PositiveLos Angeles TimesEngaging and meticulously researched ... Like a good 19th century omniscient novelist, Butler hops seamlessly among his characters’ points of view while recounting their lives and times ... Gracefully balancing on the right side of that fine line between contextualizing and condescending to the reader ... Butler’s main title, The Method, set against the book’s cover photograph of Strasberg giving notes to actor Morris Carnovsky, [is] problematic. It casts Strasberg as progenitor of modern acting craft and narrates the story of modern-day acting through the lens of the Method. Butler even refers to Awake and Sing! — with which Strasberg was not involved — as \'the first full-length Method play\' ... To his credit, Butler dedicates a generous amount of his narrative to the Group’s schism, calling it an \'unresolvable dispute.\' And yet he capitalizes on the way \'the Method\' caught the popular imagination as the revolutionary style — and therefore became the term that comes most readily to the lay reader’s mind. In doing so, he conflates the Method with Stanislavski’s System, which is akin to writing a history of rock ’n’ roll featuring Elvis Presley on the cover, crediting him as creator of the genre, and referring to rock interchangeably with its progenitors, gospel and blues ... Structuring his book like a biography, Butler traces a straight line from the birth of the Method — which was actually the birth of the System — to its demise in the 1980s ... Despite his conflation of terms, Butler’s history is an indispensable account of a revolution in acting that ramified beyond the theater ... Tools equip the actor to transmit the human condition, which can only be done by telling the truth. Butler’s book delivers on this honest gospel.
