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Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert

Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert

List Price: $27.95
Your Price: $18.45
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Interesting, with some provisos...
Review: In Dreamer of Dune, Brian Herbert, AKA "Number One Son," provides an in-depth look into the mind of the man who produced Dune, several sequels, and a number of other worthy books. Frank Herbert was a man of great genius--obvious from his writing--who also had many failings, particularly as a father. The book wonderfully describes Frank Herbert's deep love for his wife, Bev, and his feelings for his children and friends, the genesis of his book themes, his work habits, early life, and much more. Dreamer of Dune is a big book, but it's a quick and interesting read (I finished it in just a couple of days). Some minor irritations include the author's misspelling of Sterling Lanier's book "Hiero's Journey" as "Hero's Journey," plus other groaners like describing how he awoke in the morning "with a full stomach." The author also has the strange habit of repeating information that was covered earlier in the text, plus, as mentioned by other reviewers, a penchant for covering unworthy trivia. Highly recommended, though, for the Frank Herbert fan.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Interesting, with some provisos...
Review: In Dreamer of Dune, Brian Herbert, AKA "Number One Son," provides an in-depth look into the mind of the man who produced Dune, several sequels, and a number of other worthy books. Frank Herbert was a man of great genius--obvious from his writing--who also had many failings, particularly as a father. The book wonderfully describes Frank Herbert's deep love for his wife, Bev, and his feelings for his children and friends, the genesis of his book themes, his work habits, early life, and much more. Dreamer of Dune is a big book, but it's a quick and interesting read (I finished it in just a couple of days). Some minor irritations include the author's misspelling of Sterling Lanier's book "Hiero's Journey" as "Hero's Journey," plus other groaners like describing how he awoke in the morning "with a full stomach." The author also has the strange habit of repeating information that was covered earlier in the text, plus, as mentioned by other reviewers, a penchant for covering unworthy trivia. Highly recommended, though, for the Frank Herbert fan.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Interesting, with some provisos...
Review: In Dreamer of Dune, Brian Herbert, AKA "Number One Son," provides an in-depth look into the mind of the man who produced Dune, several sequels, and a number of other worthy books. Frank Herbert was a man of great genius--obvious from his writing--who also had many failings, particularly as a father. The book wonderfully describes Frank Herbert's deep love for his wife, Bev, and his feelings for his children and friends, the genesis of his book themes, his work habits, early life, and much more. Dreamer of Dune is a big book, but it's a quick and interesting read (I finished it in just a couple of days). Some minor irritations include the author's misspelling of Sterling Lanier's book "Hiero's Journey" as "Hero's Journey," plus other groaners like describing how he awoke in the morning "with a full stomach." The author also has the strange habit of repeating information that was covered earlier in the text, plus, as mentioned by other reviewers, a penchant for covering unworthy trivia. Highly recommended, though, for the Frank Herbert fan.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An inticate and personal view on the life of Frank Herbert
Review: Not but two minutes ago, I read the last page of this book. I had only recieved it a few short days ago, and throughout those few days, I could hardly put this book down. As a fan of the senior Herbert, I began collecting the Dune series in hardback, and wanted this book to add to my collection, little had I known that it would be so influencial to me. As I read this book, I laughed, felt the onset of tears, I anguished over the last days of Beverly Herbert, and felt immense sorrow when Frank passed away so suddenly along with Brian, Jan and the rest of Herbert's loving family. Reading this book showed me the quiet bond that can grow between father and son, and made me think of my own relationship with my father, and how one day, I too will have to face the pain of losing a parent. Dreamer of Dune isn't just a powerful book that I'd heartily reccomend to any fan of Dune, it's a window into the life of the man behind the stories, an incredible glimpse into the events that shaped his amazing imagination. I can't reccomend this book enough.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Leto's confessions?
Review: Not quite, although I did tire of hearing about what a rotten father Frank Herbert had been to Brian. I don't idealize Herbert and can see the need to be true to how his children experienced him, but as my other reviews indicate, I am not a fan of people bringing relentlessly into print recurrent complaints that ought to be voiced within the family, between friends, or in therapy. Nevertheless, to see the two reconciled was warming to read; both fathers and sons will appreciate many of the obstacles involved.

I was going to comment at length on the poor editing job (the main reason I only gave this book a 3) but reviewers below have already done so. An obvious catch would have been asking the author to decide between Dad, Father, Frank, and Frank Herbert. The frequent shifts made my eyes sore. (I should own up here to a negative impression going in to this biography: when I wrote the author to ask a question about Chapterhouse, he responded only with a pitch for his own serializations. This lost him a potential customer.)

Many interesting connections are drawn between Herbert's personal experiences and various themes in his books, particularly the Dune books. For those alone it's a worthy read, and may enhance your appreciation of the original series. There are also many interesting anecdotes about Herbert's life and the sense of jovial humanity that shines through in his writing.

The book is clear and very readable and organized in chronological fashion to make Herbert's life story unfold in a meaningful and easily understood order. The death of brave Beverly and the family's reactions were particularly moving, and upon hearing at one point that the author could not continue writing, I too put down the book for a moment, feeling the pain in the words.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Leto's confessions?
Review: Not quite, although I did tire of hearing about what a rotten father Frank Herbert had been to Brian. I don't idealize Herbert and can see the need to be true to how his children experienced him, but as my other reviews indicate, I am not a fan of people bringing relentlessly into print recurrent complaints that ought to be voiced within the family, between friends, or in therapy. Nevertheless, to see the two reconciled was warming to read; both fathers and sons will appreciate many of the obstacles involved.

I was going to comment at length on the poor editing job (the main reason I only gave this book a 3) but reviewers below have already done so. An obvious catch would have been asking the author to decide between Dad, Father, Frank, and Frank Herbert. The frequent shifts made my eyes sore. (I should own up here to a negative impression going in to this biography: when I wrote the author to ask a question about Chapterhouse, he responded only with a pitch for his own serializations. This lost him a potential customer.)

Many interesting connections are drawn between Herbert's personal experiences and various themes in his books, particularly the Dune books. For those alone it's a worthy read, and may enhance your appreciation of the original series. There are also many interesting anecdotes about Herbert's life and the sense of jovial humanity that shines through in his writing.

The book is clear and very readable and organized in chronological fashion to make Herbert's life story unfold in a meaningful and easily understood order. The death of brave Beverly and the family's reactions were particularly moving, and upon hearing at one point that the author could not continue writing, I too put down the book for a moment, feeling the pain in the words.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A life lived with Frank Herbert
Review: The author Frank Herbert (1920-1985) is best known for his wildly popular novel Dune, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1965 and arguably the best science fiction novel ever written. In his biography Dreamer of Dune, Frank Herbert's son Brian tells us the story behind the desert planet of his father's imagination, breathing life into the brilliant but imperfect character of the bearish man who so dominated his own life. In straightforward, no-frills prose, Brian Herbert tells the story of his father's life chronologically and in great detail, from Frank's dangerously independent childhood in the Pacific northwest--at the age of nine he sailed on his own in a row boat from his home town of Burley, Washington to the San Juan islands and back, a distance of more than two hundred miles--to his sudden death at the age of 65 from a pulmonary embolism. Along the way Herbert's life was dominated by two focuses, his writing--he was a prolific author who wrote with a feverish intensity and demanded that his time at the typewriter remain inviolate--and his wife: Beverly Herbert, Brian's mother, was Frank's partner in life and in the business of writing for nearly forty years, theirs the sort of marriage that grew in intensity over time and which seems to have been a stronger bond than either shared with their children. Beverly predeceased her husband by slightly more than two years. (Frank's devotion to Beverly is perhaps called into question by the fact that he was married again so soon after her death, to a woman thirty-six years his junior. He pronounced himself "in love" with this young woman less than three months after his wife's death.)

The picture Brian paints of his father is not wholly flattering. Frank Herbert was a larger-than-life personality, the benevolent and booming host of dinner parties, a witty raconteur. He was a doting husband and a loyal friend. A man filled with curiosity and energy, Herbert was always planning new projects--literary, ecological, architectural. Prior to his death he was planning on becoming the oldest man to climb Mt. Everest. But his personality had a less attractive side, the ego and arrogance that came with his genius. Brian Herbert writes of his father: "He dominated every conversation, even when a room was full of people, and sometimes I found his ego hard to bear. But that was his way, and he was, after all, the most interesting person any of us knew." Herbert demanded that others bend to his writing schedule to an unreasonable degree; he required a surprising degree of assistance, of gophering, from Brian in his adulthood, and he became wroth when his directions were not followed to the letter. Most importantly, although he made up for it to an extent in later years, Frank was a lousy father, impatient with his children (and, years hence, with his grandchildren), whose noise threatened to interrupt his work. He was a strict disciplinarian who hooked his sons up to a lie detector he'd procured and sweated the truth of their peccadilloes out of them. Brian and his brother Bruce--we hear very little about the latter in the book--were both estranged from their father at various points in their lives, though Brian became very close to Frank in his adulthood.

Weighing in at more than 500 pages, Dreamer of Dune is a long slog of a book which would have benefited from energetic editing. Part of the problem is that material is sometimes repeated. We are told three times, for example, that the Herberts may be descended from Henry VIII. The worse problem is that the book is overflowing with insignificant details, as if the author were attempting to include in the biography the text of every journal entry he ever made and every last bit of family lore he could lay his hands on. These tidbits are strewn about the book in passages that could readily have been cut from their surroundings. Thus, for example, we are told early in the book about Frank Herbert's dental hygiene:

"From an early age Frank Herbert was fastidious about his teeth, spending as much as fifteen minutes at a time brushing them. In his entire lifetime he never had one cavity, and his teeth were so perfect that dentists marveled upon seeing them."

And later on we hear about the character of a yawn Frank Herbert yawned at about ten o'clock on a Saturday in July of 1980:

"Just before ten o'clock Dad bid us good night at his usual time, so that he could rise early the next morning and write. He kissed Mom and whispered something in her ear, which caused her to smile. As he shuffled off to bed he yawned, simultaneously making a drawn-out, mid-range tone that was punctuated with a high pitched 'yow' at the end. He entered the master bedroom and closed the door behind him."

It is remarkable that that "yow" business made it into Brian Herbert's journal, let alone into his published biography of his father.

On a second discussion of the Herbert teeth, we hear also of Frank's difficulty sleeping one night in August of 1981:

"I recall seeing him in our bathroom in boxer shorts one morning, flossing his teeth. He had always taken care of his teeth. They were perfect, without a cavity. He said he didn't sleep well the night before, and that when he drifted off he snored more than usual, and it kept waking him up. His back was bothering him a little, too, though he propped a big pillow under the head of the mattress as he normally did. We offered him some aspirin for the pain, but he said he was all right."

Banal as these details are, they do serve to paint for persevering readers a very intimate and surprisingly moving picture of a life lived in Frank Herbert's circle. After this 500-odd-page entrée into his father's family life, one cannot be left unmoved by Brian Herbert's loving account of his parents' relationship, of the tragedy of his mother's lingering illness and death, of Frank Herbert's singular devotion to his wife. Readers interested in getting to know the man behind the masterpiece, boxer shorts, floss, and all, will enjoy Brian Herbert's biography.

Debra Hamel -- book-blog reviews
Author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Close and Insightful Look at a SF Legend
Review: When you know inside information about the life of a man who's influenced the literary community, you can't help but let that seep into your writing. Especially if you're writing a biography about this man. Add to that the fact that you're his son, and you've got a triple-whammy!

Brian Herbert (a successful author in his own right) shows us the powerful life of his legendary father, Frank Herbert, in Dreamer of Dune, the biography of Frank Herbert's life.

The story surrounds Frank Herbert from his humble beginnings in small town Washington, to his rise to the head of science fiction's most coveted awards (the Nebula and Hugo awards).

Brian Herbert takes us on an emotional rollercoaster ride as Frank and his family go from starving in Mexico, to eating caviar in Hawaii. Then we get let down again as Bev, Frank's love of his life, passes away.

Throughout the biography, Brian expertly weaves the life that would lead Frank Herbert to write his magnum opus: Dune. His newspaper days, working for senatorial candidates, ecological research and travels all helped shape the world of Dune that would emerge onto the literary world and shape the science fiction community for decades to come.

A well-written biography with some touching information on a man who may still remain and enigma to many fans. Enjoy.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Close and Insightful Look at a SF Legend
Review: When you know inside information about the life of a man who's influenced the literary community, you can't help but let that seep into your writing. Especially if you're writing a biography about this man. Add to that the fact that you're his son, and you've got a triple-whammy!

Brian Herbert (a successful author in his own right) shows us the powerful life of his legendary father, Frank Herbert, in Dreamer of Dune, the biography of Frank Herbert's life.

The story surrounds Frank Herbert from his humble beginnings in small town Washington, to his rise to the head of science fiction's most coveted awards (the Nebula and Hugo awards).

Brian Herbert takes us on an emotional rollercoaster ride as Frank and his family go from starving in Mexico, to eating caviar in Hawaii. Then we get let down again as Bev, Frank's love of his life, passes away.

Throughout the biography, Brian expertly weaves the life that would lead Frank Herbert to write his magnum opus: Dune. His newspaper days, working for senatorial candidates, ecological research and travels all helped shape the world of Dune that would emerge onto the literary world and shape the science fiction community for decades to come.

A well-written biography with some touching information on a man who may still remain and enigma to many fans. Enjoy.


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