SOURCE: "The Menace," in New York Herald Tribune Book Week, July 10, 1966, p. 17.

In the following review, Brooks provides a sketch of the plot, characters and ideas in Big as Life.

One day a gigantic, nude man and woman arrive in New York. They lean against the horizon. They are beautiful, burnished, odorous, and they have a powerful effect on the town, which proceeds to tumble over itself, to huddle, to pray. The town cries NO.

What can be done? Consultation, defense command, intellectual research, jetliner, helicopter, and practical philosophy are brought to bear. The President, the Cabinet, and the governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania are interested, make suggestions.

Through the screen of hysteria we see most plainly Wallace Creighton, a professor of history at Columbia University, jazz bass king Red Bloom and Red Bloom's love, Sugarbush. These people inch their way through the violence...