Usually, on completing a book, I can be definite as to my feelings,'A good read', 'a poor effort'..... This tome is a little more tricky. It sells itself as an autobiography and, in the traditional sense of that word, I would say that it is a failure: Groucho's life is not laid out chronologically; indeed, I am sure that some important aspects are left out all together.
What we do get, is a feel for his life through the final years of his life and a real sense of the man.
I would criticize the last two hundred, or so, pages which are taken up with a series of verbatim reports of conversations between Groucho and other greats of American comedy. A conversation is just that: it is not the same as the written word. We end up with several re-tellings of the same stories and, more than once, a battle for verbal supremacy between the star and Groucho. This, I feel, needed more strict editing but, despite that niggle, this was a book which I ultimately enjoyed. ( )