Customer Reviews

"Mr. B" or Comforting Thoughts About the Bison: A Critical Biography of Robert Benchley (Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture)

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Wes Gehring contributes a great deal to Benchley scholarship, being the first Benchley biographer to sift through the letters and extant diaries. His investigations have been extensive, and aside from beating the whole "antihero" theme to death, he offers intelligent commentary on Benchley's life and work. But this self-professedly scholarly study (listed at so high a price) is full of typographical and other errors that a good line-editor and/or fact checker should have corrected. For example, within two pages of the main text, Gehring has Benchley writing the introduction to S. J. Perelman's "Strictly for Hunger." Another howler occurs when Gehring inserts a note into Benchley's letter describing Artie Shaw's near-fatal illness: "Shaw lived until 1991." This would no doubt surprise Mr. Shaw, who is still alive and well at this writing. Some of the difficulty may have originated with Gehring's (and his secretary's) unfamiliarity with the computer--he goes on at length about his trouble with the machine. This ineptitude is perhaps meant to evoke the spirit of Benchley, who admittedly could not change the ribbon in his typewriter without becoming "festooned like Laocoon." The difference is that Benchley's fumbling was funny. Gehring's is just irritating, particularly if you paid full price for the book. (I didn't.) This book is for the true Benchley fan, who will be able to wade through the mistakes to find the nuggets of new scholarship that made it ultimately worth reading.