Bob hope biography review

Customers find the book informative and well-written, providing interesting insights into Bob Hope's life.
Set up as a trashy "real" look into Bob Hope's life as an adulterer, skinflint and all around not nice guy, the book really doesn't serve up the dirt it.
It's a great, forgotten story, and Mr. Zoglin provides a definitive version.

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Hope: Entertainer of the Century
By Richard Zoglin
A Book Review by Dr. Lloyd Sederer

My father looked like Bob Hope, especially his nose, which was long in its arc and pointed a bit upward at the end, not unlike the end of a ski slope. It was distinctly different from the Eastern European Jewish noses of my family. My father also had the same receding hairline, very fair skin, and lean body (when younger). The similarities stop there, perhaps except for both their intelligence and disposition to control everything in their orbit.

When we got a TV, among the millions of Americans in the early 1950s, it was Bob Hope, Milton Berle (Mr. Television), and Ed Sullivan whom my family, and most of America, religiously watched every week.

So began my fascination with Bob Hope.

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Bob Hope was arguably the most successful American entertainer of the 20th century. He made 66 films; dominated radio for 10 years (his shows often reached 40 to 50 percent of US. households) then discovered how to dominate television; told his story in 14 books, some with huge s

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How He Captured America

When Bob Hope died in 2003 at the age of one hundred, attention was not widely paid. The “entertainer of the century,” as his biographer Richard Zoglin calls him, had long been regarded by many Americans (if they regarded him at all) “as a cue-card-reading antique, cracking dated jokes about buxom beauty queens and Gerald Ford’s golf game.” A year before his death, The Onion had published the fake headline “World’s Last Bob Hope Fan Dies of Old Age.” Though Hope still had champions among comedy luminaries who had grown up idolizing him—Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, most prominently—Christopher Hitchens was in sync with the new century’s consensus when he memorialized him as “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny.”

Zoglin, a longtime editor and writer for Time, tells Hope’s story in authoritative detail. But his real mission is to explain and to counter the collapse of Hope’s cultural status, a decline that began well before his death and accelerated posthumo