Author: Amy Pascale (no website found)
Publisher: Chicago Review
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
I am not one of the Joss Whedon groupies. I respect his abilities, but while I loved the Buffy movie, I detested the TV series. I liked Dollhouse and Firefly, and I loved the Avengers movie, so you could say I'm a fan, but definitely not a fanboi. That's how you know that when I recommend this biography, I'm not gushing mindlessly, but considering it rather more dispassionately than many reviewers might.
The biography (which contains no photographs - not in the advance review copy anyway) covers Whedon's life from youth to present (at least present as defined by when the book was written), and it's written by someone who is definitely a fangirl, so yes there's some gushing, but it's kept in check, and it never overrides the facts, of which there are many from a diversity of sources.
These sources include writers and producers who worked with Whedon on his TV shows, such as David Grunewald and Tim Mi near, actors from those shows, such as Anthony Head and Sarah Geller, and actors from The Avengers, along with a host of others. The list occupies a whole paragraph in the acknowledgments, and features Whedon's wife, Kai Cole, and of course, Whedon himself.
The biography makes very good reading, and fills in a lot of details surrounding his rise to success, and the struggle he had to get there. I'm not someone who really cares that much about the details of his personal life (although this book has plenty of those). As a writer myself, I'm much more interested in his writing career. For me the mechanics of how he goes about this is what was the most engrossing to me: where he came up with his ideas, how he got them into a format that could be filmed, how he made it happen on the small and the large screen.
I would have happily read much, much more about that than this book contains, but then it would probably have been really boring to other readers, so be comforted that Pascale strikes a nice balance between the personal and the professional in telling this story. You will learn about his imperfect childhood, his stint in Britain, his school experiences, his choice between acting and writing when he was choosing a college, and how he chose Wesleyan.
From there on out it seems like his story doesn't need telling, but if you think that, then there's still a lot you'll miss. Pascale talks in detail about his work in TV and the struggles he had there in trying to find a balance he could live with between his vision, and the rather short-sighted if not bizarre demands of Fox TV. The details cover Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Agents of Shield. His movies are also covered, including the original Buffy movie, Toy Story, The Cabin in the Woods, Much Ado about Nothing, The Avengers, and a mention of the Avengers sequel, the Age of Ultron, the notes for which were begun over a pint and some fish and chips in a Brit pub.
All in all this turned out to be everything I wanted when I picked it up, and I was completely satisfied with it!
