Herders, warriors, and traders Book

The trouble with autobiographies is that only part of most people's lives is interesting. So it is here. I wanted to read about Marilyn Monroe but we get only small parts out of two chapters. Miller glosses over the breakup of his first marriage and the formation of his relationship with the most famous sex-goddess of the 20th century. You have to piece together in your own mind how and why she married a dry, not particularly attractive man, or indeed why he took the major step to marry her. Then also, I wanted to know how much sex played in her life. After all she represented the sexual dreams of most men at that time. I don't need details but some indication - she maybe have been indifferent to sex, or gloried in it. She clearly suffered sexual abuse through her climb up the Hollywood ladder, so how did this affect her? I can't believe that Miller, with all his insights into every other aspect of his and people's lives, was not curious about this himself.

His prose is often vague and rambling, eg: "Glamour is a youth's form of blindness that lets in light, incoherent color, but nothing defined."

If you want to learn about the world of theater in the Fifties and Sixties, or the political climate during that time, including the extensive fear of Communism and the McCarthy trials, then this book is for you.