The Man Who Grew Young

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Summary: The Man Who _Never_ Grew Young...
Review: ...
...is the name of an sf short story from 1947 by Fritz Leiber. The premise and some of the details are so close to what is in Quinn's book, that it amazes me to see no comments comparing them, especially in the "editorial" reviews. I would call it plagiarism, conscious or unconcious, but I don't know if Daniel Quinn ever read or heard of the story. It seems just as likely that he never read it, because a concious plagiarist would have changed MORE of it! Sorry to say, the Leiber version's ending and philosophy are more thought-provoking than Quinn's.

It is a great story, and not rare or hard to find. Here are some or all of the places it was published:

Night's Black Agents, Arkham, 1947, 1961,1978
The Dark Side, ed. Damon Knight, Doubleday, 1965
The Best of Fritz Leiber, Nelson Doubleday, 1974, 1997
Beyond Reality, ed. Terry Carr, Elsvier/Nelson, 1979
The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction, ed. Robert Silverberg & Martin H. Greenberg, Arbor House, 1980

Rating:
Summary: What a load of Sophmoric Horse Pucky
Review: Daniel Quinn always surprises me with his ability to think outside the lines and create alternative realities. He wanted to write a novel that went backward in time. "Impossible" he was told. Impossible to write, impossible to sell. He wanted to write it as a screenplay. Same reaction. Finally he wrote it as an adult comic book, illustrated by Tim Eldred. Does it work? Pretty much. Satisfying? Surprisingly, yes, up to the ending. It's filled with Quinn's usual concerns about the environment and our place in the scheme of things. And there's a bonus. His preface "The Lure of the Impossible" provides raw encouragement to every writer who has tried to push the envelope.

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Summary: In Search of Mom
Review: Daniel Quinn always surprises me with his ability to think outside the lines and create alternative realities. He wanted to write a novel that went backward in time. "Impossible" he was told. Impossible to write, impossible to sell. He wanted to write it as a screenplay. Same reaction. Finally he wrote it as an adult comic book, illustrated by Tim Eldred. Does it work? Pretty much. Satisfying? Surprisingly, yes, up to the ending. It's filled with Quinn's usual concerns about the environment and our place in the scheme of things. And there's a bonus. His preface "The Lure of the Impossible" provides raw encouragement to every writer who has tried to push the envelope.

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Summary: A Tale of Our Place in the World...
Review: Daniel Quinn's latest book is the one he calls his favorite. Like many of his books, it's an impossible one to write, meaning it's an impossible story to tell in book form (much like his work ISHMAEL was for so many years, and which he finally DID manage to write in a way that worked). His latest is The Man Who Grew Young, and thanks to the brilliant efforts of artist Tim Eldred, Daniel was finally able to tell his story of a man suspended in time while the entire universe moved backward around him.

Imagine a world in which you're born by coming out of the ground, old, and in which you grow younger as your life progresses until the day comes when you return to the womb. Imagine one man who for some strange reason lives outside of this process, and who spends his thousands of years searching for the clue to the mystery that he is.

The only way this story could be well told is in graphic novel form, and because it's a graphic novel, it can be easily read in less than an hour. But like most well-written graphic novels, doing so would be doing the story a grave injustice, for this one must be read carefully, and its ideas slowly considered and carefully digested. Daniel lays out a scenario of man's place in the universe, and such a story is NOT to be brushed aside lightly.

Eldred's work is fantastic, and Quinn's story an engaging and inspiring mystery. The man who only grows young when he unravels the mystery of his being could be any of us, searching for our origins and finding it in the only place it could be...where all humanity comes from and where all humanity resides. I found this to be a great read.

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Summary: Left stranded
Review: I enjoyed the book, which tells a story of a man living in a world that runs backwards rather than forwards. The implications are interesting (for example, how we perceive time as running in one direction only as the ONE RIGHT WAY to understand time). If you've read Vonnegut's novel "Timequake" you might enjoy this story. However, I did not find the ending satisfactory. I did not understand what the ending meant, and it did not provide closure or completeness to the story. (I'm still looking for someone to explain it to me, in case I misunderstood the ending and the fault is my own lack of comprehension rather than a shortcoming of the text.)

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Summary: An Incredible Journey
Review: I have read most of Quinn's books and as an author he is extraordinary. All of his books have opened up new thought processes and gotten so many of my questions about our place here in this world answered.
In The Man Who Grew Young, Quinn gets help adding great visuals to a mind-boggling story. The main character, Adamn Taylor, is stuck in a world which goes backwards from the world we know. Life in this place in time goes from ground to whom, earth mother to flesh mother, and Adam is unique in that he cannot Find his mother. Without his mother to reunite with, he stays in time as every life ever lived is lived again, in reverse. He watches our resources returned to the earth, our cities dismantled, our weapons thrown away.
I love how Quinn gets the reader thinking in new ways - exploring different ideas and possibilities, and that's just what he did again here - magnificently.
I also have to say that Tim Eldred did a wonderful job of expressing Quinn's story. My kids are a huge fan of PBS's Dragon Tales, which i later found out that Tim Eldred produced. What a small world. :D
I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to go on a wild journey of the mind - thinking thoughts we rarely dare to think.

Starr

Rating:
Summary: Not quite what I expected.
Review: I picked up this book with Quinn's other works in mind - fantastic books like _Ishmael_, _The Story of B_, and such - and thus had high hopes for it. The concept is surely a difficult one to write in a flowing and compelling manner - the universe is collapsing upon itself, and one man is bearing witness to the de-evolution of humankind and all life. Everyone lives their lives backwards, rising up from the ground, and growing younger and younger, until they return to their mother's womb.

Quinn tries to impart important points through this story, but I feel that this format is much less impacting than his standard books. The graphic novel is useful to more easily portray concepts that would take paragraphs, but ultimately, it just didn't work for me. Most of the text boxes just didn't *sound* like Quinn to me - the dialogue was flat, stilted...just not up to his usual standard.

I really wanted to like this book, because I've loved everything I've run across that Quinn has written. Alas, it just wasn't to be. The introduction was the best part of the book for me, during which he discusses creating "impossible stories."

All in all, this isn't a *bad* book - it just didn't quite work for me as I'd hoped it would. I almost gave it two stars, and if I had my druthers, I'd give it a 2.5.

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Summary: this is a comic book for the ages
Review: I was surprised to see that this was a comic book(graphical novel thats what they called it) I thought I was going to be dissapointed for the first time by Quinn.
Having read both Ishmael books and the Story of B, I had high hopes for this one.
I wasn't!
The story moves fast you can probably read it in under an hour, but you'll probably want to take your time and check out the cool art work.
Bottom line is this is a story that I will remember as with Ishmael. Fans of Quinn's will not be dissapointed.

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Summary: Proof of the validity of Quinn-tesential thought?
Review: In mathematics, one way to test the validity of an equation is to try it backwards.
Here, Quinn does just that, and gives a fun ride while he does so.
With this fun tale of the course of humanity in reverse, we see the unfolding of Quinn's hypotheses for a best potential future, and it seems to be a very successful one: new ways of regarding ourselves in relationship to the planet and each other which are not merely pie-in-the-sky utopian fantasies, but down-to-earth examples of how revolutionary the bare, naked truth - drawn from biology, anthropology, sociology, theology, and other "ologies" - can be (of course, you'll need to read his other works to really get the full scope of what I mean)... Great little gem of a book.

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Summary: Schtick is a Recycle of PK Dick's "Counter Clock World"
Review: Much as I like Quinn, the device isn't original at all: Philip K. Dick used it in the mid-60s in "Counter Clock World". I'm loathed to suggest Quinn eat "sorghum" (cf. the original) on this count, but reviewers at least ought to consider it in the context of the Dick work, not as some sort of breakthrough.