Star Trek and History: Race-Ing Toward a White Future

Rating:
Summary: Unmasking American Imperialism
Review: ....The truth has been unmasked! Even though I love Star Trek, as a Puerto Rican who has been conquered and assimilated by the US, I totally agree with the writer's conclusions about the aryan aspects of Star Trek. ..... Learn more about American imperialism!

Rating:
Summary: Another Tiresome Politically Correct Diatribe
Review: Apparently Martin Luther King disagreed...Yawn...Another tiresome politically correct diatribe written by someone who has clearly exhausted the possibilities inherent in writing essays on the homoerotic aspects of Gilligan's Island and the feminist subtext of Bewitched. Like most diatribes of it's kind, it hinges its indictment of Star Trek's racism on the most petty and ridiculous things and has no connection to reality but to the author's black and white version of reality. Star Trek fans should avoid this nonesense like the plague, while fans of academic essays on the Brady Bunch as a metaphor for Apartheid and the end of American nationalism will lap it up like spoiled chili.

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Summary: A true insight underlying our viewing pleasures.
Review: Being a true couch potato and an avid Star Trek fan, I can admittedly state that Dr. Bernardi has hit the nail on the head. "Us, couch potatoes" must realize how society around us shapes what we see on TV (and in the movies) thereby shaping who we are. Using Star Trek, a series that spans decades - including the movies and series spin-offs, is ingenious. This book clearly outlines how TV, movies, et al emulates our social beliefs and how intricately these beliefs are interwoven into the fabricate that is our being. Orwell's Big Brother is no match to our own psyche. Star Trek and History: Race-Ing Toward a White Future is insightful, as it is entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: Unmasking American Imperialism
Review: Bernardi likes to verb his wordage. This acts to weird his language. From whence does all this useless anger come? Reading this and "Race in Space" -an IDENTICAL book- depressed me almost as much as forum columns in the Daily Northwestern do. The examples of symbolism forming the basis for these two books' thesises are, while of obvious interpretation to the authors, mere fluff to each reader possessing operational neural function.

Rating:
Summary: in search of a subject
Review: Bernardi likes to verb his wordage. This acts to weird his language. From whence does all this useless anger come? Reading this and "Race in Space" -an IDENTICAL book- depressed me almost as much as forum columns in the Daily Northwestern do. The examples of symbolism forming the basis for these two books' thesises are, while of obvious interpretation to the authors, mere fluff to each reader possessing operational neural function.

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Summary: This book is for the thinking Trek fan and social scholar.
Review: Daniel Bernardi's book looks at Star Trek (the entire 30 year institution) through the eyes of social change. It examines how our society now effects the Trek vision of the future. Unlike any other Trek book, this one shows the powerful impact of race and gender in a series that takes pride in its depiction of a future of equality. A great book for the social and film scholar!!

Rating:
Summary: Misguided From Beginning To End
Review: I don't think I've ever read a book as blind to its subject matter as "Race-ing Toward A White Future". Bernardi misinterprets many of the episodes, taking certain scenes and characters way out of context, and ignores the vast majority of scripts that would counteract his hyper-PC argument. I found myself disagreeing with him in almost every paragraph. For example, Bernardi seems to think that every use of the color black in Star Trek and other Sci-Fi shows and movies is an automatically racist gesture (!); this is a paranoid, ignorant and ridiculous assumption. And just when it seems like he's about to make a valid point about a particular episode or scene, he takes it too far by making grandiose statements which have no basis in reality. AVOID THIS BOOK AT ALL COSTS. It is poorly written, narrowminded in focus and misinterpretative of Star Trek's position on race.

Rating:
Summary: Misguided From Beginning To End
Review: I don't think I've ever read a book as blind to its subject matter as "Race-ing Toward A White Future". Bernardi misinterprets many of the episodes, taking certain scenes and characters way out of context, and ignores the vast majority of scripts that would counteract his hyper-PC argument. I found myself disagreeing with him in almost every paragraph. For example, Bernardi seems to think that every use of the color black in Star Trek and other Sci-Fi shows and movies is an automatically racist gesture (!); this is a paranoid, ignorant and ridiculous assumption. And just when it seems like he's about to make a valid point about a particular episode or scene, he takes it too far by making grandiose statements which have no basis in reality. AVOID THIS BOOK AT ALL COSTS. It is poorly written, narrowminded in focus and misinterpretative of Star Trek's position on race.

Rating:
Summary: A really, really horrible school essay
Review: I read about half of this idiot's book and finally had to toss the piece of garbage in the trash. Rather than being infuriated by the ridiculous, utterly idiotic waste of time, I came to the conclusion that people who spend their entire lives reading books and studying to be a 'doctor of film' (whatever the hell that means) live in a world so devoid of reality that their entire lives will be devoted to an ultra-PC sensitivity. This moron thinks anything relating to the color black in "Star Trek" is immediately a racist gesture. I assume if there were more pale colored aliens, he would consider it an obvious exclusionary act and therefore also racist. Not only that, but this guy spends an entire chapter spitting out a point that could be summed up in a page. He uses excessive verbiage, clearly using a Thesaurus to increase, I suppose, the word count in the book. The fact that this imbecile is a doctor really decimates the real doctors out there.

Rating:
Summary: Strictly for fans of academic Political Correctness
Review: If you like Star Trek, you will probably hate this book. It drones on for what seems like forever in an academic time warp of jargon and irrelevancies. For readers interested in the background history of the original Star Trek series, this is NOT the best book to read. Many other histories of the series are far better. For readers who do not consider race to be a "social contruct" but rather a biological reality underpinning a social superstructure, this book will be infuriating.