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Philip Short
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Although Putin stands accused of various forms of chicanery, Short almost always exonerates him, writing that much of what his critics have said about him is no more than hearsay or rumor...It is hard to say if Short is right in this compelling and nuanced biography ... Short does, however, have a dark story of deception to tell. He skillfully shows how Putin gained the confidence of Western leaders because of his criticism of the former Soviet Union, and because he welcomed foreign investment and seemed not all that concerned with the expansion of NATO — until, of course, he was ... As Short makes clear, the Russian military has never been able to fight a war without committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nothing Putin did earlier in his career, or now, has done much to mitigate war by atrocity.
John Markoff
Positive San Francisco Chronicle Even in a book as comprehensive as this, based on his access to Brand’s archives and to Brand himself, Markoff has trouble tracking this revolutionary thinker’s many changes of mind as he moved from a career in the military to photography to various startups, seeking to cope with the velocity of change by employing a slowed-down, organic way of thinking about the world ... Missing from this biography is a chronology, a sort of chart, that might help the rest of us navigate through the teeming adventures of the Brandian world.
Anne Sebba
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Sebba provides a compassionate account of Ethel’s character as a wife and mother, dutifully standing by her husband no matter what, and at the same time doing everything in her power to nurture her two boys, who emerged remarkably unscathed by their parents’ ordeal and who honor their parents’ memory in Sebba’s account of their lives ... In this engrossing narrative, Ethel emerges as a doctrinaire Communist, and yet the opposite of the contemporary attacks on her as an unfit mother. Ironically, Ethel conformed to the period’s American ideal of the wife and mother with fealty to her family while she was attacked for being the spy ring leader who manipulated her husband and was thus unfaithful to her role in society and her ties to her kindred.
Jan Swafford
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle It is a great pleasure to read about Mozart as a working composer in a narrative written by a working composer ... a biography that has an immediacy, a wholly thrilling \'you are there\' impact.
Ron Chernow
Positive The Wall Street Journal In even the most impressive biographies, a curious bifurcation can appear when the author\'s source notes are compared with his acknowledgments. In Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow emphasizes his reliance on primary sources. According to his notes, however, other biographers—notably Douglas Southall Freeman and James Thomas Flexner, authors of justifiably renowned multivolume lives of Washington—provided a good deal of the narrative fuel. It does Mr. Chernow no disservice to regard his biography as a culmination of a long biographical tradition that has divested Washington of his marmoreal armor ... Flexner\'s 1974 redaction has been the standard, but it cannot compete with the vivacity of Ron Chernow\'s new narrative, even if the two arrive at many of the same conclusions. For those who want their Washington in even greater detail than Mr. Chernow supplies, Flexner\'s multivolume work remains the most readable and authoritative source ... n his author\'s note, Mr. Chernow announces that he has changed his subject\'s grammar, fixing commas to smooth older texts. This is no minor matter, but it works well in a biography that wants most of all to create a living George Washington.
Stephen Greenblatt
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle In Stephen Greenblatt’s powerful and capacious group biography, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, two personalities dominate the centuries of exegesis on Adam’s and Eve’s rise and fall. St. Augustine and John Milton are towering figures that dominate the period up to Darwin … Greenblatt shows that Augustine and Milton, two of Christendom’s greatest writers, engaged in a brilliant holding action that allayed, if it did not quash, the qualms among the faithful … To this day, of course, the Adam and Eve story, and the Bible itself, has remained the literal truth for many worshipers. Why? The moral power of the story, Greenblatt supposes, continues to buoy believers who wish to see a divine purpose in nature and in the lives of men and women.
Frederick Crews
Mixed The San Francisco Chronicle Crews marshals his evidence like a prosecutor, and he has a lot of it to work with — not only as a result of his own brilliant investigations but also because of the growing and impressive literature of Freudphobians, several of whom have blurbed his book. Crews is adept at finding a Freud condemning himself in his own words ... As arrogant as Sherlock Holmes, Freud dazzled his readers with clues of his own invention, which he then deciphered with aplomb. But here is where Crews the sleuth goes awry. All too often in his account, armed, he believes, with incontrovertible evidence of Freud’s duplicity, Crews tells us what Freud 'must have' thought or felt. Beware the biographer who presumes but cannot prove ... What is also missing in this biography is the quotidian Freud, what he was like to live with, how he interacted with his friends, what life was like after he left Nazi-dominated Europe, and even Freud’s own views about biography and his practice of the genre. Instead, we get case after case of Freud’s appalling treatment of patients and colleagues. Unfortunately, the whole man himself is not there. He is presented as a sensibility but not as person. As biography, Crews’ book falls short, no matter how powerful you find his dressing-down of the master.
Mary V. Dearborn
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle Ernest Hemingway’s legacy endures in Mary V. Dearborn’s cautious and yet exhilarating new biography. She does not tout her achievement, but this is the first major Hemingway biography by a woman, and her gender makes a difference. She can put the question in a particularly authoritative way: What aside from the macho code and grace-under-pressure ethos remains of his reputation? ... The estimation of Hemingway’s place in American fiction — the esteem his short stories still commands — is not altered by this biography. But a more nuanced portrayal emerges in this empathetic, if still critical, study of a conflicted man and artist.
James Lee McDonough
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. McDonough’s masterly account is the product of a historian’s lifelong study, including extensive research into Civil War battles such as Shiloh, where Sherman had his first combat experience when surprised by a Confederate attack ... Mr. McDonough is especially perceptive about Sherman’s postwar policies as commanding general of the Army, which were, unfortunately, consonant with those of Southern segregationists. [He] present compelling evidence that not only did Sherman treat freed slaves with decency and even respect, he was not averse to sitting down with them, chatting and sharing his cigars ... a full-blooded narrative that is sometimes...And yet Mr. McDonough left me wanting more of Sherman, a reaction that his own men shared.
Anne Boyd Rioux
Mixed The Minneapolis Star Tribune Rioux is an excellent scholar who has assessed her sources shrewdly. She gets in trouble, though, when she tries to fill gaps with that bane of all biographers, 'must have been,' which can be translated as, 'I don’t know, but let’s pretend that I do.' Even so, Rioux’s biography is the place to start before you make your way to Woolson’s work.
Claire Harman
Positive San Francisco Chronicle Claire Harman pays tribute to her predecessors and manages to refresh a perennial subject for biographers, although not without shortcomings. At her best, she reads the evidence anew, showing, for example, how far ahead of their time Charlotte, her sisters, and their brother, Branwell, were in creating a world of their own, one that can be understood in terms of what children are doing today.
Jonathan Bate
Mixed Minneapolis Star Tribune In an exculpatory narrative, Jonathan Bate tries to reverse the momentum of literary history, making Plath the wife of Ted Hughes, poet laureate and winner of virtually all the important poetry prizes. This canny biographer succeeds in his aim, but at a terrible cost to his subject. Plath continues to overpower Hughes on every page. Bate is taken prisoner by her myth even as he tries to rectify the distorted narratives of Plath biographers who put her first.