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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
New York Times Bestseller
Goodreads Choice Award Winner
Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner first crossed paths as actors on the set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Little did they know that their next roles as Spock and Captain Kirk, in a new science fiction television series, would shape their lives in ways no one could have anticipated. In seventy-nine television episodes of Star Trek and six feature films, they grew to know each other more than most friends could ever imagine.
Over the course of half a century, Shatner and Nimoy saw each other through personal and professional highs and lows. In this powerfully emotional book, Shatner tells the story of a man who was his friend for five decades, recounting anecdotes and untold stories of their lives on and off set, as well as gathering stories from others who knew Nimoy well, to present a full picture of a rich life.
As much a biography of Nimoy as a story of their friendship, Leonard is a uniquely heartfelt book written by one legendary actor in celebration of another.
Author Notes
William Shatner is an actor and writer. He was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on March 22, 1931. He graduated from McGill University in 1952.
Shatner made his acting debut at the Montreal Playhouse in 1952 and performed with the Canadian Repertory Theatre in Ottawa. From 1954 to 1956 he appeared in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario and in 1956 he made his Broadway debut in Tamburlaine the Great. In 1966, Shatner was cast as Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the TV series Star Trek. The TV show inspired several film spin-offs, the early ones starring the original cast. Shatner directed Star Trek V. He also co-starred in a law-related series on television called Boston Legal with James Spader.
In addition to acting, Shatner began a career as a writer of science fiction novels. The first one, Tek War, was published in 1989. Shatner has also written his memoirs, Star Trek Memories. He was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1999 for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his performance as The Big Giant Head on the TV series 3rd Rock From the Sun.
Shatner's title co-authored with David Fisher, Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man, was a New York Times betseller in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shatner and Leonard Nimoy shared an off-screen relationship as deep, complex, and sometimes testy as their Star Trek characters Kirk and Spock, according to this fond elegy. Shatner is warmly effusive, calling Nimoy his only "real friend. to whom I could completely emotionally unburden myself," but there were rough patches: relations on the original Star Trek television series were marked by a rivalry that exploded into tantrums; friendship blossomed while they basked in adulation at Star Trek conventions, and when Nimoy, a recovering alcoholic, helped Shatner cope with his alcoholic wife's death. The friendship sputtered in its last years after a never-explained rift made Nimoy cut off contact. (Shatner's anguish over the rupture is palpable.) Nimoy is an interesting if aloof presence here; the most insightful chapters deal with the meticulous Method technique he used to craft the cerebral, soulfully alienated, nerve-pinching Vulcan, which played brilliantly against Shatner's intuitive, external, fist-fighting embodiment of Kirk. The book is also a fine portrait of the prosaic, unsentimental worldview of workaday actors. (Both men were astonished by the emotional fervor Trekkies-including Martin Luther King Jr.-invested in the show.) Amanuensis Fisher's engaging prose and Shatner's shrewd reflections and good humor make this a resonant retrospective of one of pop culture's great partnerships. Photos. (Feb. 16) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were not only Star Trek stalwarts but actually good friends, who shared a similar and fascinating background. So why did they fall out? On 10 February 2014 Leonard Nimoy appeared on Piers Morgan's CNN chatshow for what would be the final interview before his death 12 months later. Nimoy, then 82, had agreed to the gig in order to publicise the dangers of smoking. Although he had quit 30 years earlier, he had recently been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and, to make the point of how horrible it was, had brought along his oxygenator as a fearful warning. Morgan was just as you'd expect -- polite enough about COPD and its ghastly consequences, but bursting to talk Star Trek (Morgan is exactly the right age to have been captivated by the programme -- it arrived in Britain in 1969, and ran on a continuous loop throughout the early 70s). After sprinting through a few tired jokes about Vulcan nerve pinches and beaming up, Morgan asks Nimoy about how often he sees the old gang, William Shatner in particular. Without missing a beat, Nimoy says: 'Not in a while ... we don't have that kind of relationship any more. We used to." From there the conversation tacks off into Nimoy's favourite episode ("Amok Time"), and the weirdness of the early Trek conventions at which thousands of fans would descend on some provincial hotel dressed in bri-nylon pyjamas in an approximation of their favourite Enterprise crew member. But for those of us steeped in Star Trek, which means not simply knowing every one of the 79 episodes almost verbatim but also its many backstage narratives, we had stopped listening by this point. What was that Nimoy had just said? That he was no longer in touch with Shatner? It felt like the mother of all phaser stuns. One of the founding stories of the Star Trek mythos is how the two original leading men locked horns on meeting in their mid-30s, soon got over their "feud", and went on to be the most unlikely of best friends, even when the camera was turned off. It was a friendship that had spanned addiction (Nimoy himself and Shatner's third wife were alcoholics), angry divorces (both of them), a solid stint as a director for Nimoy (Three Men and a Baby, no matter what you think of it, was the top grossing film of 1987) and a respectable acting career for Shatner, who went on to create two other memorable, if not iconic, TV characters, TJ Hooker and Denny Crane in Boston Legal. And now, here was Nimoy admitting that the two had barely spoken for years. So the big question with Leonard, Shatner's memoir of the man who was supposed to be his best friend but actually wasn't, was always going to be whether it would acknowledge and account for this late rift, or make like nothing had happened. In fact, Shatner, whose palpable narcissism has always been shot through with streaks of baffling candour, squares up to the issue head on, admitting near the beginning of the book that he had once had "a very rare, very enviable" friendship with Nimoy "and then I lost it". Before he gets down to telling us why, though, there is the how-we-met part of the story to deal with. "Trekkers" (the term Nimoy always preferred to the reductive "Trekkies") will know this material well. The two men were born in 1931 four days and 300 miles apart, Nimoy in Boston and Shatner in Montreal, into orthodox kosher Yiddish-speaking Jewish families that had emigrated from the Ukraine and thereabouts. Shatner's father was in the schmatter (clothing) business; Nimoy's was a barber. The two may have come from what Shatner calls "the same tribe", but by some kink in the genetic code it was he who came out with blondish hair (though not much of it -- these days his toupee has its own website) and eyes that you could believe were blue, even though they were actually hazel. It was a physicality that allowed the young Canadian to make a career in the new world of network television playing all-American heroes: soldiers, astronauts and the occasional cowboy. Nimoy, by contrast, was obliged to go the route of so many Jewish actors and play a variegated range of ethnic heavies. He was either Latino or Native American in westerns (Gunsmoke, The Virginian) or Italian in low-budget feature films (Kid Moroni) or Russian in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which is where he met Shatner for the first time, in 1964. Most prophetically, he was a memorable Martian in Zombies of the Stratospher e. There was 17 years of this journeyman work, seldom lasting beyond a week, until Nimoy was cast as Mr Spock in the pilot for a new series, Star Trek, pitched by the producer Gene Roddenberry as "Wagon Train to the Stars". It wasn't simply the two men's contrasting appearance that defined their early career options ("choices" would imply far too much autonomy -- they took everything they were offered). Shatner is excellent on the way that he and Nimoy's story also turns on the distinction between their acting styles. Shatner, who had trained under Tyrone Guthrie at the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario, was always an outside-in player, fluent in the kind of stagey gestural acting that you associate with prewar Olivier. By the time he got to perform Kirk as an essentially Shakespearean hero, brave but given to soul-wrenching soliloquies, Shatner had yanked the English language out of any natural rhythm into a wilfully bumpy pattern of pauses, bunching and sudden rills. Nimoy, by contrast, was "method" through and through. He started from the inside and worked outwards, and the result was a kind of mannered naturalism. Fine if you were doing Clifford Odets on Broadway, but slightly laborious if you were playing a character who could best be summed up by a pair of latex rabbit ears and a slathering of Max Factor "Chinese Yellow". Still, it worked. Shatner's scenery-chewing allowed Nimoy to retreat into the internalised drama of Spock, a creature caught between his rational Vulcan brain and his messy human heart. In the pilot episode, in which the captain's role was taken by another actor with method tendencies, Jeffrey Hunter, the result is deeply uncomfortable. With far too much empty space between them, Nimoy is obliged to make Spock a larger, flashier presence. At one point he even smiles, a shocking moment that threatens to fracture the whole Star Trek universe before it has started to cohere, and would take the first part of series one to put back together again. If you know your Star Trek you will have gathered much of this already from the small army of books written over the years by anyone remotely involved with the programme, including Shatner and Nimoy themselves (Shatner, in particular, is a serial autobiographer). What Leonard adds to the mix is a new late-life awareness on Shatner's part about how both he and his former best friend were profoundly shaped by the immigrant experience. He puts both his and Nimoy's family-shattering workaholism down to an inherited terror of losing everything. Indeed, Nimoy had grown up in an atmosphere of such fear that when, in the early 1970s, his parents are invited to accompany their famous son back to their Ukraine village by an expansive Russian ambassador looking for a photo opportunity, they are appalled. Convinced that it is a plot to put them in prison for having snuck out in a hay cart 60 years earlier, they refuse, leaving Nimoy to travel to Zaslav alone to meet his equally baffled and fearful cousins. In Shatner's case, the inheritance of terror shows up in a hyperkineticism that still has him, about to turn 85, touring the world with his one-man show and tweeting several times a day in a desperate need to keep making his mark. But even he is obliged to stop dervishing for long enough to ponder the big questions, including what went wrong in his friendship with Nimoy. Admitting that that "until Leonard and I had developed our relationship ... I didn't even know what a friend was", Shatner nonetheless insists that he has no idea what he did that made Nimoy drop him suddenly in 2011. You do, of course, have to wonder at Shatner's emotional intelligence. This, after all, is a man who agreed to be a guest photographer on a Playboy spread but kept it secret because he knew his wife wouldn't like it, and then seems genuinely surprised when she finds out and is, predictably, furious. Thus it is a mark of Shatner's transparency that he admits to the freeze with Nimoy and a mark of his cloddishness that he genuinely doesn't know what caused it: "It remains a mystery to me and it is heartbreaking." And that, really is the irony of this book, indeed of the whole Nimoy-Shatner saga. Shatner, who always seemed like the less interesting man, is the one who ends up keeping you hooked into a narrative that started 50 years ago and shows no sign of yielding up all its riddles any time soon. * To order Leonard for [pound]15.99 (RRP [pound]18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
In the original Star Trek series, Mr. Spock's contemplative temperament was balanced by Capt. Kirk's emotive and physical nature. Now it's the captain's turn to reflect. It's hard to believe that an entertainment franchise consisting of five distinct TV series, 12 feature films, numerous comics and novels, an animated series, fanzines, conventions, and a huge worldwide fan base began with an underfunded TV series that only ran for three seasons (1966-1969) before being cancelled by the network for its unprofitability. This year marks the 50th year since the franchise's birth, and the crew of the Enterprise continues to go where no man has gone before. Though the fabled starship has had many actors at its helm, the original portrayals of Kirk and Spock remain iconic. Shatner (Shatner Rules, 2011, etc.), who will celebrate his 85th birthday in March, memorializes his esteemed co-star in a memoir that spans the half-century of the two actors' friendship and, with the input of others who knew Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015) well, beyond. From Nimoy's early years in Los Angeles scrounging for bit roles in TV to the late actor's charitable support of Zachary Quinto in his 2009 reprisal of the role of Spock, Shatner describes his friend as a serious artist who constantly honed his craft. Though the actors eventually formed a strong bond, Shatner humbly recalls bags of fan mail arriving in the first weeks of Star Trek's popularity and the jealousy that he felt that the most beloved character on the show was Spock. Fans will devour anecdotes surrounding the making of the series and its posthumous surge in popularity, but Shatner takes readers behind the nonemotive Vulcan visage to reveal the poet, photographer, devoted stage actor, recovering alcoholic, and formidable listener who was his friend. A fond remembrance of Leonard Nimoy by one who knew him like no other. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Shatner, the legendary actor who brought Captain Kirk to life in Star Trek, pays tribute to his lifelong best friend, Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed the iconic Mr. Spock, in this memoir-biography hybrid. Both actors were born in 1931, and both surprised their religious Jewish families by deciding to pursue careers in acting. Nimoy established himself as a character actor, making a career out of playing villains until Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, remembering Nimoy from a guest spot in another show, handpicked him to play Mr. Spock, the taciturn half-Vulcan. Shatner is candid about the evolution of his friendship with Nimoy: they started out on set as colleagues who occasionally clashed, in part because Nimoy, rather than Shatner, became the breakout star on the show. After Star Trek was canceled in 1969, they went their separate ways, but fan conventions and six feature films brought them back together and forged a deep friendship between them. Touching on Nimoy's other pursuits, including his photography, poetry, writing, and directing, Shatner offers up a lovely and moving tribute to his beloved friend.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Fans of TV shows might wonder if the people who portray the characters are friends in real life. As Shatner explains in this biography of Leonard Nimoy, actors form close bonds when working together and swear their undying friendship when it's over but more likely never see one another again. That was not the case with Shatner and Nimoy, who starred in three seasons of cult favorite Star Trek as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock respectively, though -Shatner reveals that they were wary of each other at first. He tells stories about the show, such as Nimoy's creation of the iconic Vulcan salute and nerve pinch, yet also shares little-known personal information, such as Nimoy's alcoholism and the price of celebrity. However, the heart of this book is Shatner's description of their friendship that grew from the Star Trek movies and the Trekkie conventions they attended as a pair. Shatner discusses his own life and the parallels in Nimoy's, but he does not upstage his friend, rather giving him center stage with his usual Shatner self-deprecating humor. VERDICT Trekkies will want this for the insider stories from Captain Kirk himself, but fans of candid, emotion-filled biographies will adore this account because it's a treasure trove of information. [See Prepub Alert, 8/10/15.]-Rosellen Brewer, Sno-Isle Libs., Marysville, WA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.