PanThe Los Angeles TimesWhen I sat down with Kate Andersen Brower’s Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, I expected to read a biography — a book that would offer both argument and documentation. But I was hard pressed to find any organizing principle beyond chronology and bursts of indiscriminate admiration, and what passed for endnotes dismayed me. They did not reference specific pages. Each chapter was noted with a jumble of interviewees and books, but no precise attribution ... This 512-page object appears to have been miscategorized. Brower is obviously not Robert Caro. She does excel, however, as a fangirl, which is not terrible. Elizabeth Taylor is a rambling commemorative, the sort of tribute album that you get at a memorial service ... I can’t help wondering what might have been. Brower had a huge advantage over Taylor’s many previous biographers: the cooperation of Taylor’s family and access to the documents they guarded ... Brower tries to shove Taylor’s many identities — child star, substance-abuser, serial marrier, multimillionaire, mistreated political wife, tax exile — into a single volume. This doesn’t work. It leads to flatly descriptive narration ... Although the book’s star-flecked cover is as sparkly as the jewels Taylor collected, it leaves the reader feeling sad ... I wish Brower had been more respectful of the access she was given — not through lavish thanks or wide-eyed praise, but by approaching her project and her sourcing with more verve and rigor ... Nothing is sadder, after all, than a missed opportunity.
Patti Smith
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewM Train does not move in a simple arc from one destination to another. It meanders between her interior life and her life in the world, connecting dreams, reflections and memories. Smith’s rich, inventive language lures the reader down this nonformulaic path.
