Rating: 
Summary: For the record:
Review: A reviewer below -- though not as below as he deserves to be -- writes: "DA Miller is an old professor of mine, and this book is as insufferably pretentious as is the man himself...The only person stupid enough to say about this book that it's "Barthesian" is Professor Miller himself (who I actually suspect to be the author of the review below...)"The bad faith inscribed in this "review" is evident enough, even if its history is obscure; my guess is that Miller gave this guy a B+ instead of the A he thought he deserved. But for the record: Miller did NOT write the review that called his approach Barthesian. I did. And, by the way, I'm another former student of Miller's (back in his Harvard days, where he was one of the very best teachers I've ever had). PLACE FOR US is difficult, sure -- I think everyone can agree on that. But it more than rewards those who make the effort to meet its challenges. It's a dazzling critical and literary performance.
Rating:
Summary: For the record:
Review: A reviewer below -- though not as below as he deserves to be -- writes: "DA Miller is an old professor of mine, and this book is as insufferably pretentious as is the man himself...The only person stupid enough to say about this book that it's "Barthesian" is Professor Miller himself (who I actually suspect to be the author of the review below...)" The bad faith inscribed in this "review" is evident enough, even if its history is obscure; my guess is that Miller gave this guy a B+ instead of the A he thought he deserved. But for the record: Miller did NOT write the review that called his approach Barthesian. I did. And, by the way, I'm another former student of Miller's (back in his Harvard days, where he was one of the very best teachers I've ever had). PLACE FOR US is difficult, sure -- I think everyone can agree on that. But it more than rewards those who make the effort to meet its challenges. It's a dazzling critical and literary performance.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, passionate, and demanding
Review: As the Times's cultural critic Margo Jefferson says on the back cover, Miller's book is "like a musical score that the genre has yet to catch up with." If you go into a Sondheim show expecting Jerry Herman, you will be disappointed. Miller writes in long, complicated, Proustian sentences: his approach is demanding, sometimes exhausting, but if you do the work, it pays off richly, both intellectually and emotionally. This book is not designed to be read quickly for information or to confirm existing recieved ideas about gay men. It is a dreamy meditation, a passionate combination of language and sentiment that is designed to be read with love, the same love that gay men so often have for musical theatre. This is not a simple expositional piece, nor does it attempt to be. "Place for Us" requires substantial time and rereading, and when given the attention it deserves, it is enormously rewarding and insightful.
Rating: 
Summary: terrible, silly, and a little crazy
Review: Be afraid. Be very afraid. This book is the worst kind of fake intellectual, uber-pretentious drivel, and its hopelessly meandering, crazy, and meaningless prose ought to be nominated for a No There There Award. Who is this guy fooling? Just because he uses big words and writes in freakishly long sentences, do people really mistake this mess for something of import? Take it from this Juilliard grad and New York theatre professional -- the Emporer is naked, ladies and gents, and no amount of verbosity can hide that. Don't waste your time on this terrible, silly, crazy imitation of a book... unless you're very bored and very desperate for a laugh.
Rating:
Summary: Puh-leeeze
Review: DA Miller is an old professor of mine, and this book is as insufferably pretentious as is the man himself. Worthless drivel and unexamined claptrap. The only person stupid enough to say about this book that it's "Barthesian" is Professor Miller himself (who I actually suspect to be the author of the review below...) Save your money. Save your time. Don't fuel this man's ego any further by purchasing his obnoxious self-congratulatory book. It's a waste of resources that could be spent elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Face it, folks -- the Emperor is naked.
Review: I wish this book had entertained me as much as some of the equally pretentious reviews below. This unfortunate book has literally nothing of import to say and takes far too much time saying it. Miller's circuitous, desperate to impress, unintentionally hilarious prose is the literary equivalent of untalented finger painting. And far from being progressive (as other reviewers here claim), his take on gay culture and gay people is as hopelessly rooted in the 1970s as Tony Manero's white three-piece suit. Ever the optimist, I forced myself to read the entire book in hopes of finding hidden kernels of wit or wisdom (I quickly gave up hopes of finding both together) but alas, there is no there there...
Rating:
Summary: A Scholar of Pleasure
Review: In this volume D.A. Miller, as he did in its brilliant predecessor BRINGING OUT ROLAND BARTHES, does what few other academic writers, born with the moon in Barthes and Foucault rising, have been able to accomplish: he takes the work of these celebrated theorists further both in the name of and toward the understanding of pleasure. Hence his style gets the bad rap that all great gay displays receive, since it is willfully ostentatious, proud of its own capacity to desire, and as complicated in its elaboration as we imagine all of our individual desiring lives (real and fantasized) to be. Moreover, it refuses to testify to the so-called straightforward mode of criticism that blunt populists and people who can't stand gay men (imagine Paglia in both categories) moralistically rant about so tiresomely; instead, it uses language like a scalpel or, better yet, as the integrated musical uses song-and-dance: in only the most highly specificed, uniquely articulated manner required by the task at hand. This work is strange, difficult, tremendously thoughtful and, once a reader has taken the time to savor each of its gorgeous sentences, as satisyfing as a great night at the theater. Let me add that PLACE FOR US doubles as a powerful manifesto in the somewhat uneven tradition of post-Stonewall gay male writers, taking us to a place, for no one else but us, that had been impossible to imagine before we read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Showtune Secret Society
Review: Part manifesto, part post-hoc diary of a current and former musical theater queen, this wordy and often rambling manuscript will be enjoyed by those who, like the author, can relate to a coming-of-age/coming out story set to the tune(s) of the Broadway musical. Those in academia will likely de-bunk the literary integrety of the author in much the same way that the people of River City kaboshed the "Think System" espoused by Professor Harold Hill. Indeed, the reader of A PLACE FOR US finds himself humming the "Minuet in G" as he makes his way through this clever and tune-full read. "La dee da dee da dee da dee da, la de da, la de da..."
Rating: 
Summary: You Gotta Get A Gimmick
Review: Roland Barthes: Madamoiselle Lee, is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?
Gypsy Rose Lee: But Monsieur Barthes, I'm not a stripper - at these prices, I'm an ecdysiast!
D.A. Miller spends more than a bit of his book, A Place for Us, Essay on the Broadway Musical, musing on Mama Rose from Gypsy, but the muse of his book is none other than Gypsy Rose Lee, famous for putting the tease in strip-tease, revealing little, but doing it with finesse and elegance. While admiring Dr. Miller's turns of phrase, when I finished the book I wondered what exactly I had just read. Though enthralled by the swirl of feathers and witty patter, I had hoped to have seen more. Call me a vulgarian or worse a pornographer, but a little more flesh would have been nice. The relationship between gay men and the musical is a rich one and a more meaty analysis with less post-structuralist/queer theory gimmickry would have been far more satisfying to this reader. But as Miss Electra, of the trio of advice-giving strippers in Gypsy, says: "I'm electrifyin, and I ain't even tryin, I never have to sweat to get paid, cos' when you got a gimmick Gypsy girl you got it made..." Despite Dr. Miller's electric brilliance, the difficult nature of his prose is designed to conceal rather than reveal. Some day, hold your hats and hallelujah, he'll let down his guard and the gimmicks, stop playing to the academic vaudeville circuit (vaudeville IS dead), and strike out on his own to speak in his own voice, which there is too little of in this book. As another former student and avid reader of Dr. Miller's other books and papers, I know "this people's got it and this people should be spreadin' it around...."
Rating:
Summary: The emperor's clothes are gorgeous
Review: The curse of Hans Christian Andersen: Whenever an emperor dares to wear clothes that are truly fine and new, a dozen ... boys will appear at their windows to claim that he is naked. Miller's finery will outlast the smug japes of those who refuse to see it. His book is a witty, idiosyncratic, deeply original, often thrilling analysis of Broadway musicals and of the gay culture in which they once played so central a role.
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