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 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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