This book is a compendium of America's neuroses, from its puritanism through its hatred for anything smacking of socialism all the way to its feminist-inspired guilt feelings towards women. These neuroses are then projected on Germany, leading to countless misunderstandings concerning the nature of German history and life. As an account of Bertolt Brecht and the world in which he operated this book is all but worthless. If you want to understand how crazy Americans really are, however, by all means go ahead and study it as carefully as you can.

I don't quite understand the previous reviewer's comments.
This book is a very good introduction from a technical point of
view. It surveys the career of Brecht as a stage director. This aspect of Brechtian studies in the Anglo-American circle is lacking. Carl Weber and John Rouse are leading scholars on this topic, but you have to dig hard and deep to find their articles.
If anything, the detailed record on the production of the Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Berliner Ensemble which forms the core of chapter six is an absolute keeper. It details how Brecht directed this play himself. What kind of things he was looking for? What to focus on? What to work on? How? It's invaluable but it's ignored again and again by college teachers who try to piece together theorectical expressions from defferent periods in Brecht's career. I say none of this nonesense; instead, study chapter six, if your German is not good enough and then you will get a handle on Brecht.
The rest of the book is a little chaotic, and his writing is a bit imprecise sometimes. People familiar with Eric Bentley's or Martin Esslin's books will recognize that the lack of political consciouness does not start with Fuegi. Fuegi really has some contributions to the study of the theatricality in Brecht by focusing upon the so-called "theatre" side.
What fouls Fuegi's reputations as a scholar and a biographer is his notorious biography published later. That volume is now deservedly out of print.

This is a terribly bad book. It is full of factually incorrect assertions woven together into a distorted picture of the most influential and complex theater worker of the twentieth century. There is a total absence of critical perception or analysis, and for someone who claims to have been working so long in the field, Fuegi betrays a remarkable lack of insight into the dynamics of theater production. He pays lip-service to what he seems to believe are feminist principles, but underneath them, he shows great disregard for the opinions and achievements of the remarkable women who worked with Brecht throughout his life. Fuegi seems to have learned nothing from Brecht;his writing is plodding and turgid - all the more so in the context of Brecht's own sharpness and economy of language. Any other book on Brecht would provide a better introduction; I have only given it one star because I can't figure out how to give it less

Brecht's achievements and influences as a pioneering modernist dramatist are inarguable. What needed to be added to the record was that the man was something of a literary sociopath whose reputation has been greatly inflated by his aggressive gift for self-promotion at the expense of others. Fuegi's documentation of his creepily Manson-like manipulation of talented but insecure women into a harem of love slaves and uncredited collaborators is long overdue.