Michael Landon: Life, Love, and Laughter

Rating:
Summary: A Thrown-Together Mish-Mash of Memories
Review: I picked up this book thinking that it would provide information about Michael Landon from the people who knew him best. And to a certain degree at least, it did. The book contains some great photographs of Landon behind the scenes in his many television projects and with his family and friends. But the book is essentially a disconnected group of stories told to the authors by friends and former coworkers of Landon's, with a very thin thread tying them together. What you walk away from after reading this book is a sense that Landon was a good man, a great father, and a perfectionist in his work -- with wonderful stories to back that up. But what the book is missing is depth. I would have preferred to see lengthy interviews with a fraction of the people this book quotes, because those would have been more illuminating about Landon as a person. Instead, the reader is left to piece together the half-page anecdotes of dozens and dozens of people, some of whom knew Landon for years and others of whom knew him only briefly. Maybe this was the intention of the authors and of Landon's family. Any fan of Landon's work will certainly enjoy what's here. But I think a man like Michael Landon is deserving of a more substantial treatment, and I was left wishing the authors had taken some more time and done a better job (the kind of job Landon himself apparently would have done if the job had been given to him).