarkable friendship.

He wrote THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES in 1944 as a collection of stories. He became intersted in the Red Planet as a ten-year-old in Waukegan, Illinois, out looking at the night stars and the "special red fire burning in the dark" sky. He collected Buck Rogers comics, and his favorite was "Buck & Wilma on the Red Planet." He read Edgar Rice Burrough's THE GODS OF MARS. Then, after finishing school, he got a job working on an astronomical program for the Smithsonian Planetarium. He studied some photos of the mysterious universe taken by Lowell Observatory. The started pondering on the Big Bang Theory and the impossibility of so simple (and complex) a creation for our world.

In 2000, at the age of eighty, he remembers how all this early sky watching adn deep thinking had evolved into his science fiction writing. When he was twelve, he became fascinated with the pterodactyl and Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur ride at the Chicago Century of Progress Fair. The 'Sinclair Oil's frozen-in-place paper-mache prehistoric monsters were on the world's first animatronic display. The moving platform provided a four-minute jaunt back to the Past.

First, he's soared into the future in his imagination toward the cosmos. Using the Grand Canyon as foundation for Space Station #1: Earth, his 'Chronicles' took him first to Space Station #1: the Moon. On to #3, Mars; then take off for the whole Universe. Our Space program since the 1960s has taken us there and back, now we're on a mission to Pluto, the last unexplored planet in the solar system.

When he fell "backward to the future," the dinosaurs "delivered me to tomorrow in ways I could not imagine." The memory of walking backward through Chicago's multimillion-year remembrance enabled him to write the screenplay for 'Moby Dick." From there, he was commissioned to develop a building at the New York World's Fair in 1964, with a ride through America's history. He was asked, "Can you create a four-hundred-year history of America in seventeen minutes flat, with a full symphony orchestra?" He was delivered "to the topmost interior of the United States Pavilion, where, gliding on a circular track as big as a football field, he wept in disbelief that by long ago stepping in reverse, he had fallen into Now."

That led into the grand Disney offer to develop the Epcot Center. Walt's Imagineers had a 50 million-dollar building to transform into the world of tomorrow. "Can you write a two-thousand-year communication history in twelve minutes flat with a full symphony orchestra?" He'd made a journey from cave to Ben Franklin's lightning shocks, to Apollo's Moon and beyond. He dedicates this volume "with love to my friends, Loren Eiseley and Aldous Huxley, whose essays showed me the way."

Essays about everything - I really liked the ones about SF especially, but most of the others were enjoyable also - Bradbury's writing style is evident even in short form - and man, the guy knows everybody!

Bradbury Speaks isn't bad...but it's also not that good. Ray Bradbury HAS lived one heck of a life, and in this life, Bradbury has moved through the ages among some of the most interesting and famous people of our time. All the while, he has remained a forward-thinking optimist and a lover of both middle America and the one-time dream city of the 20th century, Los Angeles, where he's lived sans a car for some fifty years. The Bradbury his three-dozen essays introduce is variously Ray Bradbury the cantankerous old coot, Bradbury the surprisingly lusty young buck, Bradbury the opinionated idealist and Bradbury the name-dropper. What was missing from this collection was Bradbury, master of the written word. There just wasn't much to pin down my attention here. I wanted him to talk more about his books and I wanted him to share what made him tick. In short, I wanted to get to know Ray Bradbury better. I thought I'd enjoy this trail back through Bradbury's nine decades, but in his true tales he failed to reach out with the kind of offerings that have made his fiction the stuff of modern legend. Here we can learn about certain events that inspired a few of his books, and we can be a party to his state of mind at various times. We can find out that Bradbury admires Walt Disney's appreciation of joy, and that Bradbury regards Disneyland as the epitome of that lovely inner-happiness expressed before all the world, but for every truly worthy anecdote, we must read thru half a dozen other lesser drags on the reader's time. This book doesn't take anything away from Bradbury's career achievements but it doesn't do a lot toward adding to them, either. I wanted Bradbury's views and stories from his life that...well...that interested me instead of merely being "okay". And OK is all Bradbury Speaks is.

RAY BRADBURY: over the years has been writing about computers and why they are not creative and why they restrict creativity...

He wrote, in his little collection of essays, BRADBURY SPEAKS: "To test my notion, plant me in a room with two hundred chaps, at two hundred computers, give me a number two Red Ticonderoga Pencil and ten cent Red Mowhawk pad and I will outthink and outcreate the whole Goddamn bunch."

Of course, this is a lot of Hoo! Hah! So Ray Bradbury with his pencil and paper is going to sit back and knock off a work of art that will rival SHREK? I'll venture that a man who cannot drive a car, refuses to drive one, is not competent to discuss technology. If he doesn't know how to turn on a computer, he should not criticize what he fails to share and experience.

Of course, a Bradbury fan will applaud this weird statement without thinking. It would sound good on a stage, delivered to a crowd (which it was), get a thunderous round of applause, move the crowd and make everyone nod in approval, but this kind of rabble rousing doesn't carry far, and doesn't reach out on cold print. It just sounds absurd. A computer helped create the book that was published that has this message in it. And when you see it in print, it sounds real dumb. And how are you reading this review?

There are times when being a Luddite isn't worth it. Perhaps in days gone by, the poets complained that when epics were written down, they lost the life they contained. But they were not forgotten. The Maori of New Zealand were disappointed that the young wrote down the names of the elders, instead of committing them to memory. They were not lost or forgotten.

Time will go on, the passions for art will change and how it is created.

And the luddites who cling to old ways of creating may be really losing the thrust that thier writings could give because they cannot change.

Bradbury has been making more absurd staements as he grows older, but this is to be expected. He refuses to change. And the world does change. From being quaint, he now sounds pretty cranky.

There are a lot of good speeches in here, and when he deals with literature, he comes off pretty sound. It is when he approaches something he "instinctively" fears that he is at his worst.

Some of these works don't read very well, because they require the audience feedback and the tone of voice and the interaction between the two. Brabury doesn't write speeches like William James or Mark Twain did, and then again, very few ever did, or will do so again.

I got this for my daughter. It was just what she wanted. I got it quickly and it looked in brand new condition.

My report was done on Bradbury Speaks Too soon from the cave, too far from the stars. At first this book looked very interesting. It said it would talk about space and how we would get to it and how far have we really come from earlier man. But I was proven wrong by the book. The book discusses Bradbury's life and how he met important people and interviews that went into the stuff described but it was really not at all about the future and space. That was the first sign of trouble.

I then began to actually read the book. Oh boy was that hard. The context of the literature is so hard to understand. This was one of the most challenging books I have ever read. It wasn't hard language it was just the way he used it. I struggled all the way through this book just trying to understand what the heck he meant. When I finally did start too understand the book was still a huge bore.

All he would write about was himself and for all I could read about this book it didn't say anywhere that this was an autobiographical book. It says that the stories are written by students and journalists that have Bradbury. But they all sound like they are his words. Like that they are all in first person and they don't come from an interviewer's point of view. This really ticked me off. This book was down right hard.

Now the stories themselves were really difficult. He wrote as if he had no personality. Giving only facts and making the stories dull and uninteresting. Half of them I couldn't even understand what they were about. They are so factual and have absolutely now pizzazz to them. This book gave me a sense of that no one knows what's going to happen to the human race. The book made me both sad and crazy. Crazy because he can't go directly to the point with out having a confusing remark that sent you off another road of thinking. So you would forget all about what you just read and have to start all over again. This is a book that requires too much attention from one person. All the stories talk about is how he met important people and how he likes the rain. Witch is really stupid. The book followed nothing from what you expect it to be. I would now read it if I were you.

If you want a really good book about the future past and present don't look here. But if you are looking for a dull boring something you would read if you had to this would be the book for you. I lost interest in the book since the first page but I had to keep going because it was for school. Other wise I wouldn't bother with the book. I mean even the really weird Hitchcock films were better that this book. I would sit through one thousand Star Wars Episode I movies if I could not read this book again. I would not suggest this book for my life!