Word: asimov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Asimov skips quickly over his birth and early life in the tiny Russian town of Petrovichi, which he left at the age of three and does not fully remember. But he writes with total recall of his sister Marcia and brother Stanley (now assistant publisher of the Garden City, N.Y., daily Newsday) and of their early days in Brooklyn, where Papa Asimov serially owned five candy stores...
...candy store is open every day of the week," writes Asimov of those early days. "In some respects, it made me an orphan." The demands of the store cut him off from his parents; Isaac's behavior severed him from his contemporaries. For he was not only brighter than his older classmates, he was eager to make them aware of his stratospheric...
...lonely, insufferable kid was father of the gifted man. Forbidden to read the lurid pulp magazines sold in the store, Isaac pored over science-fiction monthlies. He soon began to send them short stories. At an age when many fellow students were struggling to express themselves, Asimov, who entered Columbia University's Seth Low Junior College at age 15, helped pay for his college and graduate school with fiction that sold for a penny a word. At a time when many young men were looking for their first postcollege jobs, Asimov published what became one of the most anthologized...
...professor himself (he taught biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine for two decades), with his employers. Nor does he skimp on such intimate details as the site and sound of his introduction to extra marital sex. "What it amounts to is that she seduced me," writes Asimov in apparent amazement. "I just followed along, with my teeth more or less chattering, and not out of passion...
Whether he made other amatory conquests remains to be revealed in Vol. II of Asimov's autobiography, now under fevered construction. For the normally imperturbable author is nervous for the first time in his literary life. "It's kind of frightening," he confesses. "If people don't like your novel, they don't like your novel. But if they don't like your autobiography, it means they don't like you." The anxiety is unnecessary. As William Blake once proclaimed, energy is eternal delight. Not everyone may like every one of Asimov...