Finally, the Captain's Log that a zillion Trekkers have been waiting for. This isn't an omnibus Star Trek history. Shatner (a.k.a. Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise) and Kreski (editorial director of MTV) stick to Stardate mid-1960's and the original TV series, skipping both the Star Trek movies (presumably the subject of a future Shatner memoir) and the multiple series spinoffs. No matter; what remains is a fascinating account of network TV in its post-Beaver, pre-Bunker teenage years. Shatner works against his reputation for hogging the limelight (which he confronts head-on in the final chapter) by remaining off-camera for the first quarter of the text while recounting Gene Roddenberry's early Hollywood career and the making of the pilot, the ``absolutely, incontrovertibly brilliant'' The Cage. Tidbits tumble forth: at first Roddenberry envisioned a Captain Robert April at the helm of the USS Yorktown, with a half-Martian ``satanic'' Mr. Spock at his side. As the high concept took flesh, a fight arose among studio executives over Spock: How important should he be? What should his ears look like?— questions that attained even greater importance when, to everyone's bewilderment, the mind-melding Vulcan bested Kirk as the focus of the Trekker cult. Soon the rest of the cast signed on, along with ace producer Gene Coon, whom Shatner praises to the detriment of icon Roddenberry: ``Roddenberry created Star Trek, and Coon made it fly.'' Shatner's favorite program (``The Devil in the Dark''), Leonard Nimoy's clashes with management, why laser-guns became ``phasers'': there's enough here to satiate the most avid Trekker, delivered with pop and pizazz. After just three years, a tired cast called it quits, or so they thought. Today, Star Trek prospers, and so will this memoir- -most probably at warp speed. (``Over 130 never-before-seen photographs''—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-017734-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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