Joss Whedon

June 15, 2014
Obsessively detailed treatment of the director of The Avengers and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and other TV series.Debut nonfiction author Pascale, a director at MTV, delivers a biography of Whedon that caters to the massive worldwide community of sci-fi obsessives who won't settle for anything less than exhaustive details on the object of their obsession. The author takes readers through the auteur's privileged upbringing-his father penned lyrics for Broadway shows and also wrote for The Electric Company and Golden Girls-and formative educational years spent first in an English boarding school and then studying film at prestigious Wesleyan University, where he cut his teeth as both a teacher and a writer/director. After a stint as a video clerk, Whedon's break as a writer came through his father's industry connections; eventually, he landed a job as a writer on Roseanne in the early 1990s; not long after, he sold the screenplay for the original movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But Whedon would bounce around from show to show as a behind-the-scenes writer and script doctor until his proverbial big break came in the mid-1990s when his Buffy character was refined and recast as a weekly TV series on the WB network. That series lasted almost seven years and accumulated an intense, devoted following. Pascale totally immerses the reader in the "Whedonverse," a sort of neo-feminist supernatural world grounded in everyday human dilemmas. The author pens worshipful prose throughout, extolling Whedon's never-ending quest for complete control over his work, and she occasionally goes overboard: For example, does even the most obsessive fan really care what brand of pen and notepad Whedon prefers? By the end of the book, Pascale has adequately familiarized us with the creative commercial artist side of Whedon; however, the actual human being behind all the demons and vampires is never satisfactorily fleshed out.An informative and readable book that often resembles a long PR piece.

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June 1, 2014
Pascale offers a biography of television auteur Joss Whedon, who is perhaps the first celebrity television show-runner. The son of a history teacher and a television writer, Whedon began his television career with a staff writing job on the sitcom Roseanne, but once that job experience soured, he turned to features, penning the script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Though disappointed with the final cut of the film, Whedon enjoyed a prosperous stint writing and rewriting films such as Speed and Toy Story before returning to the small screen to resurrect his slayer. The show was a modest hit, but the passionate fan base it cultivated led to an active online community that Whedon participated in as well as further groundbreaking television offerings (Angel, Firefly, etc.) that cemented Whedon's status as an icon even before he was tapped to direct Marvel's high-profile flick, The Avengers. Though Whedon's many fans are fairly familiar with the ups and downs of his career, the many frank quotes from Whedon, his friends, family, and coworkers make Pascale's absorbing bio a must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)