BOLDLY GO

The latest collection of essays from an actor who has lived well and prospered.

It’s clear that Shatner (b. 1931) takes himself and his work seriously, but he knows that much of his appeal to younger generations is ironic, that his often exaggerated oratory has an element of self-caricature in it. Even in his 90s, he shows few signs of backing off or slowing down, and he ends this book with the lyric to a spoken-word song he has written for his next album, a piece with funeral instructions: “I Want To Be a Tree.” Despite the more-misses-than-hits nature of the author’s many attempts at humor, he has somehow found a way to be in on the joke rather than an object of derision—for the most part, at least—making this book very much in the same vein as Live Long And…, his previous middling collection. Here, the author writes about his plans to extend his legacy as a hologram, taking and answering questions from beyond the grave, and he mixes innocence and pompous profundity when he intones, “I am never so thrilled as when the word wow escapes my mouth.” Much of the text conveys the author’s fairly shallow viewpoints on the marvel of existence, how everything is connected, and how the universe has taken care of a man who has no clear sense of the divine but who has his finger on the pulse of something cosmic. “We are often reminded to stop and smell the roses,” he writes. “I have to go further. Stop and smell everything.” These essays sometimes loosely connect in the fashion of a memoir, covering plenty of the Star Trek oeuvre (which he treats as if it were Shakespeare) and the multidimensional career that has followed, as well as his four marriages and his love of dogs, horses, and all living things.

A series of pieces that are not only all over the map, but all over the galaxy.