Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book about tee vee that I have ever read, August 18, 1998
By A Customer
I have read a good many books about television and its history, but this is, far and away, the best of the lot. I do not always agree with Mr. Ellison's opinions, but this man can write with the best of them and everything in here is worth reading and mulling over. I am a little young to have been a part of the civil rights/anti-Viet Nam era, but everything here coincides with my recollections of this time as a youthful bystander. You might not remember many of the shows about which he wrote. Most of them are forgotten, and with good reason. Here, it doesn't matter at all. Ellison writes about so much more just tee vee that, ultimately, America's portrait is reduced to a 21" tee vee screen. Scary, enlightening, entertaining and often roll around on the floor rolling your head off funny. He wrote a companion volume called "The Other Glass Teat," which consisted of later columns from the Los Angeles Freep and a few from the paper that picked up the column after the Freep dropped him. Not as good as this, but still excellent writing. Perhaps the best stories are those of when he went to speak at a high school in the ghetto and had a kid tell him off and the other of when he was a tryout contestant on the pilot of "The Dating Game." The first tells us more about America at that time than all the self-righteous academic nonsense ever published; the second is uproariously funny and also tells us a great deal about how vacuous we can be. What can I say? Get it. Read it. Think about it. I have recommended this book to friends many times with the guarantee that if they did not like it, I would buy it from them at cover price. I still have only my original copy of this gem.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
classic anti-nostolgia, December 18, 1997
Hate nostalgia? Harlan brings you a live, from the trenches, collection of his late 60's - early 70's Los Angeles Free Press televison-criticism columns. Unearth the horror of Tammy Grimes! See why Laugh-In was, in truth, an example of proto-Republican mind-molding and why all the true freaks watched the Smothers Brothers instead!. (My copy came from Half-Price books, Austin, TX, and supposedly there is a companion volume called The Other Glass Teat, one that is REALLY hard to find and one that I would be very grateful to read.)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ellison at teh top of his game, June 1, 2007
I bought this book in, of all places, Cambridge England, and stayed up past 3 AM reading it. It was hysterically laugh-out-loud funny as it pushed my memory back to early childhood (I was born in January 1965 so 69-70 are at the edge of recollection); yet, shows like "My Wolrd, and Welcome To It" which Ellison rightly loved still fired a few joyous neurons buried in the back of my skull. I've given it four stars because much of the commentary simply cannot mean anything to those born after, say, 1980. They didn't see the shows, know the mood, grow up with the actors, or watch the re-runs. But for those over forty (or who can remember who The Banana Splits were), I would recommend it unhesitatingly.
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