Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury’s Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland

Loosely based on the period in 1953 when Bradbury lived in Ireland and worked on the screenplay of “Moby Dick” for film director John Huston. A series of terrific set-pieces (such as, “The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place,” “The Cold Wind and the Warm,” and “The Anthem Sprinters”) are strung together with accounts of the writer-narrator’s meetings with the director, and incidents of the latter’s casual cruelty and unreasonable demands. But the set-pieces, embedded in a 1992 volume, date from the mid-1970s and before, and one might have preferred a more direct, detailed portrait of Huston and Bradbury instead of this recycled collection. But if one has never read any Bradbury before, this is as good a place to start as any, particularly for its rich, entertaining portrait of Ireland and the Irish. Read by Jimmie A. Kepler.