RaveLos Angeles TimesAn invaluable and highly absorbing new biography ... Hartigan’s biography is at its best in chronicling the artistic process that reshaped not only Wilson as a dramatist but also the producing structures of the American theater ... Wilson’s artistic story, throbbing with the ancestral memory Wilson felt in his blood, is profoundly inspiring in Hartigan’s magnificent rendering.
D. T. Max
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesBrazenly entertaining ... The crackle of [this] book has everything to do with the zingy forthrightness of [its] title character ... Sondheim’s inability to finish the work gives Max’s book a faint air of Waiting for Godot. Yet failure proves illuminating, as Sondheim dissects the routine of his stymied creative process, until he pulls the plug on Max, explaining that he’d rather not be profiled after all. The death of Sondheim last year increased the value of these sharp-witted conversations and enabled Max to publish them ... Sondheim is, of course, top-drawer throughout. Broadway’s god of mixed emotions, he is captured in Max’s set of interviews and spare commentaries in all his irascible tenderness — his chumminess on display along with his crabbiness ... Max’s method results in a curiously touching miniature ... It summons to the page a Broadway voice like no other.
Mary Rodgers, Jesse Green
PositiveThe Los Angeles Times... brazenly entertaining ... The crackle of these books has everything to do with the zingy forthrightness of their title characters ... much more than a work of filial revenge. It’s the story of a bygone theatrical age when New York was the center of the cultural universe and Broadway could still pretend it was at the crossroads ... Rodgers’ scathing honesty jumps off the page in a way that had me imagining a theatrical adaptation along the lines of Elaine Stritch at Liberty.Shy would also benefit from the structural discipline demanded by the stage. Too many chapters are devoted to musicals that either went nowhere or are largely forgotten today ... Rodgers is aware that her story could come off as poor-little-rich-girl griping. But in her cocktail party recap of Broadway’s heyday, she bears witness to what it was like to be a female composer in a field dominated by men — chiefly her father. In the process, she turns a second-drawer career into a top-drawer performance.
Harvey Fierstein
PositiveLos Angeles Times... scrumptious ... [Fierstein] delivers plenty of dish, some of which leaves a bitter aftertaste. But his writing is most alive in the early years, before he becomes a Broadway institution ... A natural storyteller with a yenta’s love of mischief, Fierstein paints a vivid portrait of his youth in Bensonhurst ... Fierstein’s dings are often dressed in self-flattery ... to his credit, he is often scathingly honest about himself. He writes courageously about his alcoholism ... could have used more of this kind of soul-searching. The Harvey Fierstein glimpsed here is tantalizingly, defiantly, irreducibly complex. It’s a pity Sondheim isn’t around to offer the contradictory protagonist of this memoir the musical he deserves.
Michael Riedel
PositiveLos Angeles TimesReading Riedel has long been mandatory for theater insiders. They may complain about his journalistic practices, his tendency to sensationalize and distort, his refusal to let a fair review of the facts get in the way of a good scoop, his speculative and often erroneous conclusions. But his copy is sinfully entertaining, full of dish and drama and delivered with the wicked wit Broadway pros can’t help but admire ... An equal opportunity offender, Riedel is in no one’s pocket. His contrary streak makes his reporting essential even if his proximity to the material hampers his storytelling.
Alice Munro
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesThe casually impeccable stories in her latest collection, Dear Life, are somewhat more traditional in that they are largely focused on a defining episode of a character’s life. It’s still possible to piece together a broader history — Munro has a genius, no empty word here, for selecting details that keep unfolding in the reader’s mind — but the scope has tightened ... The plots, if it’s possible to call such natural seeming accounts plots, build to big cinematic scenes ... No story is quite as haunting as \'Amundsen,\' the tale of an abortive engagement between a young teacher who takes a job at a tubercular hospital in a wintry rural outpost and the presiding doctor who is all business even when making love ... The classic Munro figure of a woman, usually with unfulfilled literary yearnings, making a getaway from a stale or stifling marriage appears repeatedly, though the balance sheet of happiness isn’t altered for long by new passion ... Dear Life has something of a valedictory quality to it, but the consciousness behind these stories has a vitality that, thankfully, seems in no danger of ending any time soon.
Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney
Rave4ColumnsThis wide-ranging anthology, selected by Darryl Pinckney, acquaints a new generation of readers not with the story of Hardwick’s life but with the style and shape of her consciousness — what Wilde called 'the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind' ... Elizabeth Hardwick: the name itself evokes her impressionistic prose, as stately as a royal ship yet as unpredictable as the churning sea ... Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, this collection is admittedly a bit of a grab bag ...this volume offers a welcome counter-model in our age of hot takes and microwaved analyses ...dissenting correctives, dryly mocking the erroneous assumptions of scholars and biographers while delighting in the subversive truths of artists ... Hardwick’s own flamboyant sentences are choreographed to amaze with their kinetic punctuation... By maintaining the novelist’s prerogative for vivid portraiture, Hardwick made criticism sing.
