On the recommendation of my pal Jerry Beck, I ordered the above two books and they both came today. Both are authorized biographies of actors who were linked to Superman during their careers. Bob Holiday played the Man of Steel in the unsuccessful Broadway musical, It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman. Noel Neill played Lois Lane for several seasons on the Adventures of Superman TV show with George Reeves in that title role. Both books are nicely written, loaded with photos and scrapbook stuff from the actor's career, and each provides a nice insight into the performer's life with most of the pages going to their Superman period.
I found the Holiday book interesting because I really knew nothing about the man and precious little about the show. Turns out, he was an all-around entertainer with impressive credentials as a comedian and singer, and even had previous Broadway experience. (He was in Fiorello with Tom Bosley). I wish I could have seen the Superman musical in New York because, judging from a bare-bones regional production I saw once, it's a clever show that deserved a longer life. And I remember Holiday making the rounds of talk and game shows at the time and proving himself to be quite "right" in the costume both in physique and attitude.
And I found the Neill book interesting because while it dwells at length on her Lois years, it also places them in the proper context of her whole career…a career that was largely over by age 40 when the Superman show ceased production. She did not hesitate to tell her Boswell about her post-Lois years working as a secretary — at one point, she was a personal assistant to Tom Selleck — and she made something of a "comeback" in the seventies when college students were willing to fill auditoriums to hear the lady they'd all loved as Lois. She's always seemed like a classy lady and she deserved and got a classy bio. If a book about Noel Neill's life sounds intriguing to you, you won't be disappointed by this one.
You can order the Noel Neill book at Amazon for $17.47 but I'm going to suggest you purchase it instead from this website for $24.95 plus four dollars postage. If you do, it'll come autographed by Ms. Neill and her biographer, Larry Thomas Ward. That's worth the extra bucks, and I'm guessing Noel Neill makes more money that way. The Bob Holiday book (written with Chuck Harter) can be ordered here for twenty bucks plus postage. I think you'll enjoy them both and if you don't, you can always complain to Jerry Beck.