REVIEW: Beaming Up and Getting Off: Life Before and Beyond Star Trek by Walter Koenig

Beaming Up and Getting off: Life Before and Beyond Star Trek by Walter Koenig

FEBRUARY 9, 2021 - Walter Koenig’s new book, Beaming Up and Getting Off: Life Before and Beyond Star Trek, is a wonderful book and you should read it immediately.

Right...now that’s out of the way…

The folks at Jacobs Brown Press kindly sent me a copy of Beaming Up and Getting Off for me to review. My first thoughts were: “Wow, is that an unintentional double entendre?” Spoiler alert: no, it isn’t. Well, it is a double entendre, but it’s definitely not unintentional. More on that later.

Beaming Up and Getting Off was published in 2020, and is an updated and expanded version of Koenig’s 1998 memoir Warped Factors: A Neurotic’s Guide to the Universe. He’s updated it with nearly 100 pages of new material.

I started reading Koenig’s book with not much to go on. I didn’t know much about Walter Koenig, other than what we all know: he played Chekov in The Original Series, he was brought in to be a Davy Jones-alike, he didn’t make it into The Animated Series but he did write an episode, and that one scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan makes no dang sense if you actually watched Star Trek (if you know, you know). Oh yeah, and he played that one other guy on that other show.

So I dived into the book with a sense of curiosity, and I was very much not disappointed.

Right off the bat, Koenig’s writing style is readable and totally relatable. It’s frank and disarming with a hearty sense of humor. At times, his storytelling is so intimate that you feel like maybe you shouldn’t be reading it. There is more than one discussion of Koenig’s love life, in more detail than you would probably expect. But all of that contributes to a feeling of camaraderie with the author and I would challenge any reader to just try and assert that they have nothing in common with Walter Koenig.

Beaming Up and Getting Off begins in the summer of 1943, at the start of Koenig’s second grade year in New York City. He talks about his experiences as a first-generation American, about the aftermath of World War II, and about the Red Scare. He talks about his parents, his teachers and schoolmates, and he talks candidly about the childhood events that drove adult neuroses. It’s a largely chronological tale, covering early childhood into mature adulthood, stopping to linger on pivotal moments. It’s also got plenty of exclusive photos from Koenig’s own collection.

To read Koenig’s words is to live the life of a working actor, someone who (if I may editorialize) couldn’t have been anything else. As a reader, you’ll live his highs and lows, gasp in awe when things go right, and cheer him on when he suffers setbacks, of which there are plenty. And you’ll love the behind-the-scenes insights from on- and off-set of your favorite shows. Yes, including Star Trek and Babylon 5.

Overall, Beaming Up and Getting Off is an essential and inspirational read. It’s substantial, at more than 350 pages long, but it’s highly enjoyable. Koenig writes with intelligence, humility and humor, and once you pick this book up, you’ll find it hard to put down.

Beaming Up and Getting Off: Life Before and Beyond Star Trek is published by Jacobs Brown Press and available from Amazon.com or wherever you get your books.