- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Headline Book Publishing (6 Oct 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0755311558
- ISBN-13: 978-0755311552
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 793,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" launched Douglas Adams to instant superstardom when it came out in 1978, becoming a success as a novel, radio and TV series. Like all his best work it was funny, but seriously funny. But Adams the comic writer, who worked with Monty Python among others, is only part of the story. He had a probing scientific mind and was happy discussing ideas with the likes of Richard Dawkins or Stephen Pinker. And his ideas in "Hitchhiker" helped inspire the techies of the IT revolution. Here, Nick Webb has created a portrait of a larger than life character who is still mourned by his millions of fans around the world.
About the Author
Nick Webb worked in publishing for 30 years, eventually becoming MD of Simon & Schuster for nine years. He first met Douglas Adams when he acquired THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY for Pan, and they remained friends thereafter.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Where to begin with this dreadful book? The prose is appalling, frequently straying into a (presumably deliberate) cod-pastiche of Adams' style. It's thematically, not chronologically, structured, so you find yourself jumping back and forth around Adams' life throughout. This is both irritating and confusing. And author Nick Webb - who knew Adams - is too close to his subject to bring a critical perspective. Essentially, this isn't really a biography as such, but rather an account of Douglas Adams' publishing projects interspersed with extended, unprocessed recollections from people who knew him. There may be snippets of trivia here for the Adams' obsessive, but anyone wanting a rounded view of the man behind the books should look elsewhere.
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If you want a history of British publishing in the 1980s, packed with minutiae about contracts and printers, this is the book for you. It is also a great insight into Nick Webb himself as he pontificates on art, science, literature and history, some of it even vaguely connected with Douglas Adams. But as a biography, Wish You Were Here falls far short.
Wish You Were Accurate might be a better title as the book is peppered with small but careless errors. People's names are misspelled, titles are misquoted, and Webb manages to get the name of Adams's private rock concerts wrong even though he was there himself. He claims a definition in The Deeper Meaning Of Liff refers to an event in 1985 - but that definition was first published in 1983! Webb's knowledge of Doctor Who seems minimal, and he has researched Adams's schooldays by simplying reading one book and flicking through a few old school magazines. The Hitchhiker's Guide computer game gets only a couple of passing references and the Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide isn't mentioned at all.
Unlike most biographies, this doesn't start with Adams being born and end with him dying but instead it rambles all around the houses. And the footnotes! Almost every page has one or two lengthy footnotes, many of them serving no purpose but to show off the author's erudition. Without them the book would be half as long.
Although Wish You Were Here was published several months after M.J. Simpson's Hitchhiker - A Biography Of Douglas Adams, Webb doesn't appear to have read the other book and presents as true several well-known anecdotes which Simpson has already shown to be the products of Adams's imagination. The only place where Webb scores over Simpson is in a few pages near the start where he explores Adams's strained relationship with his father. But to get to that good stuff the reader has to plough through a tedious, irrelevant guide to the Adams family tree going back almost to the stone age.
If you want a lightweight, entertaining, well-written account of Adams's life as told by Adams himself, read the updated edition of Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic. If you want a detailed history and analysis of who Douglas Adams was, what he did and why he did it, packed with insightful comments from everyone who ever knew him, read Simpson's book. It's difficult to know who would want to read Nick Webb's book, which is hard work and ultimately deeply unsastisfying, which is a shame.
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I hadn't heard of this book until another 'Hitchhiker' fan told me. It's written by someone who was both a fan and a friend of Douglas Adams, and it tells a fascinating tale of the brain behind one of the greatest comic adventures of our time. Adams was larger than life, complex, curious and at times deeply troubled, and his full story is laid out here for his fans, but with a wry smile and a basic sympathy from the author. Once I started, it was hard to put down, which is something I seldom say about any biography.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
An inter-galatic biography
I have only just come across Adams a zillion years after everyone else and having secured a copy of the Webb book found it a hugely rewarding insight into a complex genius. Read more
Published on 7 Jun 2004
What more can i say...
This is a wonderful insight into Douglas Adams from such a personal point of view. I was genuinely absorbed by this biography which was written in such an engaging way. Read more
Published on 19 May 2004
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