Excellent.

Stevens clearly adores her subject, describing him as a 'solemn, beautiful, perpetually airborne man.' Camera Man is less a traditional biography than a series of reported essays about the progress of the 20th century with Keaton at their center. Sometimes Stevens ventures too far afield.

Dana Stevens shows us she isn’t screwing around as early as page six by unpacking the year 1895.

... superb.

Ms. Stevens (who is a professional acquaintance of mine) writes with grace and passion about her idol.

Stevens vividly describes Keaton’s early life on America’s vaudeville circuit.

Stevens is a passionate Keaton fan.

Buster Keaton was not only an early filmmaker of extraordinary ability, Stevens contends, but his life and work act as a lens through which to view the emergence of cinema and the arrival of the American Century. Camera Man is an essential read if you’re interested in any of these topics, and a terrific starting place for the budding Busterphile.

In this thoughtful, engaging, and moving work, Slate writer Stevens posits that Buster Keaton’s life is an entry point to understanding the 20th century—and vice versa.

Film critic Stevens astutely aligns Buster Keaton’s kinetic cinematic artistry with the velocity of innovation and change in the twentieth century.

Though its historical wanderings read as windingly as one of Keaton’s famous chase scenes, Camera Man redeems details from Keaton’s life that previous biographers have misread or glossed over.

... a masterful mix of cultural history, biography, and film criticism to consider of the work and legacy of silent film star Buster Keaton.

... the author doesn’t flesh out...larger events, and attempts to connect Keaton to them are often misguided. Stevens rightly bemoans the poor treatment of women in the cinema of that era, so it’s odd she doesn’t note that many lead actresses in Keaton’s great films—Sybil Seely in One Week, Kathryn McGuire in The Navigator, Marion Mack in The General—more than hold their own and are every bit the Keaton character’s equal. The author devotes eight pages to Spite Marriage, a 1929 MGM mediocrity Keaton didn’t control, but she provides far less detail about Our Hospitality, Go West, and other superior films where Keaton was in charge. Stevens devotes more space to Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 Limelight, a plodding film in which Keaton has only a small role, than some of Keaton’s directorial gems. Readers hungry for details of how Keaton made his pictures should look elsewhere. An appreciative but wildly uneven look at a brilliant filmmaker..