Word: aldous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ALDOUS HUXLEY, by John Atkins; THE HUXLEYS, by Ronald W. Clark. Cynic or mystic? Humanist or cold fish? Both books get close to the answers as they dissect the puzzling genius whose family contributed more than its share of intellectual heavyweights...
...alienated of a latter-day generation, Huxley was all heart: pacifist, passionate pioneer of mind-blowing drugs, hippie blood brother in Oriental mysticism. But when this Aldous Huxley, shot through with cancer and LSD, died at 69-a few hours after President Kennedy-on Nov. 22, 1963, he could have met no stranger ghost on his final trip than his younger self...
Baby Mine! The obligation to be clever in some way came as a birthright-rather reverently if hastily tracked through three generations by Family Biographer Ronald Clark. Above Aldous' cradle brooded the example of his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, a brilliant biologist and a public defender of Darwin when Origin of Species was shocking fundamentalists. Representing a kind of caretaker generation, Aldous' father Leonard devoted most of his life to a two-volume biography reciting the achievements of T.H. and looking forward with confidence to his own chil dren's outdoing him. No one is quite sure...
...chances are that he meant this ominous burden for both. Julian obliged by becoming a distinguished biologist and scientific humanist. Aldous came equipped to be clever: his head was so big it kept him from walking until he was two. By the age of nine, he already struck others as "aloof and secretly critical...
...through Eton and Oxford to live in a thin, rarefied world of his own. His notion of conversation, Osbert Sitwell grumbled, was to relay data on the "incestuous mating of melons" or the "curious amorous habits of cuttlefish." In words that Clark applies to all the Huxleys, young Aldous seemed less a human being than "something more nearly approaching a controlled experiment...