Thin on insight, but nobody plays a pompous windbag with more authority than Shatner.
The veteran actor shares what he has learned over a long life and a prosperous career.
By now, the voice of Shatner is as familiar on the page (Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man, 2016, etc.) as it is from the stage and screen. The questions remain: Is he serious? Or is he in on the joke? Can he really take himself so seriously? Or is he laughing all the way to the bank? “When somebody asks you what it is you are searching for in life, your answer better be passion,” he advises. Fair enough. But later, he elaborates, “mostly, though, I am passionate about continuing to be passionate. The pursuit of passions has influenced every aspect of my life. That has never wavered or changed: I am still in search of the perfect meatball!” Now, at 86, he writes (again) of how his Star Trek comrade Leonard Nimoy was the best friend he has ever had and how he still doesn’t understand why Nimoy refused to speak with him for years before his death. Likewise, “several members of the Star Trek cast have never forgiven me for things I didn’t even know I had done.” His better—or at least less complicated—relationships have come with dogs and horses, and apparently his most satisfying marriage has been to a woman he met through his passion for the latter. He claims that his secret for fulfillment has been, “say yes, yes to life,” and he claims that a working actor should never say no. Yet he recounts the time he declined an invitation to a party at the Kennedy compound (he never says why he was invited) and had to be persuaded to accept a role that had been written expressly for him on the TV series TJ Hooker. Though he suspects that his years are finite, he insists, “I never plan for death; rather, I plan for life.”
Thin on insight, but nobody plays a pompous windbag with more authority than Shatner.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16669-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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