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!

This collection was a letdown. It was, as many have said, repetitious, but my biggest problem was Bradbury's utter loathing of things like the Internet, which he seemed to regard as a noisy, inconvenient nuisance at best and a despair inducer at worst, without considering that it might have a few aspects worth valuing, not to mention riotous potential. At the same time, he went into raptures over many things that people used to do--such as taking trains instead of planes, for example (understandable, given Bradbury's fear of flying)--and frequently boasted of his ability to think himself into Herman Melville's state of mind when he was writing a script for Moby Dick. By the end of the book, I felt quite sad. I was not seeing the genius I had loved for so many years, but a querulous old man alternating between reminiscences of the way things used to be and yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.

Ray Bradbury is one of my all time favorite writers. As with many of his long time fans I first discovered him as a child. This was one of a few Bradbury collections I have not read. As such I had been saving it. It saddens me to say that this collection was a grave disappointment. Many of the essays overlap in content, are poorly edited stream of consciousness, and generally lack any sense of wonder normally inherent to Bradbury's works. I blame the editors in their creation of this text rather than Bradbury himself. The context and real insight to each story is missing. The collection is is worth a read if only to humanize the author, but do not expect very much.

Wonderful way of looking at the world from childlike eyes

This suffers from some of the same repetitiveness that caused me to give A Pleasure to Burn just two stars. He can repeat himself at the best of times and you deliberately group his similar stories together, that's even more apparent. This is a collection of essays that Bradbury wrote over the course of his career about various things but I wouldn't exactly all it non-fiction. There's a lot of personal anecdotes that are obviously either created out of whole cloth or greatly elaborated upon.

So, a handful of thing that I noted about the essays --

First, judging by these, Bradbury's experience writing the script for "Moby Dick" obviously had a lingering influence on him - it's something that he mentions over and over again for decades. Yet, I don't recall seeing much influence in his short stories. Is there truly none or is it there and I'm just not recognizing it since I've never read that book?

Second, it seems a bit hypocritical that Bradbury is so adamantly anti-Television when he spends so much time writing movie scripts and talking about and meeting people in the film industry. I just don't get why there's this disdain for the small format but admiration for the large. It baffles me!

Third, I had NO idea he was so anti-political correctness. In his fiction he seems to be cognizant of the nastier implications of institutional racism, which is much more than I can say for many white male authors so it's very jarring when he insists that someone isn't black - he's colored - like the "semidark retainers in childhood films." Or the other essay where he implied that women who aren't mothers/nurses/teachers are macho male wannabes. Or yet another essay where he seems to think that anyone wanting more women and people of color in their fiction are out of their minds because it would mess with the story's aesthetics. I do tend to think of him as a mid-century "small town America" writer from the pre-civil rights and pre-women's lib era and as such, I guess I just ignore these sorts of problems in his work since it's to be expected from fiction of that era. But some of these essays date to the late 1990s - FAR after that time - and I guess it just bugs me a bit that a writer I like had such attitudes so recently.

Forth... Well, I had more to say, but after my third topic, everything else seems a bit superfluous.

(B) 72% | More than Satisfactory
Notes: Unabashedly optimistic and prideful, it has a handful of excellent pieces amongst largely rambling/nonsensical filler.

A collection of disjointed essays, enjoy.

If you love a writer's works, try not to find out what kind of person they actually are, because it might kill your love of the books themselves.

Finished reading Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon From the Cave, Too Far From the Stars by Ray Bradbury.
If all you did was attempt to struggle through The Martian Chronicles in 7th grade and remember kinda hating it or being bored by it you have a very poor idea of who Bradbury is.

But take a moment, if you will, and read with adult eyes. Read to see his message, to understand his ideas; to see the world as he sees it. Stop looking for theme and fore-shadowing, stop essaying the work and see what he sees. Let him tell you what he thinks, how he thinks.

This book is a collection of essays that does just that. Ray Bradbury was a part of some of the most amazing spectacles of imagination the mid-20th century offered, and these essays take you along to show you the way he thought as he brought them to life.

I don't keep many books for rereading, but this is one of them that I will.

I like Bradbury, but this book is a series of essays where some were really good and others kind-of fluffy.

Like many readers, I've been inspired to pick up and read (or re-read) some Ray Bradbury lately. This book contains a bunch of essays, written at various times, and on a variety of subjects. I found I liked a few of them very much -- and I learned some new things. Like -- I had no idea that Something Wicked This Way Comes started out as a short tale called "The Black Ferris," and then into a screenplay that Bradbury wrote for Gene Kelly (?!?) and then was re-worked by Bradbury into the novel. That book is one of my all-time favorite stories (not just by Bradbury, but overall all-time favorites), and I've seen the movie several times .... and I would have never imaged in a million years that there would be a connection to Gene Kelly.

This was just one of the essays that I enjoyed. Some of what Bradbury wrote about is pretty interesting, and some of it is really thought-provoking. There's a lovely essay from 2004 called "Remembrance of Books Past," where Bradbury talks about a conversation he had with Bernard Berenson about the Wilderness People from Fahrenheit 451, and how interesting it would be if all the great books remembered by those people could be reprinted from memory --- and how those stories would change. Bradbury writes, "What if you could pick your favorite? Kipling, Dickens, Wilde, Shaw, Poe. These, memorized and reborn thirty years from today, how would they, unwillingly, change?" (p 29) It's fascinating to ponder how the stories could change, depending on how someone remembered them.

For my full review, please visit my blog: http://fluidityoftime.blogspot.com

This is probably a 3.5 for me. I love listening to the rhythm of Bradbury. There's something alive in his words, a pulse that I can feel, but this collection was not well planned. My main complaint is the repetitive nature of the topics. If you were to make a concordance of this book, I imagine Herman Melville will be among the top words used.

Still, though, there isn't another writer like Ray Bradbury. I plan to add a quote to this review when my son is done his nap and I can access the book.

"We defy old Shakespeare's cry that we are just sound and fury signifying nothing. Our sounding fury will signify something. A silent Universe speaks because we speak. A blind Universe sees because we see. An unknowing Universe knows because we know. Who says? I say. So you will say it, and your children's children's children. We will outlive war and shout-claim the Universe. And live forever, or a million years. Whichever comes first" (Page 154).