A magazine blurb about the reading opens the description on this audiobook, before the subject, the byline or the premise get a word. AudioFile praises a performance of touching reverence, humor and sincerity, and the publisher put that first because it is the strongest thing anybody has said about the recording in public. Six hours and forty-seven minutes from Macmillan Audio, released in February 2016, with William Shatner credited both for writing the book and for reading it. Whether that doubling is the point or the problem is the only question that matters here.
Sharpest of the five written entries is a three-star filed from Australia in December 2018, and it lands a criticism the rest of the column never touches. Some new stories, it says, but not many great insights, and then the sentence that should decide the purchase for a lot of people: the book as a whole tells you more about Bill than it does about Leonard. That is not a hostile reading. It is a structural observation about a memoir written by one half of a fifty-year friendship, in which the surviving half controls every anecdote, every silence and every choice about what a friendship even was.
My own sense is that the objection is correct and that it does not sink the thing. Nimoy was a private man by every account this book gathers, and a portrait assembled from the outside by somebody who spent seventy-nine television episodes and six films in the same frame is going to be a portrait of a vantage point as much as of a subject. Go in expecting a double exposure. What arrives is two careers photographed on the same negative, which is a stranger and more interesting object than a biography.
What Makes Leonard Worth Hearing
The best of the material is the part that has nothing to do with the series that fixed both men in place. A five-star filed within days of release in 2016 catalogs what it found: Nimoy as a family man, a perfectionist about his work, and a person with interests running well past acting, photography among them. That is the book doing what a friend can do and a biographer usually cannot, which is to notice the ordinary shape of somebody's attention over decades. The description backs this up, promising material gathered from others who knew Nimoy well.
Shatner reading his own tribute is the production decision that justifies the format. The description calls this a book written and read by one legendary actor in celebration of another, and the reading credit names nobody else, so what you get across the six hours is grief and affection delivered by a professional voice that has been close to this subject for half a century. No proxy narrator, however skilled, could supply the pauses in the places where this one puts them.
The origin story is a good one and it is on the record: the two men first crossed paths as working actors on the set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., long before the roles that fixed them in place. Neither had any way of knowing what a new science fiction series would do to the next fifty years, and the book is at its most alive when it stays in that period of not knowing. If you have absorbed decades of convention-circuit mythology about that relationship, hearing where it actually started is worth the first hour on its own.
Things to Know Before Starting Leonard
Start with the title. The field on this record says one word, Leonard, and stops. A four-star from October 2017 supplies what the page omits: the full title continues as My Fifty-Year Friendship With A Remarkable Man. Anybody searching for the book by the name printed on its cover will have to guess their way here, and anybody browsing will see a single first name with no indication of who it belongs to. That is a straightforward discoverability failure and it costs the publisher sales.
That same entry is the most useful preparation available. It expected the book to concentrate on the Star Trek years and the decades afterward, and found instead that it starts much earlier, with Nimoy's childhood and how he came into acting at all. Whether that history was researched or gathered across years of conversation is left open. Either way, adjust your expectations forward: this is not six hours of set anecdotes.
Grades on this listing are not usable. It shows 4.5 as an average with a rating count of exactly one, and a single vote cannot land on a half star, since one voter picks a whole number and nothing else. Five dated written entries are visible below that counter, spread across a decade, which contradicts it again. Read the column, ignore the badge, and note that the spread of those five runs from three stars to five, so the enthusiasm is real but not uniform.
Who William Shatner Is Writing For
Anyone who arrived through the show and stayed for the people will find this rewarding, and the most recent five-star describes exactly that route, coming away knowing more about Nimoy, about the series and about Shatner than it expected to. That triple return is the honest description of the book's value. It is also a fine entry point for listeners who care about how working actors survive being permanently identified with a single role, which is the real subject underneath the friendship.
Pass on it if you want a rigorous life of Leonard Nimoy, with sources, chronology and an outside perspective. This is not that, and its own copy is careful to say so, calling it as much a biography as a story of a friendship. Come for the friendship and the biography arrives as a bonus. Arrive wanting the biography and you will spend six hours listening to somebody else remember.
- Read by: Shatner holds the reading credit alongside the byline, which is the whole production argument for this edition.
- At its heart: Fifty-year friendship, actors typecast by a single role, grief, Star Trek's off-screen history
- Vibe: Warm, anecdotal and openly partial
- Short version: A memoir of a friendship rather than a life of Nimoy, and better understood that way before you buy.
Good to Know
Does William Shatner read the entire audiobook himself?
The narrator field names him and nobody else, and the description states plainly that the book was written and read by the same actor. A trade-press quote printed in the copy describes the performance as reverent and sincere, which is the only outside assessment of the recording on the page.
Do you need to know Star Trek to follow this audiobook?
Some familiarity helps but very little is assumed. The copy supplies the scale on its own: an entire television run plus six feature films, across half a century of working within sight of each other. Friendship carries the structure here, and the franchise supplies the setting it happened in.
Is it a biography of Nimoy or a memoir about Shatner?
The publisher hedges on purpose, describing a book that is both at once. In practice everything arrives through one participant, including the material gathered from other people who knew Nimoy well, so the perspective never fully steps outside the friendship it is describing.
What do long-time fans of the pairing get out of it?
A five-star from March 2025, written by somebody who came to the series through a parent, describes it as full of wonderful stories and easy to picture, and lands on the affection between the two men as the takeaway. Emotional payoff, not new information, is what that reader reports.
