Today (Aug 22) is Ray Bradbury's 87th birthday. Bradbury is still telling tales, which he dicates over the telephone to his daughter, who then transcribes it.
I was introduced to Bradbury in the 5th grade, many, many years ago. My teacher read "A Sound of Thunder" to our class as I lay my head on my desk imagining the story in my head.
The next day, I went to my school's library and checked out, The Illustrated Man (1951), which was simply amazing. It's about a man, who's entire body was tattooed, with each illustration telling a story (one of his many short stories collected books).
After I finished that book, I checked out every book that my library had, so I had pretty much read Bradbury's entire book release up to 1972's The Halloween Tree.
I can tell you that I had much prefered his Science Fiction stories over his more or less biography stories.
Fahrenheit 451 remain one of my favorite stories of all time. The story is set in the future where books were books were illegal. They have regular raids by the Firemen, whose jobs were not to put out fire, but to burn books.
The title is taken from the point in temperature where paper catches fire (this would be 233°C).
This was made into a relatively popular film in the late sixties, and I'm happy to say that a re-make of Fahrenheit 451 is set to begin filming in 2008.
In keeping with my non-USA song, here's Duran Duran's "Sound of Thunder"... which has nothing to do with the book.... The band is from Birmingham, England, and I can remember one of the first introduction of the band on Entertainment Tonight: "The name Duran was so good, they had to say it again".
August 22, 2007 6:06 PM vu my♥posts [email protected] raybradbury.com
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