Unlike the previous few books I reviewed from Rowman, this one is more organized and focused. The chapters promise to discuss the history of Star Trek, of American science fiction, and then to connect the show to American history and the history of technology, as well as covering its fans. This type of coverage should be more useful for students who are writing research papers on this popular show. It is difficult to imagine a student sitting through a book about beautiful corpses, but this study should allow them to find specific types of information that might help them make a strong argument in a research paper. The front and back matter is useful in this regard, with a timeline summarizing the series, an index, and episode summaries (which are for some reason marked with different numbers of stars as they are reviewed for relative quality by the authors). The book is illustrated with some black and white stills from the show, which are necessary when discussing a visual medium.
One problem that becomes apparent in the opening of the “Introduction” is that while the episodes in the back are rated, the book as a whole is propagating the grandeur of this series as “the single most important work ever produced by American popular culture” (xi). It is pretty standard for scholarly books to explain the significance of the subject covered in an introduction, but this is too pompous and hints at a bias in favor of the filmmakers, as if this is a paid-for ad. The rest of this chapter is more standard as it summarizes the contents covered in the other chapters. The sections on the history of the show are detailed and heavy on research: this should be useful even for graduate students writing about this popular show. The chapter linking it to American history covers topics such as race (75) and gender (81) by reviewing events, social debates and the like that influenced the show or were influenced by it. While there are some sections that could have been cleaned up or edited out, most of this book is pretty polished, presentable, and delivers useful information. So, I would recommend it for graduate and undergraduate researchers, and even perhaps as one of the assigned text in a popular culture or popular film studies class.