Life Lessons From The Twilight Zone

Mark Dawidziak is the television critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer,  and is a serious scholar on Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Rod Serling, and, as such, he is an unabashed devotee of Serling's landmark television series, The Twilight Zone.

He has converted that knowledge into this interesting book of life lessons, as delivered from that place between shadow and substance, the fifth dimensional land whose boundaries are the limits of the imagination - The Twilight Zone.

Here are just some of the fifty life lessons that Dawidziak tells us about:

• Follow your passion
• Nobody said life was fair
• Don't live in the past
• When nobody else believes in you, keep believing in yourself
• You're only truly old when you decide you're old
• Make the most of the time you've got
• Remember the people who got you where you are
• The grass is always greener...or so you think
• The universe does not revolve around you
• Angels are all around you

I could go on, but you get the idea.  Dawidziak then uses classic episodes from The Twilight Zone to illustrate each of these fifty life lessons.  Many episodes illustrate more than just one of these lessons.

This book is not an episode-by-episode compendium of all of the series' episodes. There are the books like that out there if that is what you want.  However, you will be reminded on many, many classic TZ episodes such as Walking Distance, Time Enough to Last, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, Eye of the Beholder, The After Hours, Terror at 20,000 Feet and over one hundred of the 154 total episodes that were produced.

So maybe these life lessons are not necessarily new or especially profound, but it never hurts to be reminded of them, and this book, submitted for your approval, illustrates them in a new and different way.  Reading the book may remind you that perhaps you have forgotten some of these lessons in your journey through life, and you will welcome the refresher course.  It may also cause you to go to that DVD Box Set of The Twilight Zone you own and rewatch some of these great stories - never a bad thing - and view them in a new and different way.

Four stars from The Grandstander for this book.