Biography
November 06, 2011
Irresistible
To read a full life of Steve McQueen is a strain on interest, but two minutes of Bullitt and you recall his coiled, lethal impact. He was beautiful on
November 03, 2011
The Hater
Reinhard Heydrich might well have been the cruelest among the many cruel National Socialist leaders. Even though Heydrich has entered history as one o
October 26, 2011
The Inventor of Our Politics
Richard Brookhiser saves his central argument for his final pages, and it might have been wiser to bring it out more explicitly much earlier. Madison
October 03, 2011
The Star that Barked
Susan Orlean has done a fine job with this book, and it is to be numbered among the best Hollywood biographies. She seizes the bone at the end of her
September 20, 2011
The Wendy Chronicles
Wendy Wasserstein may not belong in the ranks of the greatest American Jewish writers, but like Neil Simon before her, she helped to popularize the Je
September 12, 2011
All Hat and No Cattle
There are (considering his enduring popularity with modern historians) surprisingly few biographies of Alcibiades. So how does P.J. Rhodes deal with h
September 08, 2011
The Stench of Perfume
Hal Vaughan's biography distinguishes itself from the many other Chanel biographies by tackling the dicey subject of Gabrielle Chanel’s activities dur
August 29, 2011
Turn and Face the Strain
Paul Trynka, whose life of David Bowie, fascinating though it is on the quotidian detail of his young life, doesn’t begin to account for its subject’s
August 11, 2011
The Work, Not the Life
Joan Mitchell, who was born in 1925 in Chicago and died in 1992 in Paris, was an expressionist and a romantic. But she considered herself to be an int
July 18, 2011
Dateline Hitler
William L. Shirer, born in 1904, was one of the twentieth century’s great reporters. He witnessed many of the key events of the 1930s in Europe at fir
