A delightful summer read, in which New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot uses the life of her father, B-actor Lyle Talbot, to explore Hollywood and the ways in which it shaped the mores of 20th-century Americans. She writes about him with obvious affection, leaving out the excruciatingly detail that some family-authored biographies can fall prey to. Instead the focus is on how Talbot’s life and work exemplified some profound things about American life: the striving of rural kids in the early 1900s and how they got out of genuinely hard-scrabble circumstances, but also the ways in which that success could appear to be luck to those who made it in the talkies. Most fun for me we’re his early years as a magician’s assistant on the road and his pre-Hollywood repertory theatrical experiences, in which “the essential sprightliness of his nature” stood him in good stead. Later there were multiple failed marriages and a brush with alcoholism before the marriage that took—30 years with Margaret’s mother and her three siblings—steadied him in his 60s. The books includes an excellent set of annotated sources at the end. So lovely to read a warm tribute to a Hollywood father.