This readable biography sketches the trajectory of a man whose life might have served as the plot for one of his television dramas. The creator of Star Trek flew missions as a B-17 pilot during WW II, wrote speeches for LA's chief of police, and penned scripts for shows like Dragnet during television's Golden Age. Alexander succeeds in recreating Roddenberry's voice: As the official biographer chosen by Roddenberry, he provides correspondence written over the years to family, friends, and fans. But the author only shifts to warp speed when he discusses how Roddenberry launched the original Star Trek. The book lets Trekkers gorge themselves on the trivia of this cultural phenomenon and overhear backstage bickering. Production memos teem with such revelatory details as actors' contracts (Nimoy originally earned a fourth of Shatner's salary), casting decisions, and of course, the secret campaigns to save Star Trek (all of which Roddenberry inaugurated). Although Rodenberry's widow, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, states in the introduction that her husband wanted to be depicted ``warts and all,'' Alexander remains a friend throughout. Interviews with cast members are curiously absent and would have added depth to such incidents as the series'—and television's—first interracial kiss. According to Alexander, this met with only a single memo of protest from NBC; however, others have attested that network suits refused to let the scene be shot as originally written. To be fair, or provocative, Roddenberry's bouts of drinking, use of amphetamines, and frequent infidelities are recounted. The chance to create another Trek TV series, however, stirred him. While his bitter fights with veteran staffers marred the production, Star Trek: The Next Generation ran for seven years and remained true to its creator's optimistic belief in humanity. While this account swings too far between elegy and gossip, it successfully conveys the spirit of Roddenberry, who led us ``where no one has gone before.'' (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-451-45418-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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