Review: LEONARD, My Fifty Year Friendship With A Remarkable Man, by WILLIAM SHATNER

Slightly more than a year ago, Leonard Nimoy passed away. His legacy as Spock in the original STAR TREK series is by this time undeniably huge. It was also well known that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were good friends. William Shatner played Captain Kirk as a man of action to Nimoy's voice of reason in Mr. Spock. Add to that the humanity and compassion of Dr. McCoy (so wonderfully played by the now often forgotten DeForest Kelley) and the basis was present for a set of adventures that knew no bounds. The Original Star Trek was cutting edge television in its day. If you know William Shatner, you also know that he is a career man, who never ceases to work and do things that will benefit his career. He has had the luxury of the heroic roles ( Captain Kirk, T.J. Hooker) as well as the narrative presenter (Rescue 911) or the spokesperson (his Priceline background) as well as being a writer of many books. Some will think Mr. Shatner is a blowhard ego-maniac (his continuing quarrels with George Takei are well documented and easily found on the internet) but I prefer to think of his more as a career minded bull in a China shop, who has no awareness of what he causes. You see, I don't think of him as someone who would be "evil" or in any way or capacity the bad guy. I think he is just not really very aware of some of the reactions he causes. In the book LEONARD, My Fifty Year Friendship With A Remarkable Man, you will also find this very characteristic back again. It is a very enjoyable book but to people who have read loads of earlier releases not much of it will surprise you. But in effect this is a book about William Shatner and his relationship to Leonard Nimoy. So if you want to read this, be sure to install your Bullshit Filters and get ready to read Shatnerian prose. If you learn how to read between his lines and get to the truth of this book, it is very enjoyable. I do think it is a bit of a shame that Shatner chooses to give it a bit of a dramatic ending with a regret of his towards the deceased Leonard Nimoy, but this kind of misery and regret does sell books. So think of that as nothing more than it is.

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were good friends. Read nothing more into this book than that and you will have a nice few hours with it. Of course, the question will always remain how much of it is actually written by Shatner as he admits to co-writing this volume with David Fisher (it has often been suggested that he also never truly wrote the TEKWAR books or any of his subsequent books, that he provided the outlines and let the damn books be written by his ghost writers) but if that is of any concern to you, well, that is up to you. I just wanted to say, I had a good time with LEONARD, My Fifty Year Friendship With A Remarkable Man.