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A blog by someone who doesn't like or understand blogs.
A major theme of this blog is the love affair between the blogger and the city of New York.
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Saturday, November 23, 2002
BOOK REVIEW: LIVE FROM NEW YORK: AN UNCENSORED HISTORY OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (2002) * * (2 stars out of 4).
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This Book's authors, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, have clearly confused the word "uncensored," which is good, with "unedited," which is bad. Almost the entire book is taken up by long, unedited, paragraph-long and page-long quotes by people involved in the show, separated by no exposition, other than to give the name of the person quoted. While this is an interesting style, the result is, at various times, wild jumps in topic, to keep things organized chronologically, or wild jumps chronologically to keep things organized thematically. It's also, at various times, very repetitious, and very contradictory.
Furthermore, while the book may (for all I know) do a good job of capturing the feeling of what it was like to be there at the beginning of the show, it doesn't really have any information that isn't common knowledge to most long-time SNL fans. In particular, conspicuously missing in the discussion of Norm Macdonald's being fired from Weekend Update was any attempt to either dispel or confirm the rumors that this was because NBC executives objected to him joking about O. J. Simpson-- this book makes no mention that any such rumors ever existed. All in all, the book was a disappointment, and even though I am very interested in the subject, getting through the book felt like a chore.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2002/11/book-review-live-from-new-york.html
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