BIOGRAPHY

Editor’s Note: The following reviews represent the best books of 1997 in the judgment of our contributors. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed for reasons of space.

ERNST MAYR

BUFFON: A Life in Natural History. By Jacques Roger . Translated from the French by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi . Cornell University Press: 494 pp., $49.95

Two hundred years after Buffon’s death in 1788, this great French naturalist-philosopher is unduly neglected if not virtually forgotten. Buffon’s work in the 18th century helped lay the foundations for the great flowering of biological science in the 19th century. Or, to put it another way, Buffon made Charles Darwin possible. Now, at long last, Jacques Roger, the late great historian of France’s 18th century, has given us the first thorough study ever made of the incomparable Buffon. How wonderful that Roger’s masterful study of Buffon and his work is now available in an admirable translation. Roger provides the perfect example of what a fine biography should be. He not only presents Buffon as a person, he also gives a most illuminating critical analysis of Buffon’s thoughts, beliefs, theories and controversies. Roger’s superb knowledge of science and philosophy in the 18th century permits him to examine Buffon’s theories against the prevailing thinking of his time. Along the way, we also encounter all the other great thinkers of the 18th century. We must be grateful to Roger for having brought Buffon back to life.

CHARLES R. MORRIS

MAN OF THE CENTURY: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II. By Jonathan Kwitny . Henry Holt: 754 pp., $30

Jonathan Kwitny’s “Man of the Century” is the third major papal biography in the last two years, and there are more on the way. For the time being, “Man of the Century” must be considered the best life of Karol Wojtyla available and, by a substantial margin, it is the most thoroughly researched and the most complete and offers the best balance between maintaining a sometimes prickly critical distance and showing open admiration for its subject. Kwitny’s skills as an investigative reporter are amply on display here. Although he did not have direct access to the pope, he seems to have tracked down everyone who ever spoke to him, worked with him or knew him. No legend goes unscrutinized. Kwitny is not intimidated by philosophy, and his thumbnail sketches of the pope’s intellectual roots are admirable and important in understanding who Wojtyla is and what he stands for. Kwitny’s diligent research and readable chronicle will be a fundamental source for understanding these critical events for years to come.

HEYWOOD HALE BROUN

JACKIE ROBINSON. By Arnold Rampersad . Alfred A. Knopf: 448 pp., $27.50

Arnold Rampersad’s “Jackie Robinson,” stately in pace and voluminous in detail, is an account of a life of continual combat. One may fault the author for giving us so many high school basketball scores, but one must admire him for the breadth of his research, which creates a detailed portrait of a fascinating, irritating, admirable man. The book benefits from the fact that it was written with the full cooperation of Rachel Robinson, who made available a lifetime of husband-and-wife correspondence and material from other family members, which makes this much more than a black “Baseball Joe” celebrating the statistic-studded years of Jack’s baseball life.

DAVID THOMSON

BOGART. By A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax . William Morrow: 676 pp., $27.50

No one had much right to expect that “Bogart” would be an immediate triumph, but I believe it is. So rich in its research, so compelling in its writing, it is an absorbing human story that reveals an exact understanding of the motion picture business in the age of Humphrey Bogart, who died 40 years ago. A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax appreciate the levels of courage in Bogie--whether acted or real--and they have written a book that sets standards for research and evidence in the life of an actor. Bogie is no longer just the famous stills and the undying lines; he has become a human being.

ERIC LAX

NAZIMOVA: A Biography. By Gavin Lambert . Alfred A. Knopf: 420 pp., $32.50

The half-century that Alla Nazimova has languished in obscurity is a decade longer than the time she basked in fame. The Russian-born actress transformed the theater of her time with her natural approach to her craft, and her independent life mirrored the New Woman she introduced to America in her electrifying interpretations of Ibsen, beginning in 1906 with Hedda Gabler. Besides the five major Ibsen roles she made her own, she also gave life to Chekhov’s Madame Ranevskaya (“The Cherry Orchard”), Turgenev’s Natalya Petrovna (“A Month in the Country”) and O’Neill’s Christine Mannon (“Mourning Becomes Electra”). Her talent was such that she is a strand of the DNA in the evolution of acting. As Gavin Lambert points out in his lively and engaging biography “Nazimova,” “a line, not straight but unbroken, runs from Stanislavsky to Nazimova to the Lunts to the Group Theatre to the Actors Studio, which was founded two years after Nazimova died” in 1945 at the age of 66. Lambert had access to Nazimova’s private papers, and his thorough research and easy style re-create 19th century Russia and the vitality of Moscow theater life in the age of Chekhov and Stanislavsky as well as the exuberance of Los Angeles in the 1920s and ‘30s. He has taken a seminal yet largely forgotten actress and brought her back to life, a feat Alla Nazimova would most earnestly have desired.

JEANINE BASINGER

PICKFORD: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. By Eileen Whitfield . University of Kentucky Press: 410 pp., $25

WITHOUT LYING DOWN: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Hollywood. By Cari Beauchamp . Scribner: 476 pp., $30

The lives of Mary Pickford and Frances Marion are colorful stories from a colorful era, with much to tell us about the film business and the role of women in its history. The beauty of Beauchamp’s fascinating book is that she makes Marion’s life into a story about her friendships with other successful women. Near the end of her life in 1973, she told an interviewer, “I hope my story shows one thing--how many women gave me real aid when I stood at the crossroads.” Marion herself was a great friend, writing an Oscar-winning role for Marie Dressler, whose career had sagged; putting Lorna Moon’s name on one of her own scripts when Moon needed the money; and never failing to listen to another woman’s lament. She was there for her friends, and they were there for her. “Pickford” and “Without Lying Down” are triumphant tales of two unique women who made it to the top of their professions. That’s a story still rare enough today to warrant our attention as well as our respect, and these two books do Pickford and Marion proud.

WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

BECOMING MAE WEST. By Emily Wortis Leider . Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 432 pp., $30

Mae West’s earliest memory, we learn from Emily Wortis Leider’s eloquent, scrupulous, intelligent account of the star’s life and times, was of “her mother massaging her with baby oil.” We also learn that in her vaudeville days, West “adopted her lifelong habit of giving herself a daily enema in response to theater bathrooms that were ‘so filthy I couldn’t face them.’ ” Oil, enema: such details set a fan’s pulse racing. Glimpses into a star’s erotic, scatological origins justify the existence of the much-maligned genre of the celebrity bio, which this important study is not. The book subordinates gossip to social history and to a wise celebration of West as a performance artist who understood that sex is a business and that moneymaking hits are forms of orgasm. This book has rare virtues. It pays exemplary attention to glamour techniques. West’s mainstay was slowness; languor, hardly laziness, was a monumental labor. If, as Leider observes in a brilliant concluding line, “Mae West continues to stop traffic at the risky intersection of Vamp and Camp,” the star owes it to unseen collaborators--costumers, makeup artists and cinematographers. It’s about time that everyone who participates in beauty’s manufacture be accorded the cultural capital reserved for directors.

RICHARD HOWARD

VIRGIL THOMSON: Composer on the Aisle. By Anthony Tommasini . W.W. Norton: 606 pp., $30

American critical writing concerned with the performing and plastic arts--discursive texts frequently produced as journalism in this country between, say, 1925 and 1965--is among the best literature of its kind to be found the world over. The art chronicles of Henry McBride, the music criticism of Virgil Thomson, the dramatic theory and theater reportage of Stark Young and the dance writings of Edwin Denby are preeminent here. Thomson is exceptional among them in that he was secure in the roles of writer, critic, commentator and polemicist before he even started his career as a composer. Anthony Tommasini has subtitled his fine biography to suggest the tensions this situation afforded--one of the most colorful masters of American criticism, and he is as enterprising in his scrutiny of the politics of Thomson’s critical performance as he is responsive to his (merely) musical achievement. This is one of the most attentive biographies I have read in some years, for though Tommasini knew Thomson only since 1979, he has studied the entire span with great diligence, has stuck with him to the end, and past the end, to the grave in Rehoboth Cemetery, where his ashes were buried in 1989, remaining ever loyal to the principle Thomson so often pronounced and so often betrayed: that language is for telling the truth about things.