It’s a perfectly fine biography that suffers a bit from jumping around like crazy.

Douglas Adams is one of my all time favorite authors. I don't know how many times I've read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Let's just sat that I now own three copies of it, and they have all been read at least once. In my view he is among the best comedy writers of novels to come out of Britain. The British comedy writer that I have read as often is P. G. Wodehouse who I also absolutely adore. But despite how much I like him this is the first biography about Douglas Adams I've read.

This biography is mostly centered around his working life. It is very interesting, but in a sense very sad. Adams seems to have been the opposite of Wodehouse in his attitude towards work. Wodehouse liked writing a lot, he spent a lot of time on in it all through his life, but Adams had a hard time with it, to say the least. In fact I get the sense that being a writer was probably what he was best at, but at the same time what he was least suited to do.

It was a good and interesting read. Simpson has a humorous touch, but still makes a good, and detailed account of Adams life from the time he was in school, until his untimely death. I enjoyed this book, even though it gave me a little different view of my idol than I had got from reading his books, listening to the radio plays, and watching the TV series, and movie. He definitly wasn't without flaws, but he was still a great writer even though he may not have enjoyed that part of his job much.

A warts-and-all biography of the great man - which isn't as bad as it sounds, because there weren't many warts in Adams' life. He was flawed, but never fatally; some blind spots and hang-ups, but by and large someone who was likeable and liked by most people he met. The author M.J. Simpson is obviosuly one of those people - but he is also a journalist, first and foremost, and so he pulls no punches in getting to the actual truth. Many, many myths and legends grew up around Adams' life and Simpson is able to get to the root of most of them. It still speaks of a charmed life that happened to a man whose good fortune it is impossible to begrudge. Still, I was interested to see how Simpson touches on Adams’ notorious inability to meet a deadline; he’s not having any of it. A journalist knows how these things matter. Adams never did. Unfortunately, he always (eventually) laid the golden egg and so he was allowed to get away with it. If any publisher had ever had the guts to say to him, "Sorry, too late, you missed the boat, here’s your manuscript back" then who knows what might have happened.

Oddly episodic and lacking much depth but still an interesting read for those of us brought up on Hitchhikers.

Recommended biography of Douglas Adams. Well researched and written. Obviously of absolute highest interest for HHGTTG fans, but I think others can appreciate it as well.

Well and carefully recorded, because there are many varying anecdotes, this bio of Douglas Adams brings home a lot of good about the man. Also, to me what came across, was that Adams had a couple of good ideas in his life and went about using them over and over, from performing days at Cambridge with The Footlights to the same ideas being shoehorned in to a first or fifth novel. His idols were all male, Python and the Beatles and so on, and he later met many of them and worked with several.

Other than the first two Hitchhiker books, drawn from a collaboration radio script, I didn't enjoy anything by Adams, except Last Chance To See, written with Mark Carwardine. Nor did he produce many books, just nine, and some of those dashed off in a few weeks after he had spent the million pound advance and his publishers were making a sequence of final demands. He didn't like writing. He just liked having ideas. That shows.

We're told of enormous and lavish parties; we are not reading a word about any odd substances that may or may not have been present at any time. Except alcohol, of which there was a muchness. This is probably tact and a need to avoid legal consequences, but given the times, somebody may have brought something somewhere. Adams, who denied himself sleep for days to get work written after ignoring the need to start for months, died aged only 49. His work in progress was a computer game being developed by a firm that ran out of funds and was bought by the BBC; and the hope of a film being made of his first book. Which was eventually made after a common sense move added an obvious romance to the plot. The whole atmosphere around Adams seemed to be blokey and he admitted to not understanding women, which would be why almost all his characters are male.

I recommend the contrasting auto bio of Michael Caine's, Blow The Bloody Doors Off. That is a much better way to succeed. Rather than the world's largest collection of left handed guitars, or every Apple computer as they were issued, Caine bought his mother a house from the proceeds of a film. He showed up for work and worked for the show.

The notes at the end of Hitchhiker are a textbook example of careful recording of conversations, correspondence, and published content. Photos are included, mostly from early days.
I borrowed this book from the RDS Library. This is an unbiased review.

This is a bit dull in places. The author seemed to include some information just by virtue of the fact that he'd acquired it. But Douglas Adams's life is an interesting enough topic to make up for most of the book's shortcomings.

A good biography of one of the most interesting men. The only way to make it better would have been if Douglas wrote it himself, but then it would have become a work of fiction.

If you're looking for a Douglas Adams biography as written by a Vogon, then this is the book for you. It was really hard not to throw away and I only finished it because I paid for it and had some sunk cost fallacy working against me.
Really, really hard to read this book as the author seems more in favor of repeating himself while throwing name after name and date after date at the reader with almost no personality at all. Did you know Adams always failed to make deadlines? Prepare to be told this at least forty or two hundred times while reading this book. Not terrible but also not terribly interesting.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/685584.html[return][return]This is really an exploration of Adams in his own words and in the words of people around him, including attempts to get at the truth or otherwise of various anecdotes told by or about him during his life. Simpson conveys well both Adams' charm and the way in which he infuriated friends and colleagues. He is probably fair to put some of the blame of Adams' failure to produce on his editors. Apart from that, it's a bit unsatisfying; as John Lloyd hints in the introduction, Adams' family life, particularly his relationship with his father, remains pretty much unexplored. Also I would like someone to look at Adams' work in perhaps a more literary way, with more reflections on the social context of his writing and how he did (or didn't) link into the issues of the day.

The first third or so of this book is a hard slog: just lots of names and dates. As it does along, though, it does get more readable.

Incredibly well researched: perhaps too much so. I’m glad to have read it, but the actual reading was a chore in places. There’s a definite focus on cataloguing facts and events, rather than trying to flesh out the personality of Douglas Adams.

Overall, a bit dry for me - a bit ‘Colin from the fan club’.

One of two major biographies of Adams, both put into print within three years of the man's death. The "official" biography (Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams) was penned by Nick Webb, a friend of Adams, while this one was penned by M. J. Simpson, an expert on Adams's work, and involved in running the official Hitchhiker's Guide fan club; it's not the "official" bio, but it was written with the understanding and acquiescence of Adams's surviving family.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wish You Were Here is a sprightly-if-verbose book that gives a good sense of what it would've been like to work with Douglas Adams, or to have been his friend; but it isn't, frankly, an especially good biography. Simpson's bio is, also unsurprisingly, more comprehensive and minutiae-oriented, but only intermittently gives a sense of what Adams was actually like in life. Both books are by, essentially, "friendly witnesses," and they tend to be, if anything, over-respectful and over-reverent. They aren't dishonest about Adams's foibles, but neither bio really tries to get inside Adams's head, or to seriously examine his relationships with others. (And ultimately, they're biographies of a man known for his output of comedy writing, with the main tragedy of his life being his premature death; and both bios are written for, basically, an audience of established fans, rather than critical scholars. So it's hard to expect much more- things like analysis of his correspondence, or a study of his writing methods, etc- disappointing though that might be.)

I guess I'd recommend this book if what you want is a solid, workmanlike bio of Adams, focused on his career, while I'd recommend Webb's bio if you want more Adams "flavor." Neither can really be called "definitive."