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I picked up the Kindle version from Amazon yesterday afternoon and I'm already sixty percent through the book.
I could quibble on some details and creative choices--and I don't consider it canon--but overall it's an enjoyable and easy read. I'll probably finish reading it sometime today.
One detail I disagree with was the choice of Kirk's first command. The bio reprinted in The Making Of Star Trek references Kirk's first command as a destroyer equivalent class ship. the Hotspur described in this book isn't anything like that. It doesn't ruin the narrative of the book, but it did strike me as a choice I wouldn't have made.
It is interesting in how it gives us something of a first person perspective on events many of us are already familiar with. That and the clear writing style make it an easy and engaging read and something of a page turner.
But it wasn't just that RA didn't care for TAS. At the time, Filmation itself was being divided up and sold off, including chunks to Hallmark. Its entire back catalog of TV shows were left in royalty limbo for some time, and it was easier and cheaper to declare TAS off-limits in 1989. DC Comics's editor was asked to drop Arex and M'Ress from the new movie-era comics (and M'Ress even had to be redrawn in Issue #1 of Series II).
Eventually, the rights were cleared, ownership of TAS was clarified as belonging to Paramount/CBS (Filmation, Norway Corp and NBC all had interests in TAS prior to that). The first Trek tie-in to reference TAS again was Jeri Taylor's adaptation of TNG's "Unification", the episodes of which were (coincidentally) the first to air after Roddenberry's passing, IIRC.
I Saw The Autobiography of James T. Kirk at the bookstore - I've gotten out of Trek lit quite a while ago, but was interested by the concept - wow, am I glad I decided to pick it up! - The author did a fantastic job at capturing the personality and voice of TOS Kirk, as portrayed by William Shatner. I really like his take on Kirk's life story, and the personal reflections about his actions is spot-on TOS Kirk. (I laughed out loud when I read how cleverly the author handled Star Trek V... it was great). Goodman's experience at narrative that flows at a snappy pace, no doubt from years of television work, is evident here - the biography has a great pace that gives us lots of insight into the character, using the canon material, without getting bogged down by too much detail or backstory - he chose just the right events to touch on, and was careful in which ones to elaborate. It was a refreshingly accurate portrayal of a classic television and film character, and made me nostalgic for the series that started it all!
In some respects this book reminds me of John Pearson's An Unofficial Biography of James Bond. Both books have a similar structure and approach of taking fictional events and linking them together through a connective narrative.
I just finished. There are a few details I would have changed but except for those, it was better than I expected. Whose idea was it to include Ensign Bateman?
But it wasn't just that RA didn't care for TAS. At the time, Filmation itself was being divided up and sold off, including chunks to Hallmark. Its entire back catalog of TV shows were left in royalty limbo for some time, and it was easier and cheaper to declare TAS off-limits in 1989.
I understand that Dreamworks owns the Filmation library now, at least the parts that weren't adaptations of other people's creations (Mattel still owns He-Man, DC still owns Batman, etc.). I'm a little disappointed there's apparently been no effort to develop new versions of Filmation shows. Imagine a Dreamworks Groovie Goolies or BraveStarr, or a live-action reboot of Jason of Star Command. (I would've suggested Fat Albert, but I'm afraid the recent revelations about Bill Cosby have probably made that a less desirable property to adapt. Although on second thought, Cosby probably owns that property himself. They already did a pretty bad movie version back in '04.)
While the book doesn't overtly exclude TAS it doesn't really acknowledge it either. And there are a few events in TAS that could have been commented on.
I thought it was interesting the way the author -- using "Kirk's" inner voice -- juxtaposed the situations with Edith Keeler and Gillian Taylor. Kirk would definitely see parallels between the two that (as an audience member) failed to register with me, but seems authentic and obvious in hindsight.
Excellent insight into the character of Kirk by Mr. Goodman.
I'm sure Kirk would've been deeply embarrassed by that subtitle.
And I'm not convinced it's accurate either. We all treat Kirk as the uber-captain of the 23rd century because he was the star of the show, but we tend to forget the other captains that Kirk himself admired and emulated, like Garrovick and Garth. Garth was supposedly an amazingly great and important captain before his injuries damaged his mind, so I find it implausible that his accomplishments are never mentioned. It's not like he really did that much damage while he was insane, since his crew stopped him and he was then confined on Elba II; and his derangement was the result of injury, and was later cured by the new medicine. So I don't think his bout of mental illness would be held against him to the point that his entire illustrious career was effaced from history. I mean, Kirk's had some unfortunate interludes of his own, like being split into good and evil selves and becoming an amnesiac god for two months.
So treating Kirk as the only noteworthy 23rd-century captain is making the common mistake of confusing our perception of the universe as fans with the internal perception of its own inhabitants. We should remember that others like Garth and Decker and Wesley left their own marks on Starfleet history. And who knows what kind of careers lie behind flag officers like Stone and Mendez and Komack and Nogura and Morrow?
Maybe, but we find out about Garth during the five year mission, and Kirk has another 20-30 years of a career after that, where he saves Earth from V'Ger, the Federation from Khan, saves Earth again from the probe looking for the whales, and prevents an all out war with the Klingons. I don't think it's a "mistake" to say he was the greatest captain whoever lived.
I've wanted to read Captain Kirk's autobiography ever since I read "Once Burned," where Peter David (as Mackenzie Calhoun) spent a page or two describing it and even included a small "excerpt." I wasn't sure if I should read this one, since it by definition couldn't be the hypothetical book I'd been intrigued by back in... wow, 1998. I was won over by the positive reception in this thread, so I gave it a shot. Even though it's not the book I hoped for, it's closer than I expected to the contemplative, philosophical version PAD proposed, and a good read in general. I imagine I would've liked it unreservedly if I didn't have a bunch of die-hard fanon baggage.
If we lived in a kinder world, it would go without saying, but I really appreciate that the book was about the life and times of James T. Kirk from Star Trek, and not the bed-hopping intergalactic frat-boy he's caricatured as in pop culture. I'm not sure how an autobiography from that kind of character would read (come to think of it, I probably have a good idea from McSweeny's series of reviews of self-help books by pro athletes), but the style of the book did not come across as written by someone who was a childish two-fisted hot-head.
The pre-TOS section was my favorite. I enjoyed a lot of the stuff in Kirk's early life, and the way all the different backstory references in TOS were tied together. I also liked the element of Kirk commanding a ship before the Enterprise, something I saw occasionally referenced in older media, but which hasn't seemed to break into the current corpus of fanon.
I go back and forth about how I feel about Cartwright's cabal of hard-line anti-Klingon flag officers having been together and pushing for militarization for so long. On the one hand, it's certainly realistic: there are political and defense-policy cliques that go from presidency to presidency, and you'll see the same names years or decades apart. But still, it feels small for Starfleet to be so chummy at the top, and unwholesome for people to have been trying to gin up a war under false pretenses for thirty years before TUC. It's not that there's anything wrong with it as a dramatic choice, I'm just not sure if it's the one I'd prefer. Not to mention the stuff with the mutant animal-weapons. That seemed hardcore for the Prime timeline.
The movie era was a bit sketchier, but I recognize how tough it is to nail those time periods, and getting stories set then to feel natural tends to require a more epic scope to avoid giving the impression that TMP happened, then this one thing happened, then everyone started teaching, and the rest of the decade passed quietly.
Still, I don't know that the part of Kirk's life we saw needed to be covered in the same detail as his early life. One of the common questions about a book like this would be how to do it without just novelizing a bunch of episodes we already know backwards and forwards. Touching on those stories and giving some more development to the interstitial bits is a valid solution.
Not to go and review the book that wasn't written, but I would still be interested in something that took the "Once Burned" approach, which described a book organized more by subject and theme than chronology, specifically recounting a chapter where Kirk talked about the different Starfleet officers gone bad he met, and how it made him reflect on himself and whether he could've dissolved his whole crew into salt crystals or something under the wrong circumstances.
Oh, one last thing I hadn't noticed mentioned in reviews, that I was this surprised and delighted by:
The obligatory non-fiction color insert of photographs from the subject's life.
Is Kirk treated as the greatest captain of the 23rd century? Searching through the episode transcripts, he's usually only mentioned when it's appropriate to the context (e.g., the Enterprise-D crew meeting Spock, or Kira and Bashir entering the mirror universe). I mean Sisko goes gaga over Kirk in "Trials and Tribble-ations," but for all we know, he'd do the same thing if he bumped into Captain Stone. Icheb's report in "Q2," the DTI agents in "Trials," and the comment about first contacts in "Friendship One" are the only times I can think of where Kirk is treated as something exceptional within the show.
The subtitle was definitely hyperbolic, and may be the only questionable thing that might not make this truly "in world" but I think you could make a case given his exploits during the five year mission plus the movies that his career is unparalleled. Also, there are a lot of references to Kirk in the sequel series that make it clear that his exploits are well-known: Janeway mentions Kirk having claimed to have met DaVinci; the fact that Kira only has to mention the name Kirk to Bashir in "Crossover" and Bashir is able to immediately fill in all the blanks on where they are to me says that Kirk is a well-known figure in history.
Subtitles aside, I kinda thought Jim Kirk could have come up with a snappier main title, other than "The Autobiography of James T. Kirk". (*That* should have been the subtitle!) Wasn't the in-universe Kirk autobiography mentioned upthread from the Peter David books called Risk Is Our Business, or something like that? Now *that's* got pizzazz!
You're right, he could've, but the book was published after his "death" on the Enterprise B, so I guess some hack 23rd Century publisher gave it this title.
Truth be told, the "story of Starfleet's greatest captain" wasn't my idea, and I had some trepidation about it, but then thought if they were trying to sell books in the 23rd century that they might slap that on there, and then, as I said previously, I think you can definitely make a case that Kirk's career did make Starfleet's greatest captain when he "died" on the Enterprise B.
I picked up the Kindle version from Amazon yesterday afternoon and I'm already sixty percent through the book.
I could quibble on some details and creative choices--and I don't consider it canon--but overall it's an enjoyable and easy read. I'll probably finish reading it sometime today.
One detail I disagree with was the choice of Kirk's first command. The bio reprinted in The Making Of Star Trek references Kirk's first command as a destroyer equivalent class ship. the Hotspur described in this book isn't anything like that. It doesn't ruin the narrative of the book, but it did strike me as a choice I wouldn't have made.
It is interesting in how it gives us something of a first person perspective on events many of us are already familiar with. That and the clear writing style make it an easy and engaging read and something of a page turner.
I Saw The Autobiography of James T. Kirk at the bookstore - I've gotten out of Trek lit quite a while ago, but was interested by the concept - wow, am I glad I decided to pick it up! - The author did a fantastic job at capturing the personality and voice of TOS Kirk, as portrayed by William Shatner. I really like his take on Kirk's life story, and the personal reflections about his actions is spot-on TOS Kirk. (I laughed out loud when I read how cleverly the author handled Star Trek V... it was great). Goodman's experience at narrative that flows at a snappy pace, no doubt from years of television work, is evident here - the biography has a great pace that gives us lots of insight into the character, using the canon material, without getting bogged down by too much detail or backstory - he chose just the right events to touch on, and was careful in which ones to elaborate. It was a refreshingly accurate portrayal of a classic television and film character, and made me nostalgic for the series that started it all!
In some respects this book reminds me of John Pearson's An Unofficial Biography of James Bond. Both books have a similar structure and approach of taking fictional events and linking them together through a connective narrative.
Pearson's book was definitely an inspiration, I love that book. Also, William S. Baring-Gould's "Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street", which is the same kind of "biography" of Sherlock Holmes.
I just finished. There are a few details I would have changed but except for those, it was better than I expected. Whose idea was it to include Ensign Bateman?
