Rating: 
Summary: Arrogant over-simplifications
Review: It's rare that I regret buying a book, but I'm not happy that I spent money on this one.I don't argue that Mamet is a good playwright. Glengarry Glen Ross is brilliant, and American Buffalo isn't too bad, either. But reading this book makes me wish Mamet would stick to playwriting and not impose his narrow ideas on others. Essentially, the book oversimplifies matters in astonishing ways. For instance, Mamet dismisses the American musical out of hand. Many successful playwrights cringe at the thought of watching The Music Man or Kiss Me Kate one more time, but does his comment apply to more intense productions like Cabaret? That's a major distinction that Mamet fails to make, and it's not the only one. Also, lumping together all political theater as an automatic failure, and excusing Brecht from the rest by claiming that Brecht didn't know what he was talking about when he called his own theater political? The logic escapes me. As far as Mamet's self-aggrandizement goes-- well, I can't say I didn't know it was coming. But that he lets it interfere with the construction of solid arguments is troublesome. For a book on how to construct or read a play, look at Louis Catron's book, or even go back to Stanislavski or Chekhov. They will be much more helpful to the working writer.
Rating: 
Summary: The only sane man in America.
Review: Mamet is a playwright savant. He finds sanity in an industry where sanity has no right to exist, and in this slender, essential volume, he points out various truths about not only the nature of drama, but of human experience.
Rating:
Summary: Reactionary, but eye-opening
Review: Mamet is known as a pioneer of the theatre. He was one of the first to use pure dialogue as action, thus begat Tarantino and a million other "gritty" talk-fests. But here, Mamet writes three essays about WHY we like to watch. He analyzes the human nature of wanting to view drama: be it Hamlet, the weather, or a close football game. They all captivate us. But why? Like the writings of Peter Brook, or Stanislavski, each reading bears new fruit. Some of it will pull the rug out from under the "hero-worshipping" theatre crowd. Some will give a sigh of relief. All of it is revealing.
Rating:
Summary: With a diamond stylus...
Review: Mr. Mamet cuts and exposes the grooves that we both claim and deny. Three Uses of the Knife is much more than the subtitle "On the Nature and Purpose of Drama" would lead you to believe. (In fact, I am not quite sure that the Vanity Fair review that appears on the cover could have been written by someone who really read this book. It seems banal and patronizing = "[Mamet] brings his usual passion and provocation to his treatise on what makes good drama.") Anyway..far from a "treatise on...good drama", this is a book that calls for honest introspection and critical consideration of the pop drama of daily living (sports, politics, race, etc.). A case in point: I dare you to lay the current drama of internet madness in the context of this book -- It will be most revealing and this will become the best internet book you have read. O.K., nuff hyperbole -- the book is simply on target as a structure for social criticism. Whether you agree with his opinions or not, you can't shirk the debate and keep your integrity. It is a very short book well worth reading and re-reading.
Rating:
Summary: With a diamond stylus...
Review: Mr. Mamet cuts and exposes the grooves that we both claim and deny. Three Uses of the Knife is much more than the subtitle "On the Nature and Purpose of Drama" would lead you to believe. (In fact, I am not quite sure that the Vanity Fair review that appears on the cover could have been written by someone who really read this book. It seems banal and patronizing = "[Mamet] brings his usual passion and provocation to his treatise on what makes good drama.") Anyway..far from a "treatise on...good drama", this is a book that calls for honest introspection and critical consideration of the pop drama of daily living (sports, politics, race, etc.). A case in point: I dare you to lay the current drama of internet madness in the context of this book -- It will be most revealing and this will become the best internet book you have read. O.K., nuff hyperbole -- the book is simply on target as a structure for social criticism. Whether you agree with his opinions or not, you can't shirk the debate and keep your integrity. It is a very short book well worth reading and re-reading.
Rating:
Summary: Best self-help book I've ever read
Review: This brilliant, inspiring, and occasionally hilarious tract is Ur-Mamet. He's a pleasure to read. I picked it up because I was in the mood for some vigorous polemic--but it never occurred to me that I would find myself examining my self, my beliefs, my goals, and what it means to tell the truth. I read it twice in one night, and again the next day. A corker!
Rating: 
Summary: fundamentalist brainstorm
Review: This reads like a weekend brainstorm into the dictaphone, or party-chatter with metropolitan friends. First glance - you've got the large font, wide-margins and generous line-spacing to pad these notes out into a book. Then you notice that nearly every paragraph includes several parenthetical thoughts (like I just had another way-outer to squeeze in here, okay?), plus quoted after-thoughts (sorry, couldn't find "the right words" just then, you know?) - and foreign phrases swept in from every part of the old country - like this gem: "This pronunciamento can be taken as a jejune promise". Footnoted brain-sprinkles complete the overall intellectual profile of this work. The reader doesn't get any help to piece it all together. Eventually, you might suspect Mamet has something to say about the "three acts" of theatre (no other dramatic structures apparently exist). Mamet dips here and there into the function of drama, his bold thesis being that theatre is magic. Theatre, he declares, is a place of wonder, and no place for popular entertainment or politics. We are to walk out of theatres with "cleansing awe", knowing we are "sinful and worthless". Mamet never considers any ideas apart from his own. He draws heavily on the Old Testament and a primer on Freud for back-up, but no theatre theorists ever get a mention - apart from Brecht, with a single word, namely: "problematic". Most of "Three Uses" is actually nothing to do with theatre. It's an outpouring of quotables about statesmanship, the "Information Age", the psychology of the masses, the causes of gambling ... all argued with arrogant inconsistency: Mamet rails against "centralisation by the body politic", and then derides all manner of extremism; he argues against "avant garde nonsense" with absurd phrases like "In endorsing a blank canvas, or the Domino Theory, the individual becomes like a King Canute". For Mamet, "good art" is no more than The Bible, Shakespeare and Bach, plus an American work - "Death of a Salesman", of course. There are no surprises in the ideas, however much they're dressed to impress with showy associations and stiff fundamentalism. Too bad that the result is more like a freshman's freewheeling weblog on "life", than anything from the likes of Brook or Grotowski on "the theatre". American critics equating it with such works is no more than chauvinism. One use of the knife Mamet forgot was editing. Then he might have been able to communicate something useful here - into 3 or 4 pages. But there's no holding back the primary process exhibitionist. You have to get out the knife and do the editing yourself.
Oh, yes, the knife. Nice title, and it's the substance of a few lines near the end, which Mamet cares - and seems only able - to explain by offering more curly metaphor: "the knife is the dramatist's bass line". Meaning? Dramatists are misanthropes who basically want to kill their audiences? Who knows, but the meandering content and grandiose style of this work sure suggests Mamet's fundamental contempt for the reader.
Rating:
Summary: An artistic credo well worth reading
Review: While Mamet's booklet is essentially an exposition of opinions with little or no discourse, it is extremely thought provoking and provides ample fuel for thinking about drama - and art in general - as lying at the edge of reason. In a treatise that mirrors the three act structure he discusses, Mamet eloquently puts forth the idea that much of political drama, by instructing us what to think and feel, is mere melodrama and that "the theatre exists to deal with problems of the soul, with the mysteries of human life, not with its quotidian calamities." He assails avant-garde artists for taking "refuge in nonsense" and electing themselves "superior to reason," yet also criticizes the "hard-bitten rationalist who rails against religious tradition, against the historical niceties, against ritual large and small." "Three Uses of the Knife" is a book that will be read quickly, but will stick to the back of your mind for sometime afterwards.
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