“Nothing Has to Die”

Chapter 42 begins with an accounting of the pervasive spread of Bradbury stories through many hundreds of textbooks and anthologies. “Nothing has to die,” Walt Disney had once told him, and the memory of those words helped turn Bradbury back to the best of his long-deferred books, Somewhere a Band Is Playing. It is more mood piece than novel, but it conveys Bradbury’s lifelong search for a place preserved forever out of time. It was paired with Leviathan 99 in a single volume titled Now and Forever (2007). The chapter continues with Bradbury’s Special Lifetime Pulitzer Citation, major awards from foreign nations, the dedication of his Halloween Tree in Disneyland, all tempered by the 2008 passing of his good friend Charlton Heston.