PositiveThe Chicago Tribune\"Dave Itzkoff’s biography gets its hands around as much of that life as possible. It\'s an incisive, comprehensive, very fine book ... It’s a fascinating life, and the author captures it with grace and evenhanded perception ... Robin reads smoothly and eloquently, though you wouldn’t mind a few more passages where Itzkoff’s critical intelligence takes off and leaves the organized, orderly reporter behind for a while. Biographies of famous funny people are funny that way: They require both kinds of writers. At his best, Itzkoff is both, and Robin is all the better for it.\
Rose McGowan
MixedThe Chicago Tribune...while parts of Brave are routinely written, at her best the author vividly captures a concrete image or a moment amid the swirl of this harsh life ... Those Miramax-distributed movies [Grindhouse & Planet Terror], she believes, 'are salacious, but as female-exploitation flicks go, they’re pretty great art; they’re punk and (expletive) up. But yes, objectification was on high. And so was intense abuse of women, both in reality and symbolically.' The most vital material in Brave focuses McGowan’s complicated disgust on this issue.
Alec Baldwin
PositiveThe Chicago TribuneThe first half of Nevertheless is swift, eloquent, witty; the later chapters are more diffuse and tend to get caught up in grocery-listing the remaining stops along Baldwin's resume, as well as his tangles with various agents, managers and publicists. Nevertheless. I'm glad I read it; the good stuff in it is very good.
Glenn Frankel
RaveThe Chicago Tribune\"Frankel\'s book takes a good while to get to the actual filming and the reception of High Noon, but the side roads en route are worth it ... The Red Scare Hollywood era is familiar nonfiction territory, but Frankel makes it vital and gets down to the roots ... Without turning his book into a screed against Donald Trump\'s America and current political ideologies that aim to take the country back to 1952, Frankel keeps both eyes on the lessons of the past, as well as the movies that got made, despite opposition.\
