Look at MeAudiobook

Dustin Hoffman, Ariel Levy

Sixty years of American film, told by the man who kept being cast against it

Dustin Hoffman was never the obvious leading man, and the career that followed is the argument of this book: a face that did not fit the decade it arrived in, and a run of parts that changed what the decade was willing to put on a screen. The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, Rain Man, and a great deal of theatre in between.

He tells it himself, nine hours and two minutes, with the journalist Ariel Levy as his collaborator. The angle is not a parade of anecdotes but the question of what sixty years of watching the culture change does to a person who has been part of the change, and what it feels like to be looked at for a living, then and now.

Audiobook review by Emma Lawson

☆☆☆☆☆

An actor's memoir that is more interested in the era than the anecdotes

The trap with a book like this is that it becomes a list of films and famous people. Hoffman and Levy largely avoid it, partly because the interest is in what he was thinking rather than who he was standing next to.

The early chapters are the strongest, and they are not the ones about fame. A childhood spent being told what he was not, followed by years of auditions that confirmed it, gives the book its engine, and explains why the parts that made him famous were all, in one way or another, men who had been told the same thing.

He reads it well, which is not guaranteed for someone whose craft is on camera rather than at a microphone. The voice is dry, the timing is intact, and there is a visible effort not to perform, which suits material that is often about the cost of performing.

A practical note: nine hours and two minutes, read by Hoffman himself, and a standalone memoir. Listening to the author rather than a narrator is the whole reason to choose this format over the printed version.

If the era interests you more than the man, Dolly Parton, Songteller covers the same decades from inside the music, and Strangers is a memoir that goes the other way and opens everything. This one is the most guarded of the three.

What the book does better than most actor memoirs is describe the work itself: the preparation, the arguments on set, the way a performance is assembled out of small decisions that nobody watching will ever notice. Those passages are the ones I will remember.

Levy's hand is visible in the structure, and the book is better organised than most memoirs of this kind as a result. The passages about his father are the most carefully written in the book, and they are the ones that stayed with me.

Dustin Hoffman Look at Me memoir biography Hollywood free audiobook

Look at Me is Dustin Hoffman on sixty years of film and theatre, written with Ariel Levy and read by Hoffman himself. Nine hours and two minutes.

The free trial is the simple way to hear it: you start the trial, you take this title, and you decide afterwards whether the subscription has earned a place. If it has not, the audiobook stays in your library regardless, so nothing needs to be finished this week. Nine hours is a couple of evenings, and hearing the author deliver his own lines is the reason to choose this format.

For the details of the cancellation process, a dedicated guide is available. And if you decide not to keep the subscription, the audiobook remains yours. Before that, let one of the last voices of that era talk you through it. Nine hours is a couple of evenings, and the author's own delivery is worth the format. Nine hours is a couple of evenings, which is the right length for this.

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