An addendum to this review that I forgot to include:For sheer sexism, I was shocked to read this on page 81: "Uhura replied while taking the opportunity - now that the commanding officers were absent - to touch up her makeup." WTF!!!! (Though this would explain the presence of a mirror at her station in "And The Children Shall Lead.")
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Refer to my review of Logs 9-10 here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2449616.Star_Trek_Logs_Nine_and_Ten for why I have not become a fan of the Log series.
In Logs 1-2, my primary interest was in reading "Yesteryear." Recently I availed myself of the animated series' DVDs via Netflix. It was not a nostalgic return to my youth. Most of the episodes were pretty lame and the animation was atrocious (even by mid-'70s standards).
On the other hand, Foster has often been a good novelizer (is that a word?) of movies, and I hoped he could work his charms on these stories.
In this collection, "Yesteryear" isn't bad. The quality of the material certainly helps - Spock, Kirk and a historian use the Guardian of Forever (from the live-action episode "City on the Edge of Forever") to go back in time. While there, something happens that erases Spock from the timeline because his 7-year-old self dies on Vulcan. Spock then returns to the past and intervenes to save himself. We get a glimpse of a young Spock struggling with his human emotions and the demands placed on a Vulcan child, and we see a bit of the turmoil his parents went through raising him. (We also get to see his pet "teddy bear," the sehlat mentioned in "Journey to Babel.")
I couldn't do much more than skim through the remaining stories. The flaws I elaborate upon in my review of Logs 9-10 are evident here as well.
Logs 1-2 gets 2 stars because of the presence of "Yesteryear" but, otherwise, I'd recommend skipping the rest.
