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A review by criticalgayze
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman
sad
medium-paced
2.5
I'll be honest that I find it hard to review this book for a couple of reasons:
1) This book has really made me wrestle with the idea of whether the idea of a whether a biography should be objective or if a biography of someone who has made their name in questionable ways should be allowed to be critical in tone the way this book was to Stan.
2) I listened to this on audio, and the narrator really put in a performance. A part of an honest review would be knowing whether the author wanted or signed off on the amount of acting the voice actor put into things.
There are two honest critiques I feel I can level. One, the author is not objective. At one point, the author goes so far as to say (brag?) that an article he had written about Lee's late woes was part of what made Lee's situation worse. This kind of presumptuousness seemed wholly inappropriate to the work in a way that let me know there was a problematic lack of distance here.
Two, this book is based little on fact. While one could argue that this is a result of the things that trouble the waters of Lee's legacy, it's hard to take seriously a book that calls into question the veracity of the Stan Lee mythos when so much of the claim is built on the author's supposition and that of others.
1) This book has really made me wrestle with the idea of whether the idea of a whether a biography should be objective or if a biography of someone who has made their name in questionable ways should be allowed to be critical in tone the way this book was to Stan.
2) I listened to this on audio, and the narrator really put in a performance. A part of an honest review would be knowing whether the author wanted or signed off on the amount of acting the voice actor put into things.
There are two honest critiques I feel I can level. One, the author is not objective. At one point, the author goes so far as to say (brag?) that an article he had written about Lee's late woes was part of what made Lee's situation worse. This kind of presumptuousness seemed wholly inappropriate to the work in a way that let me know there was a problematic lack of distance here.
Two, this book is based little on fact. While one could argue that this is a result of the things that trouble the waters of Lee's legacy, it's hard to take seriously a book that calls into question the veracity of the Stan Lee mythos when so much of the claim is built on the author's supposition and that of others.