NONFICTION - Dec. 20, 1992

TELLING THE UNTOLD STORY: How Investigative Reporters Are Changing the Craft of Biography by Steve Weinberg (University of Missouri Press: $29.95; 253 pp.). Steve Weinberg, journalism professor and biographer of Armand Hammer, promises an engaging argument in the subtitle of this book, but somehow he never gets around to making it. One problem is that more than 40% of “Telling the Untold Story” is reprinted material, most of which concerns not the working methods of the journalist-biographer but the life of his or her subject; a second is that Weinberg fills in background and piles up facts rather than arguing his position. It’s interesting, certainly, to learn how Robert Caro evolved from a daily newspaper reporter into a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and how the team of James Steele and Donald Bartlett of the Philadelphia Inquirer (also Pulitzer winners) use individual lives to tell the story of an institution or an industry, but Weinberg spends very little time discussing what attributes the journalist brings, and fails to bring, to the art of biography. With regard to Caro, for example, Weinberg is basically an apologist, disputing but not countering charges that Caro caricatured subjects by emphasizing--as do most journalists--new information over significant information, personal melodrama and moral instruction over boring historical facts and trends. In his final chapter, Weinberg makes note of the enormous surge in recent years of serious, journalist-written biographies--of J. D. Salinger, Henry Kissinger, John Belushi and J. Edgar Hoover, to name just four--but the passing reference only underlines one’s sense that the story that prompted Weinberg to write “Telling the Untold Story” remains untold.