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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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