Monkey Business

[The Marx Brothers are] well captured in Simon Louvish's zippy group portrait, ?Monkey Business, which ferrets out the facts behind the brothers' often murky accounts of their lives with a care that never interferes with the fun. Louvish does a solid job of separating fact from fiction and includes a family tree and a discussion of the FBI's file on the group.?Monkey Business?includes generous excerpts of classic Marx Brothers film dialog. Recommended Mr. Louvish has written a well-researched and playful version of this hysterical history. Told with tremendous style and sparkle, Louvish's composite portrait of the Marx Brothers offers an indispensable overview of the actors' saga. Decked out with photographs and sprinkled with excerpts from reviews, interviews, memoirs, film dialogue and hitherto unpublished skits and scripts, this biography captures the sheer exuberance of the foursome as they conquered vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood. Louvish gives equal billing to all the brothersAJulius (Groucho), Leonard (Chico), Arthur (Harpo), Herbert (Zeppo), plus Milton (Gummo), who left the act to become a Hollywood agent and vibrantly re-creates a supporting cast of characters that includes George Kaufman, Irving Berlin, Irving Thalberg, S.J. Perelman and Margaret Dumont ' His fresh research clears up all manner of myths, embellishments and omissions in previous biographies and in the brothers' autobiographies. In this invigorating reappraisal, the Marx Brothers, more than Minnie and Sam's boys who never grew up, ' are timeless satirists of pretension, folly, privilege and snobbery, in the tradition of Cervantes, Rabelais and Mark Twain. The Four Horsemen of the Apoplexy, ' they embody an authentic acceptance of life's absurdity as well as a desperate need to leave one's mark.