Freewheeling Americans Aplenty

Steven Englund's "Napoleon: A Political Life" (Scribner, 592 pages, $35) is the best biography I reviewed this year, but almost as good is Simon Sebag Montefiore's "Stalin: In The Court of the Red Tsar" (Knopf, 816 pages, $30). Mr. Montefiore's deft combination of biography and history brings Stalin alive, so that he becomes as complex and contradictory as any of the great characters in fiction. Especially riveting is the biographer's account of Stalin's life from 1932 (the year his wife, Nadja, committed suicide) to the eve of World War II. By that point, the Moscow show trials and his war on the peasantry had made Stalin the supreme ruler, a tsar like Peter the Great, whom the 20th-century dictator greatly admired.

Some readers will no doubt bridle at the length of Scott Stossel's biography of Sargent Shriver ("Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver," Smithsonian Institution Press, 704 pages, $32.50). Mr. Shriver is important, but not that important, the chiding critic will probably assert. Wrong! This is a beautifully written and magnificently organized work. Mr. Stossel shows how government worked during the Kennedy/Johnson years, and he portrays Mr. Shriver as a kind of moral touchstone who makes the excesses of the Kennedy clan seem worse in light of his loyalty. Indeed, Shriver maintained such a degree of independence that neither Lyndon Johnson nor Robert Kennedy ever fully trusted him. Yet neither could do without him, for Mr. Shriver never backed down from his beliefs, and both admired his uncanny ability to get to the heart of a problem.

As a study of an important figure in American politics from the 1950s to the 1970s, Mr. Stossel's biography is engrossing reading. Realizing that he has made his subject into a saint, the biographer explores the meaning of hagiography. Mr. Stossel rightly suggests that he has not ignored his subject's faults (Mr. Shriver, for example, turned out to be a hopeless candidate when he ran in the 1976 presidential primaries), but he does not reject the other definition of hagiography: "a biography of a saint or venerated person." There is no question in the biographer's mind that he has written the life of a truly good man. I concur.

This was a better year for literary biography than 2003, although I savor almost a perverse pleasure in reading Roger Lewis's send-up of Anthony Burgess ("Anthony Burgess: A Biography," Thomas Dunne Books, 480 pages, $27.95) and Emmanuel Carrere's quirky and quasi telepathic biography of Philip K. Dick ("I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick," Metropolitan Books, 336 pages, $26). Both biographers shake up what can be a rather staid genre with considerable humor and brio.

Two excellent biographies of Audubon appeared in 2004. William Souder's "Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America" (North Point Press, 384 pages, $25) and Duff Hart-Davis's "Audubon's Elephant: America's Greatest Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America" (Henry Holt, 288 pages, $27.50). But even better is Richard Rhodes's "John James Audubon: the Making of An American" (Knopf, 528 pages, $30) - a title I did not have the opportunity to review.

Mr. Rhodes begins his biography by being true to his subtitle: "The sharp cries of gulls wheeling above the East River docks welcomed the handsome young Frenchman to America." Birds, the biographer implies, do not merely become Audubon's subject, they represent the freewheeling America that this emigrant embraces and forges into a new identity.

Here is Mr. Rhodes's description of Audubon's golden eagle, its "talon piercing the northern hare's eye," which he later links to a comment on the "larger world of animals." Classifying naturalists might object to Audubon's art, but Rhodes in rebuttal sees that the golden eagle "was Napoleon and his horse." This is sensational biography, buttressed by color plates that clinch Rhodes's point. Side-by-side his book reproduces David's magnificent painting of "Bonaparte Crossing the Saint-Bernard" - a study in dynamism, with the horse rearing up as Napoleon's right arm shoots upward, mimicking the diagonal composition of the painting - and Audubon's "Golden Eagle" ascending on the diagonal, the hare as surely clutched in the eagle's talon as Napoleon's horse is girdled by his flexed left leg.

Finally, I am still bemused by a biography that reminds me of Dickens's line in "A Tale of Two Cities": "recalled to life." If you wish to forsake stories of better known figures for a beautifully written evocation of a life virtually erased from history, I urge you to read Mona Z. Smith's "Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee" (Faber&Faber, 448 pages, $27) the life of a talented violinist, a flamboyant jockey, a contender for the welterweight title, a Broadway star and producer, a movie actor, a restaurateur, a political activist, and a blacklisted artist. What more could a biographer want in a subject?

The best explanation for Lee's disappearance from history is alluded to in Ms. Smith's title: "All my life, I've been on the verge of becoming something," Lee once said. Each of his careers was cut short. I mourn especially that this gifted actor, whose Othello is said to have equaled and perhaps even surpassed Robeson's, only had the opportunity to perform a handful of screen roles. He was the Sidney Poitier of his day, one who never got the opportunity to be Sidney Poitier. How I wish I could have seen Lee's cigar-smoking Banquo in Orson Welles's voodoo "Macbeth."

This is one of the most poignant biographies I have ever read. Some biographies have perfect pitch. This is one of them.