Goofball, genius or canny self-promoter? The jury is still out, but Shatner is indisputably a born storyteller.
Engaging recollections of an unrepentant ham actor who, by dint of a self-aware sense of humor, eagerness to please and sheer dogged persistence has earned the deep affection of legions of fans and cemented his status as one of the most recognized celebrities on the planet.
All the above qualities are fully evident in Shatner’s irreverent, amusing memoir, which leavens the expected silliness with startlingly candid and emotional passages about his chronic loneliness and the tragic drowning death of his wife Nerine. An undercurrent of sadness runs just beneath the surface of his whimsical anecdotes, revealing a man deeply anxious about financial security—which goes some distance toward excusing his apparently irresistible urge to plug his website and its memorabilia store—and strangely disconnected from his peers. (He was unaware of his Star Trek shipmates’ antipathy toward him until years after the show ended.) Shatner’s donkeylike work ethic resulted in an uncommonly rich and eventful career encompassing the golden age of classic television drama; countless roles on nearly every dramatic series of the ’60s and ‘70s; innumerable game shows, documentaries, commercials and specials; and ridiculously terrible movies like Incubus, infamous for its all-Esperanto dialogue. A late-in-life hot streak brought him an Emmy and Golden Globe for the slick dramedy Boston Legal, but the continuing global phenomenon of Star Trek will always be the most notable job on his resume. Shatner has funny and surprising things to say about it all, dishing on co-stars and marveling at a history that includes working with the likes of Spencer Tracy in Judgment at Nuremberg one day, a nude scene with Angie Dickinson in Big Bad Mama the next. Also included: accounts of bow hunting for bears, ill-advised paragliding and a puzzling defenses of his epically bemusing spoken-word album, The Transformed Man.
Goofball, genius or canny self-promoter? The jury is still out, but Shatner is indisputably a born storyteller.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37265-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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
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