In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov: 001 [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I read this book (and all of Asimov's autobiographies) when they were first printed and have read each one at least twice. If you like Asimov's "gentle reader" writing style, reading his autobiographies will be fun for you, more so if you want a view into a busy, obsessed writer's life and the forces that shaped him.

These books are frank (especially "I, Asimov"), interesting, and very often amusing.

"In Memory Yet Green" and "In Joy Still Felt" are large tomes, totalling about 1550pp together.

For a biography of Asimov, you can't do better than these. As he mentioned in his biographies, there's not much in the way of action or big events in these books. It's a long trip through all the words, but the trip is enjoyable.

I have heard it claimed that Isaac Assimov is the only author that has at least one book in every major classification of the Library's Dewey decimal system. Mr. Assimov was a prodigious workaholic author. In this book, written I suppose so he can get a book in the Autobiographical section. Isaac tells of his early life as the son of Russian-Jewish emigrants living in Brooklyn. Work and study became his regiment early on in life. I would recommend this book only if you have enjoyed his regular fare. One can see the seeds of his future books as he goes about trying to select a career path. Assimov goes onto explain his activities during WWII and surprisingly the struggle he had to become an author. Even a budding author with his talent needed mentoring. This is definitely a low-key verbose book that will appeal mainly to his fans. This book includes only his early career. One of his memories was his father's look of surprise when he saw the ocean after they stood on their apartment building roof for the first time. His family had been so intent on running their candy store business that years after arriving in New York they had never realized the ocean was so near. The book is a series of these types of memories, no blockbusters, some would even say "its nothing to write about " but he did and it makes for passable entertainment.

For the record, I should state at the outset that Isaac Asimov provided me with one of the most memorable reading experiences of my youth with "The Caves of Steel," a unique amalgam of the science fiction and detective genres.

However, after that first sublime experience, my further reading of him left me increasingly cold. I began to see his writing as awkward, mechanical and unimaginative, with thin characterization (even by science fiction standards) and pedestrian plotting. He was seemingly never able to shake the literary conventions of the pulp magazines he loved as an adolescent. That may have been at least partly because he apparently never read anything else but science fiction and thus had no acquaintance with higher literary standards.

So, how to explain his popularity? One possible reason is that he was good with ideas, which are cherished by science fiction fans. Another, and more likely explanation, is that he was the consummate self-promoter. He had a talent for selling himself to fans and editors alike by the consistent application of boundless energy in the service of his own ego. This tendency is clearly reflected throughout "In Memory Yet Green," which reveals an eager-to-please but calculating individual who made himself a primary figure in the science fiction world by sheer force of personality. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as many ultimately deserving reputations are made that way, but the quality of the work Asimov left behind pales in comparison to the audacity employed in its promotion. And, as is true in many such cases, the individual himself is revealed as shallow, immature and self-absorbed. Asimov unwittingly does so in page after page of this autobiography, whether he is describing his extremely penurious spending habits (which he saw as normal), his reprehensible behavior toward women (which he describes with typical lack of insight as "suave"), his obsession with money (he insists on providing a down-to-the-penny accounting of every check he ever received, an enervating exercise for the reader), as well as numerous trivial details of his life which could be of interest only to himself.

It is, in sum, the most narcissistic autobiography I have ever read. One can only explain its publication by reference to Asimov's finely-honed talent for self-promotion. Few others could have gotten away with it.

To be fair, though, there are some good things here, such as his (too-brief) descriptions of some of the other famous figures in science fiction history and his insider's view of publishing in those days. But, on the whole, spending several hours reading this book is like spending a year diligently panning for gold in the nearest creek bed: an exhausting exercise unlikely to reveal anything of lasting value.