Star Trek: The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (2015) Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing great. I had my second Dungeons & Dragons session yesterday, and I had alot of fun. I ended up staying up a bit later and ended up finishing reading The Autobiography of James T. Kirk by David A. Goodman, and published by Titan Books. Which is what I'm reviewing today. Because this book is basically an in universe autobiography of Kirk, the spoilers in this book are for stuff we never got to see on TOS or in the movies, but there are also spoilers for the TV show and the movies up to Star Trek Generations (1994). Let's get into it.

One of the things that I love about this book is that it connects the events between movies. So many novels and comics have attempted to tell the story of what happened between each movie, be it Kirk's second five year mission as captain of the Enterprise between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan, or what happened between the '60s TV show and The Motion Picture but because they were all written independent of each other, none of them line up with each other. Same with the events of how Kirk took command of the Enterprise after Pike was promoted to Fleet Captain. 

I also like how reflective Kirk is in this book. We see him as a leader, and this larger than life person, but in this book, he's just Jim Kirk. The man, instead of the myth. And that's extremely refreshing. Especially when the book shows the events that shaped Kirk into the captain we saw on the TV and movie screens. We got to see how he managed to become an admiral again between the first two movies, when he was Captain Kirk again at the end of The Motion Picture. We also see his internal struggle with why he blew up the Enterprise in The Search for Spock, following the death of his son, David at the hands of the Klingons.

Speaking of the Klingons, the movies seemed to imply that his hatred of Klingons started with the third movie, but this book showed that Kirk always hated Klingons, even as a kid. Which is interesting, because we only see a fraction of Kirk's life on the TV show and so we never saw what happened before the show.

This book was written and published in 2015, so there isn't anything from the first two seasons of Discovery, either season of Short Treks, or Strange New Worlds included in the book. Which is bizarre in a way because it doesn't include anything from any of the novels published by Simon & Schuster or the earlier Del Rey and Bantam TOS novels either. It just sticks to the movies, the TV shows, and background material that we've learned about throughout the show and movies. The animated series isn't mentioned either, but there weren't alot of Kirk centric episodes in TAS so the show was skipped over in the book. 

Overall, this was an interesting read. It sheds alot more light on Federation and Starfleet politics during Kirk's career, which we hadn't had in the franchise yet at the point when this book was published, so it was interesting to see how characters we either never saw but were mentioned, like Nogura, or we only saw in a few movies, like Morrow and Cartwright, were connected. If you're a fan of the original Star Trek TV series, and you haven't read this book before, I recommend it. 

That's it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more blog posts. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.