Groucho Marx was a very funny guy and I have been waiting for this book for quite some time. When I first heard about it it was out of print, so I placed an order in my local bookshop for a copy once it was reprinted. However, owing to my gypsy nature, there are now probably five or six bookshops all holding copies of this book for me all around the country. But what of the book? Well, I think (being as shallow as I am) that I would have preferred a list of anecdotes to the letters themselves. Reading through the letters is a lot like reading arcane usenet postings. There's a load of incidental rubbish that is next to meaningless, some stuff that is hard to understand because you have no frame of reference, and then, buried somewhere in there, are a few few nuggets of hilarity that make the trawling worthwhile.
The other things that disturb me about the book are that it feels like you are reading through someone's private correspondence - something you usually get seriously told off for - and that we get no background information on the people mentioned in the letters. I'm a multitasking kind of guy, I can handle a book that has footnotes or appendices telling me more about the people and the issues mentioned in the letters. The explanations would also help me to treat the book as a historical work rather than someone's personal correspondence.
Overall then, this book was definitely a wasted opportunity. I would like to have known how and why Groucho died, whether the house he keeps mentioning ever got built and why the compilers felt it necessary to split the letters into arbitrary topics so that the timeline was all screwed up.
| Ben gives it: | | | | |
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Price: �6.99
Published by: Abacus (ISBN 0-349-10675-4) (finally, a book that I can give concrete information on!)
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 |  | last updated: 10th September 1996 |