Gertrude Stein Books

This short book rounds out a few pieces of the Gertrude/Alice relationship. I liked the way she gives a flavor of Stein's first book, relieving me of any desire to read it myself. Malcolm is a good writer and she touches on subjects relating to her own drama being sued for fabricating quotations and she inserts her own biases as in, "Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years, and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain. Their effect on those they enrich or disappoint is never negligible, and sometimes unexpectedly charged. They thrust living and dead into a final fierce clasp of love or hatred. But they are not written in stone--for all their granite legal language--and they can be bent to subvert the wishes of the writer. Such was the case with Stein's will."

Interesting, but I fear the author seems to set out to defend an agenda rather than seeking to a rational conclusion from the evidence at hand. She also falls prey to a need to appear very clever which she may well be. Is she more clever than profound?

Concisely told biographical work of Stein and Toklas. If you are looking for a definitive biography, this is not the book for you. If you want to understand the essence of their relationship and enjoy good writing and insightful phrasing, pick this up.

Malcolm writes very well but she fails to offer any reason why Stein/Toklas were (was?) worth the effort of researching and writing, or reading, this book. To a non-specialist reader, Stein's writings seem like either baby-talk (Toklas called her Baby) by the youngest of five children who was petted when she talked that way, or an outright scam, or perhaps both. It appears that these two Jewish ladies were near-collaborationists during the German occupation of France where they inexplicably lived openly while other Jews were being dragged out of hiding places to be murdered. But even if they were merely friends with highly-placed Vichy officials who protected them, no one suggests they played a particularly admirable role at that time. What, then, makes them worth close study now? This book did not answer this basic question for me and it certainly did not inspire me to go read something by Stein - the few examples in the book are nonsense and uninspired nonsense at that.

Then don't read Janet Malcolm. Malcolm is not the kind of biographer who delivers more than you ever wanted to know about a subject. But if you want to know how biographers do their sleuth work, how one wrong date can determine whether we think Stein horrid or not, and how the personalities of Stein scholars have shaped what we do and don't know about this writer, then read Malcolm. Along the way, you will be treated to delectable prose and delicious literary gossip. And you will get to know the personalities of Stein and Toklas in all their lively and quirky splendor.

On the advice of Mr. Telford's "review," I have been trying to order this book from Samuel French in New York City for the past 8 months. Mr order was taken and I was mailed a receipt (no book) indicating that I had not been charged anything. When I called to find out what happened, I was told that my order was pending a certain quantity of subsequent orders for this same book -- when enough people ordered it, they would print more and mail me my copy. I called about two months later to check the status (no book yet), and was told that not enough orders had come in yet. I was then told that my order would be dropped and I would not be charged, I would not get a book, thanks anyway. I think Mr. Telford should know that this book is truly no longer available -- period.

This book is NOT out of print but is available at Samuel French, Inc. in New York City. It has been selling steadily every year since publication in 1983. (signed) Robert S. Telford, Author

With Robert Telford's long tenure as a community theatre director, one would expect from him a book on production that tells it like it really is. He does not let us down. The subtitle of his HANDBOOK FOR THEATRICAL PRODUCTION MANAGERS is the best testimony for this invaluable guide. "A Community Theatre System That Really Works." This is a practical guide to a way of producing theatre with amateur actors and technicians. Telford tells all in his HANDBOOK. The most impressive thing about this work is the close attention to detail. This is not a book on theory. This is something you can hold in your hand while you're engaged in the planning of your next production. You want to take some of the misery out of Tech Rehearsals? Telford tells you how in detail, even down to what to say when calling cues. You want to know how to recruit and coordinate volunteers? The HANDBOOK answers your question and provides you with a sample "Backstage Volunteer Crew Card." Wonderful detail with charts and diagrams. To those theatres that struggle through the production process each show and take pride in the mere fact that they "got it on," to those theatres that have established procedures but never change because "we've always done it this way," to those emerging theatres that have all the desire to produce a play but haven't the foggiest notion about how to go about it, I recommend not only buying HANDBOOK FOR THEATRICAL PRODUCTION MANAGERS but studying it in the same detail with which it was written. It could be the best few dollars the theatre could spend. The above is the opinion of James C. Carver, Managing Director, Kalamazoo Civic Players, and Past President of the American Association of Community Theatre.

turned outward to the greatest city in the world instead of inward to her own rhythms, this is Stein's best book.

I expected to be able to sense and feel somewhat the Paris of Stein's time. The writing is so poor grammatically that one wonders how it was published.
Rambling, with little focus, it was a disappointment. Perhaps I didn't find the nuances that were intended to engage the reader.

Paris France is filled with nuggets of Ms. Stein's idea of "common sense". She makes no apology for her abrupt and take charge way of communicating, nor does she apologize for her feelings of superiority of intellect. The book begins with her first memories of Paris at age 4, and continues through 1940. The culture, food and fashion of Paris are summed up by Ms. Stein in one word....civilization. The French, says Ms. Stein, will "leave you inside of you completely to yourself". That, she suggests, is why so many artists chose to make Paris their home. Many friends are mentioned and often quoted in the book....Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Juan Gris, and of course, her life companion, Alice B. Toklas.

If you like Stein, you'll like this book. It's funny, thought-provoking, and totally in your face!

Text is marred by numerous errors, not just of spelling, but of dates, too. To wit: Foyot's was demolished in 1937, not 1933 (p.72). Cafe Voltaire was at #1, not 21, Place de l'Odeon (p. 67). Modigliani died 1920, not 1926 (p.121). Nathaniel West was killed 1940, not 1944 (p.120). Ezra Pound never lived in the rue de Seine (p.22). It is a fiction produced by Hemingway himself that he once rented an attic room at 39, rue Descartes, where Verlaine died (p.130). There's no such thing as rue St. Germain in Paris. It's 'boulevard' (p.20). And so on... Author also borrows/copies heavily, at times almost verbatim (but w/o acknowledgement) from Brian N. Morton's "Americans in Paris". Now there's a book to own!

Excellent way to tour bohemian Paris. Gertrude Stein owned a bookstore on the Left Bank in the early 1900s, which was the heart of the literary and artistic scene. This book includes 5 great half-day walking tours of the Left Bank. Among the sites on the tour are Helen Rubenstein's mansion which she had decorated with Picassos and Van Goghs, and which was ransacked by German troups in 1940; the bars and restaurants where Ernst Hemingway hung out, and scenes which appear in "The Sun Also Rises"; and the studios and residences of Picasso, e. e. cummings, Colette, Matisse, etc., etc. Each site is described in one or more paragraphs. I highly recommend experiencing Gertrude Stein's Paris. (This book was published in 1988, and is currently out of print.)

This is a fine, inexpensive edition of one of Stein's two most readable productions (the other being 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'). I'm giving it five stars because the item's star rating has been impaired by a reviewer who's reviewing an audiotape, NOT the signet paperback book on this page.

Do yourself a favor and listen to Gertrude Stein reading Gertrude Stein, before or instead of listening to this recording. Enjoy Ms. Stein's crisp diction and the wonderful rhythms of her prose and prose/poems. Hear the way the sounds cascade through the phrases and the way the phrases become the meaning.

Then, if you must, listen to this Flo Gibson set. Possibly you won't listen to much of it. I disliked it intensely. The reader appears neither to understand nor to like the material and reads with unremitting dullness of diction and unrelentingly pedestrian rhythm. In an apparent attempt to give some workaday meaning to Stein's rippling, dancing phrases, many words are heavily overemphasized, like an extremely bad and condescending reading of a children's book. But do remember --you may not react as I did.

The reading is not helped by pops and hissings, especially noticeable and intrusive on the beginning consonants of most syllables.

This is a meandering, disappointing, misleadingly titled book. Clearly the author wanted to write a book about the Harvard modernists and their era, including exploring "Negro chic" and the homosexual culture of the period. This would be a harder sell as a mass-circulation book, and hence the device of recruiting FOUR SAINTS as a distillation of the world he is interested in.

But the result is that one does not get enough of anything, and too much of what you didn't buy the book for. Chick Austin, Muriel Draper, and the others may have provided physical settings relevant to the gestation of FOUR SAINTS, but they did not CREATE the piece. As such, the lingering over their particular biographies is excessive in a book purportedly devoted to the birth of the opera. Too often we get lists of celebrities present at this gathering or another, complete with fawning descriptions of what they were wearing and how they decorated their rooms -- but this stems from a fan's love of a period, not a chronicling of FOUR SAINTS itself.

Thus while we read through elegant page after page gushing about Mrs. Harrison Williams and Lucius Beebe, by the end we have little idea of what went on on stage in the opera, what more than a few of the lyrics were, or how the music sounded. If it is vital for us to know how Julien Levy founded his art gallery blow by blow, why so little info on black theatre in New York before and after FOUR SAINTS? Why spend a paragraph following up on, say, Alfred Barr after SAINTS but only brief mention of what happened to any of the SAINTS cast members? This is a book about art museums mispackaged as one about the theatre.

This book is a bit of a cynical hoax. You can just feel the editor "shaping" a book about largely forgotten arts administrators and critics, the parties they went to, who they slept with, and how openly, via hanging it all on an opera which fascinates in legend because of combining a black cast with Gertrude Stein's lyrics. In the end, this book is a collection of well-written personality sketches of pictorial artists and their patrons. The author clearly has but subsidiary interest in music or theatre -- fatal in a book purporting to be about an opera.

For those who know little or nothing about the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thompson opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," this book will provide some basic information. Those searching for any kind of in depth analysis either of the libretto or the music will be disappointed, as I was. Long on the sexual preferences of the members of the 1930's modernist elite, short on any discussion of a landmark work of art. Listen to the original cast album instead.

I came to this book hoping to learn about the creation and production of Stein's opera, and I was not disappointed. I thought the book delivered that information, and more. Watson writes well, and he tells a fascinating story of the complicated network of interpersonal relationships that were finally led this unlikely opera into production. I think Watson understands the nature of Stein's as well as anybody, although the focus of the book was not on the way the opera was written. He manages to express the way that all the participants were inspired by Stein's words in different ways, the "miracle" of their all having "to create and all of them did."

An accessible look at a writer who is fascinating but often hard to follow.

Although the effect was no doubt unintentional, reading an academic tome which attempts to make sense out of Gertrude Stein's writing is well-nigh hilarious. If you'd be interested in reading paragraphs of explanatory material regarding the statement "Peanuts blame, a half sand is holey and nearly", this is unquestionably the book for you.

"History or Messages from History" is a short work by the legendary Gertrude Stein. The back cover notes that this work was first written in 1930. It reads like an extended prose poem.

I found "History" to have an experimental flavor, but ultimately I found it largely incoherent. There are a number of cryptic or nonsensical statements on history. Examples: "In history one does not mention dahlias mushrooms or hortensias"; "Intention is not history nor finality finality is not history. Think what is history"; "What is history it does not leave dogs for cows."

Stein's language is occasionally whimsical, musical, and/or absurd. One fun snippet: "April is fully a holy day too / A holiday for a shoe." But overall, I didn't get much out of "History." Check it out if you're a hardcore Steinian.