PanAir MailTo organize Shepard’s sprawling creative life and to connect the art to his own tormented emotional struggle for authenticity, a biographer needs to impose some kind of overriding narrative vision on the work and on the psychology of the man. Robert Greenfield’s True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times doesn’t have the candlepower to do the job ... Greenfield won’t risk interpretation of Shepard’s plays or his psychology. As a result, his over 400-page account reads like a kind of travel itinerary, naming the high spots but giving no real sense of detail ... Greenfield’s book looks directly at Shepard and misses him by a mile.
Cole Porter
MixedThe London Review of BooksWhat these letters really reveal is not Porter’s process or his productions but his longing – the underground stream that fed the flow of song. Porter was at his most effusive and uninhibited before fame found him ... Recent years have seen the publication of important collections of theatrical letters; those of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, for instance, brilliantly illuminate their personalities, their times and their artistic struggles. The Letters of Cole Porter, for all its piquant tidbits, is not in that league. Part of the problem is that the editors have been dealt a thin hand of documents, a pair of twos which they try to make into a full house. The other issue is the editors themselves, both British academic musicologists, who know the music but whose knowledge of the Broadway scene is from the reading room not the green room ... Again and again, like pedantic waiters spieling about the food while keeping you from it, they intrude on the pleasure of discovery ... The playfulness they admire in the writer they refuse the reader.
