How unfortunate it is that this book is out of print. Bert Stern is one of the greats of photography in the latter half of the 20th Century. This is the man that brought commercial photography to a new level, setting the standard for what could be done, and what would have to be matched by the rest of the industry. As a photographer myself, I have found his work in all forms, this book included, to be a major source of inspiration. I highly recommend this volume for anyone who can find a copy.

Buy this book, run everybody off, pour yourself a glass of wine and vist Marilyn. There are no retouches here. You can look at these pictures and see how she would have grown and changed had she lived. She looked high and rough in some photos which makes her seem like a real person instead of a product. It's Marilyn at work giving us Marilyn but you can be privy to a sort of behind the scenes element that makes you feel like you were there.

Stern's introduction is a little heavy. He comes off like deifying Marilyn deifies him and when he plays up the sexual tension he percieved between them he seems a tad naive or maybe boastful. She was just doing what she did best. I think he had his camera confused with himself. I'll bet she was just downing Dom and being pure Marilin and it translates better than any glam portrait sitting.

Out of all of the Marilyn Monroe books that I have collected over the years, this volumne remains to be the most "unique" of its kind. The photo session that Monroe posed was completed just weeks before her most untimely death. Monroe was from her inception a most fascinatingly beautiful lady who to this very day the super models and stars who possess the charm and beauty, cannot compare to her. I really do not think that there will be another Marilyn Monroe. It just seems to me, that they "broke" the mold, when this girl was born and it seemingly doesn't look as if there will be another one like her. I found that the photos which were "X"'ed out were not to be published per request of Miss Monroe; however, years later, it seems that phtographer Bert Stern changed course and published them just the same. The book should be in every Marilyn Monroe fans' library as well as any professional photographer's library. I overwhelmingly give this book a "5" Star Salute!

I own dozens of other books and pictorials about Marilyn that claim to have "...never before seen pictures..." inside, which turn out to be the same ones used in every other book. However "The Complete Last Sitting" provided me with hundreds of beautiful pictures that I can quite honestly say I have NEVER seen before. Marilyn had never looked better. It's so nice to see her looking relaxed and natural instead of the usual posing, and she even shows off her playful sense of humour by donning a Jackie Kennedy style wig! This collection of photographs is just stunning, quite simply a MUST-HAVE for any Marilyn Monroe collectors/fans.

This small but powerful book of poems constructs the poet's genealogy out of parts of his and his wife's ancestry. Drawing first on an ancestor of his wife who had been a silk merchant in China in the nineteenth century, Bert Stern writes from the merchant's perspective in an epistolary manner that captures both the exotic aspects of a place strange to him at first and his down-to-earth clarity. The second sequence of poems also borrows voices from the past, this time from the author's Jewish past in Moldavia. This is a story of emigration from the terrors of the pogrom and immigration through Ellis Island to America. Between the two parts, we are given an almost mythic conjunction of two prominent "Americas." The author's ability to inhabit the minds of these pasts is a gift not often found among poets, and the poems are lit with a gentleness his characters must have passed on but did not often know. The third section, made up of two poems in Stern's own voice, are perhaps a culmination of these histories. Certainly they contain some of the best poetry in this book and more than suggest a powerful future for this generous-hearted poet.

I have owned this book for many years and don't really know the difference between this book and Bert Stern's other listed book, "The Complete Last Sitting." When I bought this book, I considered this one of the best on MM, but now it seems a bit ghoulish because Stern published pictures that MM had rejected. She had even used a pin to destroy the negatives, but Stern published them anyway. In hindsight, this is disrespectful to MM. He even publishes a photo of MM dropping her scarf, looking nude and very vulnerable. He also calls this sitting MM's last sitting. However, she posed for George Barris a couple of weeks after Stern's sitting, making Stern's allegation untrue. More importantly, Stern really doesn't get to know her at all so his "insights" are superficial. However, if you love MM (as I do) and can ignore these defiencies, you will enjoy this book.