Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Booklist's Top 10 Biographies: 2011 Reviewed

--by Brad Hooper (First published on June 1, 2011 (Booklist).)

Since our previous Spotlight on Biography, the past 12 months have shown us that to ever think that the art of biography is slipping or sliding, even temporarily, is ridiculous. Read the following examples of the best of the past year & see what we mean.

Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (Phoebe Hoban) - Judicious and ardent, Hoban has created a galvanizing portrait of a “rebel artist” who remained true to her humanist convictions.

Arts journalist and trailblazing biographer Hoban (
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, 1998) is the first to tell the story of artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) in full. Determined, brainy, beautiful, self-absorbed, and profoundly unconventional, Neel “radicalized portraiture” in penetrating, often unnerving paintings of a diverse spectrum of individuals, from her neighbors in Spanish Harlem to Andy Warhol, baring his bullet wounds. Having gained access to heretofore private and stunningly illuminating materials, Hoban is commanding and entrancing as she chronicles Neel’s contrary temperament and tempestuous life. Neel’s marriage to Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez was passionate and doomed, and her brief spell with his wealthy family in Havana was followed by interminable struggles in New York. Neel barely survived poverty, the loss of children, suicidal depression, the destruction of several hundred of her drawings and paintings by a jealous lover, and a torrent of other traumas and tragedies. Yet she kept painting, achieving an “idiosyncratic blend of Expressionism, Symbolism and Surrealism often sharpened with satire.” Hoban writes with remarkable detail, vigor, and insight about Neel’s stint as a WPA artist, complex relationships, focus on social justice, obscurity during the abstract-expressionist years, and phoenixlike rebirth in the 1960s. Judicious and ardent, Hoban has created a galvanizing portrait of a “rebel artist” who remained true to her humanist convictions. — Donna Seaman

Colonel Roosevelt (Edmund Morris) - Morris completes his fully detailed, dynamic triptych of the restless, energetic, on-the-move first President Roosevelt.

Morris completes his fully detailed, correlatively dynamic triptych of the restless, energetic, on-the-move first President Roosevelt, following The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), the title self-explanatory in terms of its coverage of TR’s life, and
Theodore Rex (2001), about his presidency. Now the author presents Colonel Roosevelt, the title by which Roosevelt chose to be called during his postpresidential years (in reference, of course, to his military position during the Spanish-American War). This is the sad part of TR’s life; this is the stage of his life story in which it is most difficult to accept his self-absorption, self-importance, and self-righteousness, but it is the talent of the author, who has shown an immaculate understanding of his subject, to make Roosevelt of continued fascination to his readers. In essence, this volume tells the story of TR’s path of disenchantment with his chosen successor in the White House, William Taft, and his attempt to resecure the presidency for himself. The important theme of TR’s concomitant decline in health is also a part of the narrative. We are made aware most of all that of all retired presidents, TR was the least likely to fade into the background. — Brad Hooper

A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Know Him (Michael Takiff) - What Takiff delivers is an astonishing collection of 171 interviews, collectively offering an intimate portrait of former president Bill Clinton.

Scholar and oral historian Takiff admits up front that this book won’t settle arguments about what kind of man former president Clinton is, whether liberal or conservative, brilliant or idiotic, empathetic or self-serving. What Takiff delivers is an astonishing collection of 171 interviews with Clinton’s friends, foes, admirers, and detractors as well as reporters and political analysts, collectively offering an intimate portrait of Clinton. The material is arranged chronologically to detail Clinton’s career from Hope, Arkansas, to Washington, D.C. Interspersed throughout are notes that provide context and clarity. Some interviews have a chatty, colorful, and personal feel, recalling little, telling moments in Clinton’s life and the larger moments—deciding what to do about the Vietnam draft, entering law school, getting married, and launching a political career and destroying it with an affair with a young intern. Others are more ponderous and analytical but still offer a personal perspective on a very complicated man, a liberal who enacted welfare reform and produced a budget surplus but failed to deliver on universal health care or come to the aid of Kosovo. Photographs enhance this astonishing look at a very complicated man indeed. Even readers who have glutted themselves on other Clinton books will enjoy the intimate feel of this one. — Vanessa Bush

Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography (Burton Hersh) - For readers exhausted at the thought of another Ted Kennedy book, this one is beautifully written and exquisitely detailed with plenty of new material.

For readers exhausted at the thought of another Ted Kennedy biography, this one is beautifully written and exquisitely detailed with plenty of new material drawn from investigation and interviews with Kennedy and his family, friends, and colleagues, as well as some impressions by historian Hersh, a friend of Kennedy’s since childhood. There’s the family history: driven Joe Kennedy, about whose philosophy of cutthroat competition, Hersh writes: “Nothing here the Corleones wouldn’t rubber-stamp.” Ted was born last in a large brood of overambitious, outsize personalities, so he developed the skills for gregariousness and conciliation that would serve him well in politics. All the usual history is here: the dirty politics of each Kennedy’s career climb, the assassinations of John and Robert, Ted’s stoic taking up of the Kennedy mantle, Chappaquiddick, the drinking, the affairs, and redemption, but it is fleshed out with previously undisclosed ruminations by Kennedy and the people who knew him well. Hersh also offers new insights on the accident that nearly destroyed Kennedy’s political life, the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne. Part 1 contains mesmerizing analysis of the personal dynamics between the famous Kennedy brothers and Ted’s self-doubts and eventual mastery of the political game. Part 2 focuses on Kennedy’s growth in the powerful position of “shadow president,” the man who, though he failed to achieve what at one time had been considered inevitable, nevertheless wielded enormous political power and influence. Totally riveting. — Vanessa Bush

Fab: The Life of Paul McCartney (Howard Sounes) - This is the first comprehensive, candid, and up-to-date portrait of Sir Paul McCartney.

Sounes has earned a well-deserved reputation for writing thoroughly researched, intricately detailed biographies. This comprehensive biography of McCartney is no exception. Sounes seems to have spoken to every living person with any connection to the former Beatle, from the singer’s neighbors near his Kintyre, Scotland, farm to the family veterinarian. Divided into two equally large sections—“With the Beatles” and “After the Beatles”—Fab covers all the highlights of McCartney’s life and long career: his early days in Liverpool; his meeting with John Lennon; the craziness of Beatlemania; his solo albums; the creation and collapse of his post-Beatles band, Wings; his marriage to Linda Eastman; his last meetings with Lennon; his drug bust in Japan; his forays into classical music; his disastrous second marriage to Heather Mills. This is by no means a hagiography. On the contrary, Sounes gives criticism when warranted, remarking on McCartney’s flaws both as a musician (settling for the ordinary, or, worse, mediocre rather then putting in the extra effort to create something exceptional) and as a man (a streak of selfishness that could turn callous). Indeed, Sounes is often brutally honest, offering a full portrait—warts and all—of one of the most famous men of the modern era. A must for Beatles and McCartney fans.

HIGH-DEMAND BACK STORY: In spite of his persistent mega-fame, this is the first comprehensive, candid, and up-to-date portrait of Sir Paul McCartney, making it a magnet for boomers and serious music lovers. — June Sawyers

Galileo (John Heilbron) - A complete portrait illuminating how a bold pioneer forged surprising links between science and the humanities.

“Have faith, Galileo, and go forth.” So Kepler urged on his gifted Italian contemporary. But in this insightful biography, Heilbron shows readers that as Galileo heeded Kepler’s urging, he went forth with faith not only in an ingeniously devised telescope but also in poetically inspired words. Readers see the often-forgotten literary side of the great astronomer, the side aflame with a passion for Dante and Ariosto just as ardent as his better-known enthusiasm for Euclid and Archimedes. Heilbron indeed reveals how Galileo’s sometimes-combative advocacy of great literary art prepared him for the rhetorical task of winning converts to Copernican cosmology. For in defending the creative geometry of Dante’s hell against hostile critics, Galileo honed his gift for well-crafted polemics, so priming himself for the task of championing a revolutionary scientific paradigm. For only by developing an imagination as capacious as Dante’s was Galileo able to wrap his mind around a previously undreamed-of universe, governed by radically new heliocentric principles. Of course, many seventeenth-century clerics lacked Galileo’s intellectual daring, and Heilbron teases out the various subplots swirling around the famous confrontation between Galileo and his ecclesiastical antagonists. A complete portrait illuminating how a bold pioneer forged surprising links between science and the humanities. — Bryce Christensen

How to Live; or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Sarah Bakewell) - By casting her biography of Michel de Montaigne as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question “How to live?” Bakewell limns Montaigne’s ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge.

In a wide-ranging intellectual career, Michel de Montaigne found “no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well.” By casting her biography of the writer as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question “How to live?” Bakewell limns Montaigne’s ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge. Embedded in the 20 life-knowledge responses, readers will find essential facts—when and where Montaigne was born, how and whom he married, how he became mayor of Bordeaux, how he managed a public life in a time of lethal religious and political passions. But Bakewell keeps the focus on the inner evolution of the acute mind informing Montaigne’s charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays. Flexible and curious, this was a mind at home contemplating the morality of cannibals, the meaning of his own near-death experience, and the puzzlingly human behavior of animals. And though Montaigne has identified his own personality as his overarching topic, Bakewell marvels at the way Montaigne’s prose has enchanted diverse readers—Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and Gide—with their own reflections. Because Montaigne’s capacious mirror still captivates many, this insightful life study will win high praise from both scholars and general readers. — Bryce Christensen

Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter (Patricia Albers) - Painter Joan Mitchell is no mere “second-generation abstract expressionist,” Albers avers in the first comprehensive biography of this ruthlessly independent, flagrantly blunt, highly educated artist.

Painter Mitchell is no mere “second-generation abstract expressionist,” Albers avers in the first comprehensive biography of this ruthlessly independent, flagrantly blunt, highly educated artist. Mitchell’s ravishingly chromatic, organically structured, endlessly evocative paintings are unique, and Albers learned why. Mitchell had synesthesia. For her, music, the letters of the alphabet, people, and emotions all emitted pulsing colors. Possessed, too, of eidetic memory, her visual recall was acute. This “perceptual otherness,” along with her technical mastery, underlies the push-pull vitality and ecstatic beauty of her paintings. But what a contentious, abrading life she lived. Born to wealth but scant affection in Chicago, Mitchell was “fiercely competitive,” excelling at art and as a champion ice skater and becoming a debutante who joined the Communist Party. Hard-drinking Mitchell’s moxie, recklessness, and “smoky, tough-cookie glamour” enabled her to hold her own with de Kooning, Pollock, and the boys in New York’s macho art world. Albers, also the biographer of photographer Tina Modotti, is electrifying in her metaphor-rich descriptions and forthright analysis, tracking Mitchell’s volcanic artistic fecundity in sync with her psychological struggles and “sexual adventuring” that included tempestuous relationships with legendary publisher Barney Rosset, Samuel Beckett, and French artist Jean-Paul Riopelle. Albers emulates Mitchell’s painterly mission to conjoin “accuracy and intensity” in this transfixing and justly revealing portrait. — Donna Seaman

Washington (Ron Chernow) - This magisterial biography is a vastly enlightening, overwhelmingly engaging treatment of a great man.

With so much that can be said—and said positively—about this magisterial biography, it is difficult not to write a review as long as the book itself. Given the distinction of the author, who wrote, among other single and collective biographies, the glowingly reviewed
Alexander Hamilton (2004), readers can safely assume from the outset that what lies ahead of them is a vastly enlightening, overwhelmingly engaging treatment of a great man. The subject of the book needs only, by way of identification, the one word that Chernow uses as his title: Washington. Another book on Washington? is a question rendered pointless by this one, which happens to be the author’s masterpiece. Definitive Washington is the point and effect of this biography. Our first president is thought of as more marble statue than living, hurting, loving human; however, Chernow’s Washington stands not in the opposite corner as hot-blooded and animated. Washington spent a lifetime practicing control of his passions and emotions; his innate virtues, undenied and even celebrated here, were sharpened and focused by the man’s suppression of a natural volatility. “His gift of silence” and of “inspired simplicity,” as the author so aptly terms Washington’s strongest suits, supported his consequent leadership as general and as president. — Brad Hooper

Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics (Michael Schumacher) - In addressing the life of Will Eisner, now known as the father of the graphic novel, seasoned biographer Schumacher zeroes in on the essence of Eisner’s success.

Born in 1917, Will Eisner, now known as the father of the graphic novel, grew up in the Bronx poor but resourceful. Seasoned biographer Schumacher zeroes in on the essence of Eisner’s success: his rare ability to unite art (he inherited his phenomenal gift for drawing from his immigrant artist father) with practicality (his mother’s specialty). After going to work selling newspapers at age 13, it didn’t take long for this tireless “observer of the city” and an ardent fan of short stories and movies to excel in the burgeoning world of comics as the creator of the Spirit, a masked superhero, and as the founder of a thriving comics studio. Drafted in 1942 and put to work making educational comics for the army, Eisner spent the next two decades creating instructional comics until the underground comic movement initiated a revival of his early work and sparked his revolutionary and socially conscious graphic novels, beginning with A Contract with God (1978). Propelled by Eisner’s geyserlike energy and output, Schumacher keenly chronicles Eisner’s brilliant career within a lively history of American comics and creates an inspiring portrait of a perpetually diligent and innovative artist whose belief in comics as fine art fueled a new and fertile creative universe. — Donna Seaman