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Post by finarvyn on Aug 10, 2016 13:19:59 GMT -5
This is a book that I just got and am almost finished reading. www.amazon.com/Autobiography-James-T-Kirk/dp/1783297468The book is pretty much what it sounds like. It's the life of James T. Kirk as told by Kirk himself, and it runs from his early childhood through the TOS series and through the movies. The author (David A Goodman) is, I think, connected to Memory Alpha and seems to know his stuff. I have a love-hate relationship with this book. I love the fact that it's TOS and reading the book made me want to dust off my DVD collection and re-watch a bunch of the old episodes. The drawback is that a lot of the book isn't "new" because the events he mentions often come straight from TV/movie Trek. On the other hand, Goodman does a pretty decent job of linking one event to the next, bringing in mention of characters a chapter or so before they have key roles, and making Kirk's story "come to life" overall. He seems to have found Kirk's voice pretty well and sometimes Kirk second-guesses his own decisions for actions he might have taken in particular episodes. Note that the book doesn't try to talk through every single TOS episode filmed, but it does hit many of the highlights in chronological order. With so much material to work from, some cool stuff gets glossed over quickly while other stuff gets skipped, but with 70+ TOS episodes of stuff there's no way it would all fit into a single book if the author had tried to use everything. Anyway, just about to finish the book and I wondered if anyone else has read it yet.
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Post by Starbeard on Aug 14, 2016 10:51:58 GMT -5
I just picked this up too and am about half way through (Kirk is currently recounting events of his career around the time of The City on the Edge of Forever).
I'm also finding myself loving and hating it. Some of the connections between characters and episodes I found to be a little frequent and a little too much, giving the feeling that Goodman trawled every post-TOS reference he could find to the TOS era, and made Kirk a personal witness to all of it. On the other hand, there were just as many references that I felt were very clever. I like the way he had Kirk lay out his reasonings for all of the various personnel transfers, to account for the abrupt casting changes in the show.
I'm also generally enjoying how he portrays Kirk in general. Rather than being "Captain Kirk" from the beginning, he grows into his personality and his position, making the biography overall seem more authentic. He isn't just The Greatest Captain in History, he makes command mistakes and gets confused. His distinction of becoming the youngest captain in the history of Starfleet is revealed to be a mix of workaholism, luck and getting stuck in the middle of Starfleet politics, rather than simply being a hotshot commander.
I wonder if Goodman or somebody else are intending to continue with similar autobiographies of other characters.
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Post by finarvyn on Aug 21, 2016 11:03:40 GMT -5
Agreed on his handling of personnel transfers. He clearly tried to figure out who appeared and disappeared at various points in the series/movie cycle and how to account for this. One thing that bothered me, though, was that somewhere in my brain I had stored a factoid that Kirk's Enterprise was the first Heavy Cruiser to make it through a complete five-year mission and clearly this book has several others prior to Kirk's. This is probably one of those adjustments that someone officially made in the 1990's or some such when they wanted to unify the timeline details, but I feel like it diminishes the accomplishments of Kirk and crew if it's been done before. I wonder if Goodman or somebody else are intending to continue with similar autobiographies of other characters. It's not like we don't have a lot of canon material to draw from. I would probably give such books a try.
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Post by michaeltaylor on Sept 1, 2016 16:50:34 GMT -5
I just picked this up thanks to you! It's too bad it doesn't include anything from books...
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