PositiveThe Washington PostThis is a well-researched book. Better, it’s a well-told story, one that rarely loses its focus on the larger picture ... The picture De Visé paints is of a comic genius hurtling toward oblivion as fast as he can, fueled by misery, drugs and enablement.
Philip Norman
PositiveThe Washington PostPassages do feel warmed-over, as if Norman were reciting a familiar story while reminding himself to keep the focus on the lead guitarist just behind John and Paul. It is in the chapters on Harrison’s childhood...and on the post-breakup years that we get closer to the particulars and paradoxes of this enigmatic man ... Mostly a dutiful recounting of the life of a poor but happy kid who loved rock-and-roll with a purity that precluded the need to get famous and whose response to becoming one of the four most celebrated people on the planet turned him into a seeker and a churl, a mystic and a misogynist.
Nick de Semlyen
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThere’s history to tell in The Last Action Heroes, but there’s not really a cohesive, galvanizing story ... A smooth writer and dogged researcher, Mr. de Semlyen keeps the narrative on track, but at a certain point readers realize they’re mostly getting a litany of facts ... He paints a robust picture of an industry feverishly cranking out movies ... But the book’s two biggest stars, Arnold and Sly, never come fully alive on the page, even as Mr. de Semlyen strains to puff their real rivalry up to mythic proportions. And the author misses the chance to note the technological and industrial changes that... banished these men from the screen ... More damagingly, Mr. de Semlyen dodges what his stars and their movies meant to the popular culture and political climate of their day, and he barely touches on the attitudes they modeled for how men should behave in the world ... The Last Action Heroes is a celebration, not a cultural analysis, and plenty of readers will be satisfied with that. But a tougher, more observant book might explore how the absurdly pumped-up bodies of these stars, and the way they dealt death accompanied by a quip, reflected the culture’s reaction to an age where men were being challenged about their place in society and America was being challenged about its place in the world.
Kate Andersen Brower
PanThe Wall Street JournalHow do you contain such a person in the pages of a book? It may not be possible; in any event, Kate Andersen Brower hasn’t done it. The effort is there: Scrupulously researched, Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon weighs in at nearly 500 pages ... Really, she’s a biographer’s dream. Then why does Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon disappoint so sorely? The book is a bedazzled march through a life of excess that becomes a slog of wide-eyed data points and insights that aren’t especially insightful ... The text has been researched and written but not shaped. Perhaps most problematically, Ms. Brower...writes from the point of view of a fan ... The book is more successful at conveying the often-frightening strangeness that comes with being an object of mass idolatry...and with the humiliations visited on a woman desired by famous men ... That breathlessly banal style of writing...runs throughout Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon and quickly turns numbing. The fawning tone does a disservice to any reader who truly wants to comprehend this larger-than-life figure or understand what she signified to her era ... Here is the story of one of the most absurdly dramatic, over-the-top lives of the 20th century. And it is dull.
Mark Rozzo
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a Hollywood book about everything except the movies ... Mr. Rozzo keeps racking and re-racking his focus, from the art galleries of North La Cienega Boulevard to the rock clubs that revitalized the Sunset Strip with the sounds of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield; from the sybaritic celebrity paradise coalescing out in Malibu to the bliss-outs and freak-outs up the coast in San Francisco. The author wants to take in the entirety of the ’60s cultural revolution through the lens of Southern California and two protean people who lived there. Remarkably, he succeeds, juggling names and events with the skill of someone intimately familiar with the turf. Everybody Thought We Were Crazy is an exceptionally well-researched and well-written book, and if the tsunami of information at times overwhelms, it’s not Mr. Rozzo’s fault that his subjects seemed to have known everyone.
Stephen Galloway
PositiveWall Street JournalA workmanlike and ultimately sorrowful dual biography of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh ... In its final chapters, the book is deeply harrowing, not least because mental illness remained a misunderstood scandal in mid-20th-century Western culture ... Truly, Madly, to its benefit and detriment, at times reads as an inspired feat of collation ... As biography, however, this approach often produces a muddle ... Truly, Madly has passages of overstatement and florid speculation ... Truly, Madly comes alive as a book, and it is a gripping and terribly sad reading experience.
