PositiveThe New York Times\"Though Robin, at upwards of 500 pages, is exhaustively reported and doesn’t shy away from the abundant messiness in Williams’s personal life, it never crosses the threshold from critical assessment into bonkers character assassination, nor does it marinate in sordidness ... The conventional wisdom on comics, especially troubled ones, is that their funniness comes from pain. But Robin doesn’t support this thesis...So what made him tick, for better and for worse? Here is where Robin, for all its length, comes up a little short...I would have appreciated some more authorial imposition, some attempts by Itzkoff to collate what he has learned and what he thinks into some psychological insights into Williams’s character ... In fairness to Itzkoff, it’s this very will-o’-the-wisp quality that makes Williams a tricky man to pin down. Robin is as definitive an account as we’re ever likely to have of the man, but, like the shape-shifting genie he voiced in Disney’s Aladdin, Williams was not entirely of this earth, and a part of him will always elude capture.\