Steven Rea

A cute little volume that, unfortunately, suffers from too many flaws.

Hollywood Book Club features full-page, black and white photographs of celebrities reading; the photos are accompanied by extremely brief discussions of the celebrities and the circumstances behind why the photos were taken. Most of the photos are striking, and the ones featuring Buster Keaton and Jack Benny with his daughter Joan are especially charming.

First of all, although this book is often referred to as a ‘coffee table’ book, it most definitely is not; that description is deceptively inaccurate. Hollywood Book Club is way too small to ever be considered a coffee table book.

There is also an excessive amount of wasted space throughout this book. The information provided for each individual celebrity & photo is incredibly scant; the end result is a lot of blank space on the non-photograph pages. What a waste. At the very least, the print could have been made larger, or additional, smaller photographs could have been added. The overall effect of all that white space is both cheap and shoddy.

Finally, it is apparent that no one edited this book. For example, on page 30 (accompanying Errol Flynn’s photo) is written, “The swashbuckling star wrote three books wrote three books over his career…” Either the author really wanted to emphasize that Errol Flynn wrote three books or else nobody bothered to proofread this book. Given how sparse the text is, that kind of laziness is really inexcusable.

Overall, the images in this small book are a treat to peruse, but the book itself is a tremendous fail. If your public library just happens to have a copy, check it out and enjoy the pictures. However, this book is definitely not worth buying.… (altro)