Is too much of a good thing bad? Not when it’s Star Trek.
The oral history of the Star Trek franchise boldly continues.
Writer and producer Altman and Gross (Voices from Krypton: Superman on Film and in Comics, 2015, etc.), who did a terrific job in their first volume, have once again meticulously selected and chronologically arranged a massive number of comments from more than 200 people involved in the TV shows and movies. This book takes us through the many iterations of Star Trek since The Next Generation premiered in 1987. When Gene Roddenberry was approached to do it, “I turned them down….I really feared doing it until I got angry enough to try.” When producer Robert Justman said he wanted Patrick Stewart to play the captain, Roddenberry responded, “Jesus Christ, Bob, I don’t want a bald man.” He later changed his mind and was glad he did; as Justman noted, Stewart was everything “a captain ought to be.” The tenth ST movie, Nemesis, with The Next Generation crew, was a huge failure. Actress Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) said director Stuart Baird “was an idiot.” There was trepidation about ever trying a ST movie again, but J.J. Abrams, who was not a huge ST fan in the beginning, was approached to do another film. His thinking was, “you would have to do it in such a way that it would bring it to life in a way that never had been done before.” He felt the characters of Kirk and Spock were the keys: get them right and it could work. It did. His second try, Into Darkness, went “further than the first movie in every way.” Trekkies’ appetite for all things ST will be sated this summer with Star Trek: Beyond, directed by Justin Lin (The Fast and the Furious). Actor Chris Pine (Kirk) says it’s a “close-up look” at the crew. A new TV series launches in 2017.
Is too much of a good thing bad? Not when it’s Star Trek.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08946-5
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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