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
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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