Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man

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%E2%80%A6 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%E2%80%94including Martin Luther King Jr.%E2%80%94invested 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)