RaveNew York Times Book ReviewI’ve never read one more entertaining (and more revealing) than Mary Rodgers’s Shy. Her voice careens between intimate, sardonic, confessional, comic. The book is pure pleasure — except when it’s jaw-droppingly shocking ... two of the most vividly (if scarily) rendered parents I’ve ever encountered ... \'Daddy\' is the first word in the book, and it provokes the first of Green’s many illuminating footnotes, which enrich the pages of “Shy” like butter on a steak ... Dick and Dorothy are at least implicitly present throughout Shy, and Mary’s takes on them are alternately horrific and hilarious ... But it’s the showbiz world they all lived in that lifts the book into the pantheon of Broadway narratives ... Chronology is imperfect when a life like Mary’s is rendered by a mind like Mary’s; one of the book’s alternative titles, Green tells us, was \'Where Was I?\' She jumps back and forth between her many decades, digression dangling from an anecdote, in turn hanging from an aside. Sometimes, you’re left in slightly irritating (if amusing) suspense...Would I have preferred a more straightforward narration? Not a chance, for it could have deadened her invigorating candor.
Sam Wasson
PositiveAir MailSam Wasson’s book...is awfully good ... as fine an unwrapping of the moviemaking process as I’ve read ... Wasson tracked down every pertinent bit ... Wasson’s occasionally overripe prose threatened to activate my gag reflex ... But when he’s not writing bad Chandlerese, Wasson generally keeps his storytelling straight and sleek, and is gifted enough to redeem himself with expertly delivered, shapely insights[.]
Christopher Knowlton
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... does not remotely make the case that the Florida land boom of the 1920s \'brought on the Great Depression.\' (Knowlton, in fact, effectively disavows the assertion himself, so I’ll blame an overweening publisher for the misleading subtitle.) But the book does offer a story that, though often told before, is worth the spirited retelling Knowlton brings to it ... Knowlton is not the most sure-footed of anecdotalists. Especially in his opening chapters, the reader is too often led to the edge of a telling revelation only to find nothing there...But once Knowlton gets to the bubble’s inevitable puncture, the sheer gravitational pull that eventually grounds all speculative balloons exerts its irresistible power. Ambition morphs into mendacity, the profit motive becomes avarice ... The one great weakness of Bubble in the Sun is the absence of those suckers. Entirely missing are the hapless (or, if you prefer, foolish, or credulous, or maybe just plain greedy) individuals who climbed aboard the bandwagon — earnest dreamers who thought they were buying a retirement haven on a beach but ended up with a patch of fetid swamp; small-time speculators who made some fast money, then crashed while reaching for yet more; the thousands upon thousands you can find lingering at the finishing line of any speculative mania, left holding nothing but scraps of worthless paper.
