Weirdly barren of laughs. Across 600 extremely interesting pages, I LOLed exactly once ... Fascinating ... But somehow no one is quite as fascinating as Michaels himself.
An encyclopedic doorstop ... A compendium richer than even Mr. Michaels’s most fervent admirers could ask for. That can be a problem for readers insufficiently smitten by the Michaels mystique or the SNL brand of topical humor.
Morrison...has built Michaels the kind of biographical monument usually consecrated to founding fathers, canonical authors and world-historical scientific geniuses. A fair question might be whether the progenitor and supervisor of a long-running sketch-comedy show...merits such treatment ... That the answer turns out to be yes is largely a tribute to Morrison’s journalistic chops. Briskly written and solidly sourced, Lorne is in essence a nearly 650-page magazine profile — something I mean almost entirely as praise.
One of the best biographies I’ve ever read. It’s as though she videotaped his life and the lives of everyone he’s ever spoken to, edited out all the boring parts and left us a book rich in details and anecdotes ... Her achievement is all the more remarkable because Michaels and his Saturday Night Live already are reasonably well known, but even more so because he is a complex, not easily definable subject.
Far from a hagiography ... The energy of Lorne flags at times, and Morrison goes through the second 25 years of the show’s history at a dog trot ... One thing you notice about Lorne, though, is that it is simply beautifully written — a model of research, narrative structure, concision and observation.
Reads more like a very good, book-length Vanity Fair profile. In it, Morrison tells us what makes Michaels tick, and that is no small feat ... The resulting book wields an authority most prior SNL books have lacked ... Morrison is a skilled writer. I think she writes a little too much on Michaels’ formative years ... A definitive profile of the SNL creator, deeply researched and adeptly written. All that’s missing is a cinematic flourish of narrative conflict.
Morrison uses meticulous research and pleasurably crisp writing to tell the life story of a man who has shaped pop culture for a half-century ... A fascinating blow-by-blow.
Morrison uses meticulous research and pleasurably crisp writing to tell the life story of a man who has shaped pop culture for a half-century ... A fascinating blow-by-blow.
