Despite perhaps being one of the best-known choreographers of cinematic history – though he preferred the term “dance director” – this is the first significant biographical study of Busby Berkeley William Enos. Jeffrey Spivak's book, one of Kentucky's Screen Classics series, is firmly targeted at satisfying a mainstream film-buff audience but nevertheless does valuable work in unveiling “Buzz” Berkeley's personal and professional narrative. It catalogues his life-long commitment to his mother, Gertrude, a woman to whom Berkeley at one point tithed 50 percent of his salary (97). Indeed, “dutiful” is Spivak's oft-used word to describe Berkeley's concern for Gertrude, however precarious Berkeley's other relationships proved to be. Additionally, Spivak does not gloss over his subject's faults; in this case, Berkeley had difficulties with alcohol that led to several drink-driving charges and hospital admissions. A whole chapter (123–42) is devoted to the notorious accident of 1935, and subsequent three vehicular manslaughter trials, when a head-on collision led to a car overturning and the deaths of two women (Berkeley was acquitted). Nor does Spivak ignore Berkeley's disastrous first five marriages: only Berkeley's final marriage from 1958 seems to have given him any stability, comfort or tenderness, perhaps befitting previously widowed Etta Judd's lack of “show business aspirations” (259). Indicative of the biographical style Spivak adopts, this glossy volume includes not only photographs of the family, celebrity friendships, classic on-set shots and stills of key dance sequences, but also more uncomfortable images. One shows a bandaged Berkeley at the hospital just hours after the notorious 1935 car accident; another shows a clearly distressed Berkeley being restrained after a suicide attempt in 1946. These give the impression of a warts-and-all analysis and combine neatly with the biography's even-handed attention to pre- and post-fame activities.

Alongside Berkeley's personal life, the book documents the content and art of Berkeley's productions. This covers everything from well-known to more obscure projects from Berkeley's long (if erratic) career which spanned the 1920s to the 1970s, with the depression era 1930s and early 1940s as Berkeley's heyday. Other studies of musicals have examined the most famous works like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933), e.g. Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (1993) and Cohan, Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader (2002), but Spivak has clearly spent a long time hunting out and viewing copies of all the extant works or reading detailed notes on the full range of Berkeley's shows. Use of camera angles, setups, and innovative close-ups, as well as Berkeley's own technical work such as the development of revolving stages (71), are all examined. Spivak also details Berkeley's high expectations from the performers, both the parades of anonymous girls and big-name stars. Notoriously, he twice nearly killed the swimming film superstar Esther Williams when shooting spectacular water sequences (245, 253).

Spivak's text is undoubtedly praiseworthy for utilizing resources such as film studio and magazine and newspaper archives to produce this substantial work. It certainly adds to the relatively sketchy studies of 1973 (Thomas and Terry's The Busby Berkeley Book and Pike and Martin's The Genius of Busby Berkeley) that have remained staples for those interested in Berkeley's life and career. Yet Spivak's work does little to move Berkeley scholarship on from Martin Rubin's 1993 study Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle. Despite twenty-six pages of endnotes and a twenty-four-page appendix of all of Berkeley's stage and film works with detailed credits and synopses, something remains elusive.

Weaknesses emerge through careful reading. For example, the endnotes regularly cite those 1973 sources and Berkeley's own memoirs – a three-hundred-page autobiography, Girls, Glamour and Glory – are also problematically referenced. This is despite Spivak's own epilogue noting that the autobiography provides “Buzz's rose-coloured glasses” view (300–1). Second, although usefully collated and expansive in their presentation here, the details of the appendix are largely well established and add few facts to Berkeley's career history. Finally, Spivak's journalistic style can blur certain uses of source evidence: for example, describing the 1935 accident, Spivak writes that “backseat passenger, Ada von Brieson died horribly … agonizingly … inverted” (126) but leaves it unclear if this is Spivak's own emotive description or the first witnesses' response to the event. What is ultimately lacking is therefore critical reflection about the motivations or the consequences of Berkeley's actions. Given Rubin's work contextualizing Berkeley's relationship to traditions of vaudeville and blackface, reinventing the musical at a time of social upheaval, one hopes that future scholars use Spivak as a springboard to further analysis rather than as a biographical dead end.