I read this for the experience an the historical setting amid the artists' communities of Paris in the early 20th century. I am not a fan of Gertrude Stein's talents, but was reasonably able to remain engaged. ( )

The autobiography of Gertrude Stein written by herself as though it were the autobiography of her secretary, Alice B. Toklas. ( )

I had to read this for a University Course and found it to be self serving and lacking in humor. It managed to make fascinating characters like Picasso and Matisse seem rather banal. Not one I will revisit. ( )

I was so amused by the premise, of Alice B. Toklas being reduced to a minor role in her own autobiography - the Robin to Gertrude's Batman. Could you imagine how the conversations about this book must have gone? Poor Alice

Gertrude Stein must have been such a character, and she and Alice lived such interesting lives. This book is more or less a role call of everyone important in modernist art and literature; the two women knew everyone and traveled everywhere. That's what this Autobiography is, a loose account of years of parties with artists and authors, with some bits about World War I thrown in for good measure. But it's strangely compelling, a time capsule of the early twentieth century, and fun to read ( )

More fictional tales of life in Paris of the 1920’s in the guise of a memoir, this time the author pretending to be somebody else. You can sense the smugness of Stein playing tricks upon her reader where you don’t know whether you want to admire talent or smack her across the face. Poor Alice B. Toklas, in what is supposed to be her book she is a minor character telling all about Gertrude Stein and her genius. The fact that one knows that Stein is writing this book makes her sound like Rickey Henderson with her constant references to the greatness of Gertrude Stein in third person. An entertaining read nonetheless. I liked Hemingway’s version better though.

“Gertrude Stein always speaks of America as being now the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing the be living a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world.” (p. 105)

“Americans, so Gertrude Stein says, are like spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They are not brutal they are cruel. They have no close contact with the earth such as most europeans have. Their materialism is not the materialism of existence, of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction.” (p. 123) ( )