Simply the quintessential Bradbury collection of short stories. Some are better than others, but by and large all are good, with some being so fabulous that you remember them always. A must for anyone who loves to read. ( )

(Original Review, 1980-11-16)

There are two ways to look at the work of Ray Bradbury. One is to remember how it was: to return to the old friends of youth, when these stories were beautiful, perceptive and spoke of important things. The other is to look at them as they are now: elegant, but a little shallow; obvious; sentimentalized. To do the latter is to deny the child still within us. Not to do it is to deny the child's long struggle to become an adult. What to do? Bradbury peers quizzically out of the jacket photo, and, startlingly, displays a strong resemblance to James Thurber's customary expression. Correlations: Thurber, out of Columbus, Ohio, with his stories of put-upon, soft-spoken, dreaming men preserving few traces of simple goodness in the face of management directives from bulky, sensible women.

Mother-and-son stories: Bradbury, out of Waukegan and the part of Southern California that's like Waukegan, with his Mars that's like an adolescent boy's room. The parents see the room as cluttered and come barging in to institute reform. The boy sees each object as precious and beautiful, like shells on a beach, though eroded by time and use. Cast there by wind and water, they lie where they ought to be. Move even one, call it ugly, one of them ugly, and the entire beach is ruined.

Parent-and-child stories: There are a hundred of them here, beginning with the 1943 stories that became the early Bradbury books - "The Martian Chronicles," "The Illustrated Man," "Dark Carnival." Uncle Einar, with his leathery wings, his dreadful power, and his affectionate kindness, from the 1946 "Mademoiselle." The Mexican stories, such as "The Next in Line," in which the American tourist wife realized that she has failed to acquire the rights of an adult; that her husband and, more important, great arbitrary managerial forces will pluck her from her own dreams, kill her, wither her and embed her in a catacomb mosaic.

How can we say there's no true art and no force in these stories? When we found them as children, they spoke to the thing parents never visibly grasp, just as Thurber speaks to the same thing: we spend most of our lives as pawns. Thurber's aging men are no longer adult-past it, if they were ever in it; manipulatable [2018 edit: sic; jeez! What a mouthful!] objects. Bradbury's children not only are not yet adult but may, unless they are very resourceful and especially adamant, be pipelined directly into becoming Thurber men or Thurber women trapped into lives in which their own dreams must be subordinated to the task of supervising Thurber men.

And the great horror on whose brink the Bradbury children poise is that the apparent only choice is to bow down and let oneself be arranged or else to become a heedless, insensitive arranger. To give up childhood is to opt for becoming the keeper of a catacomb.

And they are we. Only in part, of course. Life is too various, too flexible, too multifarious for a child to have appraised it all. We are not all advancing toward becoming Walter Mitty, with his errand for puppy biscuit, and Mrs. Mitty, with her errand for keeping Walter Mitty from wandering out into the traffic. Right? Can we all see that? It's not simplistic, as Bradbury makes it. But when we are a little older, perhaps it will be, again.

There's no one for whom to review this book. Adolescents are not concerned whether Bradbury is an important figure of some importance in "belles lettres." It's evident to them that he is. And he's one of the few who is their friend, and you don't analyze your friends. As for you and me, poised here in the hiatus between the initiatory and the terminal stages of helplessness, each of us works out his or her own appraisals of what's useful and what's not. And those old gaffers over there, whom we love, respect and tend - what does it matter what they think?

Bradbury is an overblown stylist, a sentimentalist whose work is better remembered unre-read. And remembered, and remembered. He is a showy and euphuistic storyteller who is forever making tempests out of zephyrs, who plays on anguishes doomed to be seen for the simple glandular secretions they are, just as soon as the glandular secretions slow down. None of those in power over their own lives will find much to approve of in these stories.

So don't ask me what Bradbury's doing these days. He's beginning to look like James Thurber. He's out there looking for the perfect parent and the perfect child. He's doing whatever we're doing. It's no longer 1943, and we're all engaged in serious business.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] ( )

Per un periodo nella mia prima adolescenza non ho praticamente letto altro. Questa è forse la migliore antologia dei suoi racconti. ( )

Three and a half *. Read about 15 stories of this collection. In the introduction Bradbury explains that the main reason for him to write is the sheer joy he has in doing it and that is exactly what these stories radiate: the intense pleasure of storytelling. Funny, chilling, surprising they often are, the only drawback being the setting that is often repeated: vampires, time travel, space adventures. ( )

this guy freaks me out. the way he writes makes u feel waht the charactes feel, usually fear, despair ( )