PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksWhat does it mean that Hecht resented his own genius at crafting scripts? This is one of the central questions that animates Adina Hoffman’s beautifully written Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, a concise but nuanced biographya concise but nuanced biography of a writer whose astonishing output and success as a commercial screenwriter never quite diminished his desire to write a \'great\' novel. Hecht lived an exuberant, madcap, bad-boy life, which Hoffman details with a gimlet eye ... The great strength of Hoffman’s biography is that she never loses sight of Hecht’s work, evaluating the films and writings with keen and revealing judgment.
