First serial to Life and Ladies' Home Journal BOMC main selection Readers' Digest Condensed Book selection. Hundreds of veterans, dignitaries, and military Family members joined at the Main Post Flagpole to witness Fort Bragg’s historic.

A reader regrets that Burton's death in 1984 at age 58 cut short a life so luminous and full of promise still. There are also perceptive critiques of the star's successes on stage ( Hamlet, Camelot, Equus ) and in film ( Becket, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ). More affecting are reminiscences of Burton's Welsh family, his mentors Philip Burton and Emlyn Williams, friends and co-stars who share memories of the rise of a poor miner's son to world renown. A big problem is Bragg's tendency to novelize the actor's life with breathy prose ('Life was for the living and Rich seized it'.). Bragg, by contrast, writes at times like an over-excited fan who identifies too closely with his subject. The biography, however, is heavily repetitious about the mutually obsessive loving and destructive Taylor/Burton relationship: their years in the international spotlight, their profligate spending and insatiable drinking their extreme generosity to those in need. The style is cool and detached, but always engaging. The revelations will appeal to readers avid for gossip but they are more interesting as evidence of the late actor's writing gifts and of his literary ambitions. I m a big fan of Melvyn Bragg His In Our Time radio programme is, I think, superb However, Rich falls well short of the highest standards in biography Where.

British author Bragg quotes extensively from Burton's notebooks in which he related his most private thoughts.

Rich by Melvyn Bragg