This was a very juicy book! I think it felt a bit scattered but that was because the author was packing so many details about so many people in. I recommend it to someone who really likes Hollywood drama and minutiae as it would overwhelm more casual readers. It was truly exhaustive on the topic!

4.5 Stars

At just over 600 pages this is a mammoth biography of the controversial Hollywood couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I have read a few other high quality biographies on the subject in the past, but this one was very unique and engaging. I'm hard pressed to try and verbalize just how this biography was served up to the reader, but I'll give it the old college try. It certainly wasn't in the strictly dry/historical style of stating the hard facts in chronological order that can sometimes bore the reader. This was a concoction mixed of stream of consciousness, poetry in motion, a blunt crassness, and an occasional "off the beaten path" diversion to peripheral players surrounding these two. The outcome was an irreverent book about a Hollywood couple that had an animalistic hunger for each other and didn't care who they hurt/pushed out of the way to satisfy it. We are treated throughout the book to fascinating excerpts from Richard Burton's diaries and the minute details of movies that Taylor and Burton starred in together and individually. The book is chock full of juicy details such as one of Richard's nicknames for Elizabeth: "monkey nipples". Need I say more?

Thank you to the publisher Hachette Book Group, riverrun who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

Delicious, insightful, repetitive, baroque, overly long, The book is as excessive as its two protagonists. But it is a compelling roller coaster with great insight into the behavior of Taylor and Burton and a great overview of 50s and 60s culture, particularly British cinema. The book has no straight lines, but each digression is entertaining.

Erotic Vagrancy is an unflattering portrait of screen icons Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Author Roger Lewis focuses on the excesses, the boozing, Elizabeth’s illnesses, the pursuit of money, the way the couple was ridiculed by others in parodies of their movies. To quote the author, “In this book I try to evoke the age of Sixties excess – the freaks and groupies, the private jets and jewels and the steam yachts sailing in an azure sea; the mess and splendour of material goods; the magnificent bad taste and greed and money smelling like jasmine.” The narrative occasionally is interesting, but often cringe worthy…as I assume Mr. Lewis desired. Some of us who lived through the 60’s remember the decade a little differently: Vietnam, Jack and Jackie, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Cuban missile crisis, Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon. I voluntarily reviewed an advance copy of this book rom NetGalley.