Jill and I went shopping at the library sale in Stone Mountain Village, GA, yesterday. Stone Mountain Park, which is next to the village, is a major civil war historic site with the world’s largest relief sculpture (3 acres of carving) depicting General Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Andrew "Stonewall" Jackson. But that’s not what we went to see in Stone Mountain.

We’d gone to Stone Mountain to check out their art fair, but sadly, most of the art was not to our taste. Fork sculptures, cute sayings carved into stones, decorative flags, and frou-frou decorative painting on furniture were the most dominant items displayed. And ribbon or faux-fur bedecked purses and signs for little girls rooms.

But there was a sign we liked — book sale at the library, hardbacks $1.

Jill bought 10 or 12 books; I bought 3.

One of the books Jill bought was Gilda: an Intimate Portrait, which looked really interesting, but turned out to be a little bit comic in how pretentiously it was written, and surprisingly devoid of what I thought it would include.

Now, I remember staying up late with my favorite babysitter, Veronica Peck, and watching Saturday Night Live back in the mid to late 1970s. I didn’t understand half the jokes, but I loved Gilda Radner. So it was fun to learn some of the background on how that came to be, and the impact it had on her life.

But aside from somewhat grusome stories from when they were all in college, and later, at great parties in New York in the 1970s, there’s not much intimacy to this intimate portrait. The author spends more time, for example, on a relationship Radner had post-college with the ex-husband of one of her college friends’ sisters, than on her relationship with Gene Wilder. This is even though the author describes Wilder as "the love of her life."

He also says, often, that he’s not going to tell a particular story because either Radner herself told it in one of her books, or because Doug Hill and Jeff Weingard tell it in their book, Saturday Night. Of course he shouldn’t plagiarize anyone else’s work, but the way Saltzman told the story, it feels full of holes.

On the whole, not worth it.