An absolute must for any Star Trek fan.
“Boldly go where no man has gone before”: the oral history of the Star Trek franchise.
Gross (Voices from Krypton: Superman on Film and in Comics, 2015, etc.) and Altman, a writer and producer, have done yeoman’s work selecting and chronologically arranging this massive compendium of hundreds of comments from over 200 actors, directors, writers and producers involved in creating Star Trek—a “franchise that has literally changed the world,” as Seth MacFarlane, who played Ensign Rivers of the first Starship Enterprise, proclaims in his foreword. The authors’ goal was to “tell the real history of Star Trek in a way that no one else would be able to.” As readers learn, it almost didn’t happen. Studios passed on Gene Roddenberry’s pilot script, and Desilu Productions executives would have if Lucille Ball hadn’t greenlighted it. Roddenberry had written some Have Gun—Will Travel scripts, and he specifically drew on Paladin’s passion, intelligence, and bleeding heart to provide Kirk, Spock, and McCoy with their major personality traits. Roddenberry was a Navy pilot in World War II and was “particularly fascinated by the story of the Enterprise…and wanted to use the name.” The original show lasted three seasons, until 1969. There would eventually be four live action spin-offs (e.g., The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine) and an animated series, the latter of which was produced before Star Trek became a big budget motion picture. Leonard Nimoy said of that film, it was a “trial for the actors.” James Doohan (Scotty) said it was “boring.” The reviews were harsh, but the fans loved it. This volume ends with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Some quotes are just lame, while others are priceless. The editors have written numerous notes, providing solid context to quotes and historical background information. The book warmly invites jumping in anywhere to just sample, but it’s best approached from the beginning to hear from those in the know how the phenomenon unfolded.
An absolute must for any Star Trek fan.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06584-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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