RaveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Handy’s teen-mag title and his book’s colorful packaging belie the author’s seriousness about his subject. A veteran magazine journalist whose credits include a stint at Vanity Fair, he writes with the lively appreciation of a fan rather than with condescension or academic pedantry, combining astute cultural analysis with fascinating trivia ... Acknowledging, if only at the end, that he has no grand unified theory of teen film, Mr. Handy nevertheless exhibits a gift for telling distinctions ... With Hollywood High, Mr. Handy offers an essential contribution to the library of books about the resonance of American genre filmmaking. It’s enough to make the reader punch the sky with a fist while crying, \'Don’t you forget about me.\'
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Diller writes movingly about his early fears that his sexuality would be used against him ... Charming ... Those familiar with how Hollywood figures ordinarily scramble to hog the credit will find such humility refreshing ... The most entertaining revelations in the book are the asides, great stories that Mr. Diller tosses off, too briefly, in a line or two.
David Nicholls
RaveThe Wall Street JournalIf the plot is pedestrian, Mr. Nicholls keeps it going at a near-sprint, creating delightful agony for the reader ... Snappy banter and Mr. Nicholls’s endless supply of witty and literate observations make every page a pleasure ... Lightweight? Sure, but exactly the proper weight for a book that glides so elegantly to its destination.
Daniel de Visé
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. de Visé’s book, though awkwardly written... races along on a whoosh of marvelous details and crackling anecdotes.
David Mamet
RaveThe Wall Street JournalA short, chatty, discursive book padded with the author’s comic doodle ... Mamet has a fine cache of Hollywood quips and one-liners, passed along from one smart-aleck to the next ... Nothing but wicked jokes, angry broadsides and pointed gossip: in other words, the ideal Hollywood book.
Hermione Lee
PositiveThe New Criterion... definitive ... a case study in the joy and gratitude that comes, or ought to, with being English ... A small-type listing of Stoppard’s credits covers nearly two pages, yet Lee makes room for at least a brief discussion of seemingly every project, even some of no consequence ... It’s refreshing that Lee avoids the biographer’s trap of subject-loathing ... One finishes the book in a state of immense gratitude that Stoppard exists.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
PositiveThe National Review...a brief, beautiful, deeply felt [book], saturated with meaning ... Michael rejects most of the assumptions of our modern consumerist condition and hence rejects its defining registers of hipness and irony. Instead he lays bare his emotions, the yearning he felt growing up with a single mom ... Michael’s welter of feelings about his ancestry and his father are the basis of this book ... Michael doesn’t so much argue as feel that some combination of materialism, technocracy, and individualism is carrying us away from our purpose. He finds his in his faith, his family, his Irishness, his determination to be conscious of past, present, and future.
