BIOGRAPHY

LINDBERGH; By A. Scott Berg; (Putnam: 640 pp., $30)

Scott Berg’s book is an extraordinary achievement. Sensibly enough, he does not devote the greatest space in his chronicle to the 1927 flight, which, after all, has been recounted so well by others, Charles Lindbergh included. Rather, Berg concentrates on the most sensational and controversial features of Lindbergh’s life--the kidnapping of his first child and his career as an “isolationist” during the most important foreign policy debate in American history, which is to many today the most noteworthy aspect of his story. Indeed, Berg, who is Jewish, revealed in a recent interview that when he told his grandmother that he was at work on a Lindbergh biography, her reaction was, “What do you want to write about him for? He was quite awful about the Jews.” Luckily for his readers, Berg didn’t listen to his grandmother. In his authoritative chronicle, Berg has allowed the inconsistencies, nuances and tribulations of Lindbergh’s life to speak for themselves without judgment or speculation. In doing so, he has given us the definitive account of a dramatic and disturbing American story.

BENJAMIN SCHWARZ

KING OF THE WORLD: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero; By David Remnick; (Random House: 330 pp., $25)

In 1954 in a gym on South 4th Street in Louisville, Ky., 12-year-old Cassius Clay, weighing all of 89 pounds, fought his first bout. The fight lasted three rounds, and Clay won in a split decision. Hands over his head, triumphant, he announced to the few who had gathered to watch the fight that soon, very soon, he would be “the greatest of all time.” How and why this cocky boy from Louisville metamorphosed not only into one of the finest fighters of all time but also into the world-famous icon Muhammad Ali is the subject of David Remnick’s fascinating “King of the World.” Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Lenin’s Tomb” and the newly appointed editor of the New Yorker, does a fine job analyzing Ali’s impact on boxing and his even greater influence on American society. To Remnick’s credit, his book avoids hyperbole and provides a balanced and realistic account of Ali’s career.

CAROLYN HUGHES

NIETZSCHE IN TURIN: An Intimate Biography; By Lesley Chamberlain; (Picador USA: 256 pp., $23)

Lesley Chamberlain’s elegant and sympathetic “Nietzsche in Turin” describes Nietzsche in the last of his European homes, Turin, where he lived on and off from 1888 to 1889. Chamberlain delights in the small details of Nietzsche’s life: She tells us of his taste for the lean continental sausage Lachshinkenwurst and Zwiebeck, a kind of French toast; she finds out what kind of stove he bought for his room and how old he was when he started growing his walrus mustache. Chamberlain chronicles the philosopher’s tragi-comic descent into madness. One cannot help but feel great sympathy for Nietzsche upon reading Chamberlain’s account. He emerges as a kind, awkward man with an immense, unsatisfied hunger for love. Though his philosophy was filled with hyperbolic comments about the benefits of solitude, Nietzsche felt an equal pull toward companionship. “At bottom, I am not made at all for solitude,” he confessed to his sister Elisabeth. One of the world’s great philosophers emerges as someone who knew there were occasionally better things to do than read.

ALAIN DE BOTTON

TITAN: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.; By Ron Chernow; (Random House: 778 pp., $30)

The very idea that the era of Rockefeller, Morgan and Carnegie is so deeply dissimilar from ours--and therefore has nothing to teach us--denies our history. Almost every single attribute and crisis we call our own, whether we ascribe it to late modernity or early post-modernity, was vibrantly alive and present--and profoundly recognized and debated--at the dawn of this century.

Ron Chernow’s “Titan” is an illuminating and detailed gateway into that earlier but far-from-distant world, constructed not as the period’s history but as the biography of one of its singular figures (and, perhaps more important, singular forces and icons). Over 35 chapters and 700 pages, “Titan” details not only the music of Rockefeller’s mind but his enormous--and world-changing--actions and the responses they produced. Chernow’s gift is for providing us with an immense, almost baroque detailing of a complex human life. By the book’s end, for example, we can appreciate why, after meeting Rockefeller, Harvard philosopher William James could write his brother Henry that here was “a man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable . . . superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced.”

RICHARD PARKER

THE DYING PRESIDENT: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945; By Robert H. Ferrell; (University of Missouri Press: 200 pp., $24.95)

This painstaking and exceptionally researched book is concise, sparklingly well-written, bearing the marks of a master historian. The short sketches of statements concerning men and women other than the dying president are sharp and telling: “The truth was that Eleanor Roosevelt was insensitive to her husband’s rapidly declining health.” Their reciprocal alienation may explain this, but it surely is contrary to the smarmy and sentimental nonsense about the Great Couple During the War.

JOHN LUKACS

KEATS: By Andrew Motion; (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 636 pp., $35)

Andrew Motion’s eloquent and deeply insightful telling of Keats’ life takes up the majority of his biography. His theme is Keats’ ethical beauty, the problem that he set himself in his poetry: how to live a true and good existence without leaving the currents of the world. Motion is especially good at making sense of Keats’ letters, some of the wisest and most imaginative documents ever written. As did Shakespeare, Keats found solace and power in a protean imaginative existence. The end of the last letter he wrote, to a close friend, catches his sense of life as a series of quickly passing props and scenery just as it wryly and vulnerably evokes the humble role that circumstances had provided him with but which he outwitted: “I can scarcely bid you goodbye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.”

LEE SIEGEL

CHOPIN IN PARIS: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer; By Tad Szulc; (Scribner: 444 pp., $30)

From the moment he arrived in Paris--in September 1831--to the day he died there 18 years later, and ever since, Frederic Francois Chopin has been, both in musical circles and among historians, the subject of much interest, admiration and misunderstanding. Where music historians have largely feared to tread, Tad Szulc has stepped in with a portrait of the composer’s life and times that pulls a great many hitherto loose threads together. “Chopin in Paris” is a sober, well-researched and carefully constructed chronicle of the events and experiences that figured most prominently in the composer’s life, at once a biography of the artist and a history of the social setting within which his art emerged. Without doing much to elucidate Chopin’s music, it sheds new light on the man and his milieu. Szulc’s account of the most important years in the life of one of Romanticism’s most important composers conveys much that is valuable and useful, in the end illuminating not only the everyday world in which Chopin lived but the inner world of thoughts and feelings that lived in Chopin.

TED LIBBEY

NELSON MANDELA: By Martin Meredith; (St. Martin’s: 596 pp., $29.95)

In “Nelson Mandela,” Martin Meredith takes on the demanding task of writing about a man who is about as close to a hero as we can probably get in the modern political world. In his spry account, Meredith carefully avoids adulation while tracing the course of Mandela’s remarkable career as he grew from a child who tended livestock in the hills of the Eastern Cape to become one of the most famous political prisoners of the 20th century and finally, in his 70s, to be the first black president of a newly democratic South Africa. Meredith has produced a readable account that enables us to look past the Klieg lights of heroism and ponder the more touching drama of a fallible human being whose fierce commitment to principle helped sustain and deliver him--and his country--from bondage to liberty.

ROBERT KINLOCH MASSIE

KENNETH TYNAN: Letters; Edited By Kathleen Tynan; (Random House: 642 pp., $30)

When Kenneth Tynan published his first collection of reviews in 1950 at age 23, some of the British press compared him to William Hazlitt and George Bernard Shaw. An exaggeration in most respects, but in one sense it is absolutely accurate. Tynan’s passion to know theater in his early and best years fits the Aristotelian definition of “to know.” It is “to become.” Tynan’s reviews were not simply the description and analysis of what was working or failing on the stage but the feat of hoisting the reader onstage as well.

Ten years ago, Tynan’s widow Kathleen, a journalist and novelist, wrote his biography. She then began editing his letters, a task she completed, despite illness, shortly before her death. They are a different and remarkable kind of biography: a rare example of a collection of letters that is better than the letters themselves.

RICHARD EDER

SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON; Edited by Ernest Mehew; (Yale University Press: 626 pp., $39.95)

“The whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote excitedly from Honolulu to a London friend in 1889. It’s a tale that has often been told but nowhere with more zest and vividness than in his own letters. Ernest Mehew spent 25 meticulous years preparing the eight-volume complete edition that Yale University Press published for the centenary of Stevenson’s death in 1994. He has now selected just over a tenth of the original 2,800 letters, linking them with brief passages of biographical background. The result is the most enthralling, and most reliable, account of Stevenson’s life that has ever been available in a single volume.

JEREMY TREGLOWN

DEAR GENIUS: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom; Collected and Edited by Leonard S. Marcus; (HarperCollins: 406 pp. $22.95)

To those working in the world of children’s book publishing during the 1960s and ‘70s, the platonic ideal among its top editors was Ursula Nordstrom, director of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 until her retirement in 1973. Happily, her letters have been collected, edited and provided with helpful footnotes by critic and biographer Leonard Marcus. These admirable, often moving selections from Nordstrom’s professional correspondence (some 300 letters out of thousands perused by Marcus) were all typed by the great lady herself during spontaneous moments of cajolery, cheerleading, critical acuity, empathy, enthusiasm, euphoria, insight and, on rare occasions, discouragement. Their generosity of spirit (as well as of editorial time), their humor and sound judgment can only enhance a reputation already bordering on legend.

SELMA G. LANES

A TRANSATLANTIC LOVE AFFAIR: Letters to Nelson Algren; By Simone de Beauvoir; (The New Press: 576 pp., $27.50)

The letters, written in English, are amazing, both for the articulateness Simone de Beauvoir achieves in a language she’s not fluent in and for the rich, textured balance they strike throughout the years, never once hitting a false or mean note. They are the letters of an educated woman very much out in the world written to a talented autodidact living mainly inside his own head. But in some odd way--and this is exciting--an equalizing strain runs through them. It is as though they both think they’re doing much the same thing: she as part of a famous intellectual circle in a great world capital, he as a lonely and compulsive tourist among the underclass of a Midwestern American city. The thing they’re both doing is making existential drama out of the materials close to hand. In these letters, de Beauvoir never whines, pleads, threatens or insults; no matter what is happening between them, the letters open with love and close with warmth. Out of them can be intuited the woman who applied herself to the task of researching and writing a report on the condition of her own sex with so much passionate steadiness that she transformed a polemic into one of the great books of the century.

VIVIAN GORNICK

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN: A Century in His Life; By D.M. Thomas; (St. Martin’s: 564 pp., $29.95)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been an outstanding figure of the century, despite current attempts in Moscow to reduce him to a pop icon or dismiss him as a relic. He is not a joke or a legend but a real, extraordinary man whose fate, as D.M. Thomas shows, reveals complex truths about his country. That alone would earn him a place in the pantheon of Russian writers whose art has been molded by exile, imprisonment and the experience of Russia in turmoil. In every pore and every weakness, Solzhenitsyn typifies what has been the Russian intellectual’s responsibility for the last 200 years. Solzhenitsyn’s life lends credence to the highly plausible view that Russia does not have history, it has only art: an art in which writers across the centuries discuss the eternal questions that endlessly recur. Thomas makes heartwarming links with the rich tradition of Russian poetry and with Yeats, Auden and Frost. He deserves our thanks for writing a marvelously readable, indispensable book about an impossibly complex man of our recent times.

LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN

DIARIES: 1899-1942; By Robert Musil; Selected, translated and with a preface by Philip Payne; Edited and with an introduction by Mark Mirsky; (BasicBooks: 512 pp., $40)

Although it took almost four decades for the Austrian-born Robert Musil (1880-1942) to be generally recognized as one of the preeminent European writers of the century, by now there is little doubt that Musil belongs in the great constellation of novelists like Joyce, Proust and Kafka, writers who fundamentally transformed the formal possibilities of their medium and reshaped the ways we use story-telling to make sense of our experience. Even in German, the vast majority of Musil’s writings were published only posthumously, and we have had to wait even longer for the most important of these to be translated into English.

The unprecedented diversity and intellectual range of Musil’s preoccupations is most nakedly evident in his “Diaries,” and their American publication is an important cultural event for which everyone involved with the project deserves our gratitude. Mark Mirsky and Philip Payne’s edition of the “Diaries” can now take its place alongside the English versions of Musil’s major writings, including the recent two-volume edition of his masterpiece, “The Man Without Qualities,” on which Musil worked for more than 25 years. “Diaries” comprises a panoramic survey of European life, art, politics and thought from the turn of the century through the darkest years of Nazism.

MICHAEL ANDRE BERNSTEIN

LETTERS OF HEINRICH AND THOMAS MANN, 1900-1949; Edited with an introduction by Hans Wysling; (University of California Press: 444 pp., $50)

Imagine for a moment that Saul Bellow and Herman Wouk had been born in the second half of the 19th century as brothers in a close-knit German family; that throughout their long, productive and prominent careers they had copiously corresponded; that Saul (prose poet of conflicted subjectivity) and Herman (purveyor of a solidly crafted if shallower realism) had both let their affection, vying and percipience flow through their pens at each other; that the exchange reflected not only their respective auctorial stances but the tremors and pressures of history all around them. Imagine all that, and you’d have a rough idea of “The Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949.” In the end, the effect resonates beyond Mitteleuropa. The brothers Mann were tireless travelers and impression transcribers. They spent World War II as emigres in the United States. Taken together, their letters form a mosaic, international and interactive, a dialectic whose abrupt dissonances and complex harmonies sound a Zeitgeist still making waves now, in the days of Generation X.

FREDERIC MORTON