Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:33:19 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Carl Rollyson :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Carl+Rollyson istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/norman-mailer-a-top-american-novelist/66246/ Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST With the passing of Norman Mailer at 84, American literature has lost one of its major voices. Mailer, who died Saturday morning at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan of renal failure, catapulted himself into the front ranks of American writers early, with his critically acclaimed and best-selling debut, the war novel "The Naked and the Dead" (1948). "The Armies of the Night" (1968), his account of the march on the Pentagon, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and he won another... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/drafting-eisenhower/64359/ Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Michael Korda misses the point about American heroes, thinking we pester them into infamy or insignificance. In his new biography of Dwight Eisenhower, he quotes Emerson's comment, "Every hero becomes a bore at last," noting, by way of contrast, France's "national passion for Napoleon," England's "sentimental hero worship of Nelson," and Russia's "glorification of Peter the Great." But if we cut our heroes "down to size," as Mr. Korda contends, we do so only to build them back up again. Hence... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/evil-ambition-to-cure/61034/ Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST "Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, Medicine and Power in the Third Reich" (Continuum, 400 pages, $29.95) is the first full biography of Hitler's escort physician, who became the Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, and the "Medical Supremo" responsible for Germany's infamous euthanization program and the horrifying medical experiments in concentration camps. The Nuremberg trial judges declared that Brandt was guilty of crimes against humanity, rejecting his defense that euthanasia was a... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/putting-amerigo-on-the-map/60548/ Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST "Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America, was a pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity," writes Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his new biography (Random House, 231 pages, $24.95). His subject is reminiscent of Melville's confidence man, a figure of protean energy and inventiveness, a Florentine operator constantly on the make and adept at the makeover. He is a startlingly contemporary personality, and so it is no wonder that the title of this biography puts us all on a first name... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/life-after-life-for-shakespeare/60054/ Wed, 8 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Jack Lynch's argument in "Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard" (Walker, 320 pages, $24.95) is reminiscent of Walter Pater's idea that the greatness of "Mona Lisa" depends on the masses of people who have projected greatness onto the painting. This is not to say that Leonardo's work is not a masterpiece, any more than it is to suggest that Shakespeare is not the immortal bard. On the contrary, the Leonardos and the Shakespeares both... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/scapegoat-femme-fatale/59574/ Wed, 1 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Mata Hari, the femme fatale convicted of espionage and executed by the French during World War I, is hardly a virgin subject for biography. She is a perennial of children's books devoted to famous spies and secret agents and no less of a draw in biographies for adults. Greta Garbo played her on the big screen as the subversive siren redeemed by love. Mata Hari's recent biographers doubt the evidence against her. French intelligence, it seems, fabricated a case, determined to find a scapegoat in... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/gospel-of-relaxation/59076/ Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Think you know Herbert Spencer? Look him up in, say, "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," and besides supplying his dates (1820–1903), the entry calls him an "English evolutionist, father of sociology, and self-appointed philosopher." Self-appointed, I suppose, because Spencer claimed he read few books, especially not those he disagreed with, explaining that they gave him a headache. A classic Victorian eccentric, he is probably best known for coining the phrase "survival of the fittest," a... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/curtis-lemay-bombing-to-win/58653/ Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST "Whatever other names arise," Barrett Tillman writes in "LeMay: A Biography" (Palgrave, 224 pages, $21.95), General Curtis LeMay and Admiral Chester Nimitz "were the two commanders most responsible for defeating the Japanese Empire." Nimitz rebuilt the Navy after Pearl Harbor and at Midway delivered a blow to the Japanese carrier force from which it could never recover. Similarly, LeMay took the air battle to the Japanese homeland, perfecting the B29 on bombing missions that may well have won... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/nazi-germanys-first-mistress/58214/ Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST "From the time of our first meetings, I promised myself to follow you everywhere, even in death. You know that my whole life is loving you," Eva Braun wrote to her Führer shortly after July 20, 1944, when a briefcase bomb just missed blowing him up. His clothes torn to shreds, an arm damaged, Adolf Hitler, already enfeebled from lack of exercise and a demonic need to spend long hours micromanaging the war, watched his Nazi cohort abandon him. On his last day in the bunker, few remained, except... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/harriet-tubman-freelancer-for-justice/57400/ Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Reared in slavery, beaten by her masters, struck in the head as a young woman with a heavy weight that caused narcoleptic spells — the story of Harriet Tubman is well-known. This petite, illiterate woman ran away to the free North, and then repeatedly returned to her home ground of Maryland, spiriting away not only her own family, but dozens — perhaps even hundreds — of slaves, never once getting caught or losing anyone in her charge. When the Civil War broke out, Tubman became a nurse and... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/man-behind-the-museum/56967/ Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST On June 27, 1829, a rather obscure Englishman died in Genoa. He carried with him a receipt for a will stipulating that the bulk of his fortune — something like £100,000 (around $50,000,000 today) — should be employed by the United States for "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." James Smithson wrote the will himself and omitted the lawyerly language that might have made his bequest clearer. A chemist by training who published a number of narrowly focused... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/body-soul/56476/ Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST "Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America's First Great Black Filmmaker" (HarperCollins, 416 pages, $29.95) is a culminating work, the result of more than 35 years of scholarship intent on returning its subject to his rightful place in the history of American cinema. Micheaux (1884–1951) "deserves to be considered in the same breath as the sainted D. W. Griffith," argues Patrick McGilligan, who pays handsome tributes to the biographers and critics who have made his comprehensive... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/grim-tales-of-a-biografiend/55980/ Wed, 6 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST In a lifetime of writing biographies of famous men, Meryle Secrest has been tempted on more than one occasion to do away with their surviving wives. Widows are the inconvenient keepers of the flame, who watch over the biographer's shoulder and forbid forays into intimate matters that might compromise the reputations of their husbands. For Ms. Secrest, "widows" are not simply the spouses of dead subjects: They are anyone who might block her access to private papers and privileged information... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/power-couple-of-the-west/55471/ Wed, 30 May 2007 00:00:00 EST "They were everything a growing nation needed for a symbol of success, and the country was not to see this combination of youth and daring again until the later cults of hero worship for George and Elizabeth Custer, Charles and Ann Lindbergh, or John and Jacqueline Kennedy," wrote the biographer Richard Egan about the subjects of Sally Denton's "Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, The Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America" (Bloomsbury, 480 pages... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/mythic-legacy-of-franklin-roosevelt/55014/ Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 EST "The literature on the Roosevelt era is immense," Jean Edward Smith notes in his preface to "FDR" (Random House, 636 pages, $35), "there is little that has not been said, somewhere, about the president." So why another biography? Because "Roosevelt himself has become a mythic figure, looming indistinctly out of the mist of the past." Mr. Smith aims to write not only history but also Plutarchian biography: The "children's hour" every evening when the president mixed martinis for his guests, the... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/chasing-the-reds-with-young-john-edgar/54568/ Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 EST In "Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties" (Carroll & Graf, 496 pages, $28.95) Kenneth Ackerman plays to his strengths. He has served more than 25 years in senior posts on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch, as well as in private practice as a Washington, D.C., attorney, and the result is a chilling account of how the rule of law in a war on terror can be subverted into a war of terror. Mr. Ackerman traces Hoover's rise from 1917 as a young attorney in... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-aaron-burr/54085/ Wed, 9 May 2007 00:00:00 EST "It is time to start over," contends Nancy Isenberg in her iconoclastic "Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr" (Viking, 544 pages, $29.95). Burr is, of course, infamous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. But historians have also branded Burr a Machiavellian villain who schemed to deny Thomas Jefferson the presidency and most likely committed treason, even though he escaped conviction. Ms. Isenberg faults historians and biographers for not examining Burr's papers — although many were... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/back-into-africa/53609/ Wed, 2 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) may evoke for millions the visage of Robert Redford, who plays this quintessential British adventurer with an American accent in "Out of Africa." Finch Hatton, the original, had sherry-colored hair and "topsoil brown eyes," Sara Wheeler reports in "Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton" (Random House, 320 pages, $27.95). His aristocratic ancestors gambled their money away, and Denys was confronted with two choices: become a... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/many-lives-of-ho-chi-minh/53193/ Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST A biography of Ho Chi Minh, regarded by many as the father of his country — and a figure who also became an icon for elements of the American left during the Vietnam War — poses a problem, Pierre Brocheux announces in his preface. The biographer cites American historian Alexander Woodside, who argues against writing "another biography while certain periods of the subject's life are still obscure and questions remain about the man even today." Surprisingly, Mr. Brocheux does not confront this... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/sources-of-george-kennans-conduct/52691/ Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST John Lukacs calls "George Kennan: A Study of Character" (Yale University Press, 224 pages, $26) a "biographical study," noting that a full-fledged biography has yet to be written. Mr. Lukacs ranks Kennan above Henry Adams as a historian and autobiographer and above Ernest Hemingway as a writer about Europe. Kennan emerges, toward the end of this impassioned work, as the conscience of his country. Although Kennan (1904–2005) is best known as the author of the famous "X" article in Foreign... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/shabbes-goy-of-psychoanalysis/52224/ Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Brenda Maddox's "Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis" (Da Capo Press, 354 pages, $26) poses a fundamental question about biography: To what extent do ideas, or, more specifically, the spread of ideas, depend on personalities? Freud himself wondered whether or not his new "science" of psychoanalysis would travel beyond turn-of-the century Vienna, Austria, and become something more than an exclusively Jewish enterprise. At first Carl Jung seemed to be the gentile... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/giving-millard-fillmore-his-due/51807/ Wed, 4 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Millard Fillmore (1800–74), 13th president of the United States, a lawyer, and a Whig, lost a race for New York governor in 1844, ran as Zachary Taylor's vice president in 1848, and became president in 1850 after Taylor died. Ridiculed as a bumbling figure and denied re-nomination in 1852, he ran for president on the Know-Nothing Party ticket in 1856, carrying only the state of Maryland. When George Pendle announced at the Biographer's Club in Washington, D.C., that he had decided to write... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/emerson-beyond-intellect/51361/ Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Biography, quite simply, gives the lie to literary criticism, and that is why it is such an affront to many literary critics. The genre suggests literature cannot be an end in itself, but rather that writing constitutes a part of some larger enterprise uncontainable within the covers of a book. Academic critics, in particular, would like to make of literature a priestly profession, a coded discipline practiced by adepts and sanctified by the Ph.D. This aspect of biography struck me while I read... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/lady-of-the-court/50860/ Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Jill Norgren has quite a story to tell. Belva Lockwood (1830–1917) had to wage an arduous campaign just to get into law school and after completing the course she was refused a degree. An expert lobbyist who befriended influential congressmen, Lockwood marshaled her forces, eventually obtained her diploma, and then had to wage another battle to be admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar. And that was hardly the last public struggle for the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court and... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/biography-the-highest-form-of-cannibalism/50440/ Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Biography is the dominant nonfiction of our age, as Nigel Hamilton observes in "Biography: A Brief History" (Harvard, 360 pages, $21.95). It pervades the press. So why is there "no single, accessible introduction to the subject, either for the general reader or the specialist?" Mr. Hamilton asks. Why has it taken so long to produce this primer? Most biographers, in my experience, do not know the history of the genre. They are attracted to biography because of a given subject, not because... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/leni-riefenstahl-on-trial/49944/ Wed, 7 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST "Every woman adores a fascist," Sylvia Plath cried out in her poem "Daddy." "To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength," Leni Riefenstahl told a Detroit News reporter in February 1937. Riefenstahl has often been called the greatest woman documentary filmmaker — although she would have bridled at the "woman." No feminist, she wanted nothing less than her due as a great artist. In her masterpiece... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/faith-based-liberation/49505/ Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST Is there anyone with even a modest acquaintance with the history of the abolition of slavery who does not know the name William Wilberforce? If so, then perhaps, just perhaps, this is the book for you. Eric Metaxas resorts to the third-rate biographer's buildup, assuring the reader that Wilberforce is forgotten. He changed the world, yet he remains unacknowledged. But wait! There is more: "Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/man-of-property/49033/ Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) left behind not only "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) but also his laundry lists and many other records, documents, and correspondence — quite an abundant stock of material — that should enrich the work of his biographer. Roger Woolhouse draws deeply on this awesome archive, and yet to my biographer's mind, "Locke: A Biography" (Cambridge, 548 pages, $39.99) is a let-down. Following the well-established procedures of academia, Mr... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/to-speak-of-woe-that-is-in-marriage/48584/ Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST Assia Wevill is the dark lady of the Plath/Hughes agon. As Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev put it in "Lover of Unreason" (Carroll & Graf, 268 pages, $27.95), "Assia was reduced to the role of a she-devil and an enchantress, the woman alleged to have severed the union of twentieth-century poetry's most celebrated couple." When Sylvia Plath and Assia first met, they liked each other. Assia, a part-Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, bore, in Plath's words, her "passport on her face." She had lived... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-catherine-became-great/48198/ Wed, 7 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST Pity the poor biographer trying to compete with the novelist. A case in point: Virginia Rounding straining to evoke Catherine before she became great, when she was still Sophie Frederica Auguste of Amholt-Zerbst, one of those 300 or so 18th-century German principalities occupying what a Russian historian once called the "feudal anthill." Engaged to another provincial princeling, Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, Sophie had to negotiate her way through the intrigues of the Russian... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/potters-secret-garden/47693/ Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST What did children do before Disney? They read Beatrix Potter. They still do. Her Peter Rabbit, who first appeared in 1902, still has a world audience, and royalties from her other books and "licensing kingdom" (as Linda Lear's publisher puts it) earn something like $500 million a year. The new film about Potter's life, starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, will make that gross even more. Unlike Disney's Mickey Mouse & Co., Potter's Peter & Co. were set in "a real place and in real, rather... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/vive-la-revolution/47290/ Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST "Toussaint Louverture" (Pantheon, 333 pages, $27) is a beautifully composed discourse on a revolutionary world, a work in a class all its own. Madison Smart Bell's sentences seem suffused with the steamy intrigue and violence of Saint Domingue, the French name for 18th century Haiti. Toussaint Louverture (c. 1743–1803) arose from the murk of events as mysteriously and as forcefully as Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen in "Absalom, Absalom!" Like the "demon" Sutpen, a refugee planter from the West Indies... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/mailer-lost-in-the-forest-in-search-of-adolf/46822/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST There has always been something pre-Judeo-Christian about Norman Mailer's imagination. He has a Homeric sensibility that is also at home in ancient Egypt. Monotheism hardly appeals to the Manichean Mr. Mailer. So it does not surprise me that a devil masquerading as a member of the Nazi SS narrates Mr. Mailer's first novel in more than a decade, "The Castle in the Forest" (Random House, 496 pages, $27.95). Modern psychology, Mr. Mailer implies, cannot account for the rise of Adolf Hitler. He has... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/talking-about-my-generation-john-osborne/46378/ Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Why was playwright John Osborne an angry young man? The tag stuck because he personified a generation of dramatists who detonated the understated drawing room dramas of Terrence Rattigan and Noel Coward that dominated London's West End at the time. Imagine a theater without the rawness of Eugene O'Neill, the bold experimentation of Elmer Rice, the steamy subversion of Tennessee Williams, and the demotic tragedies of Arthur Miller. That was English drama before Osborne exploded the London stage... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/long-encounter-with-david-lean/46038/ Wed, 3 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST David Lean began his career carrying tea to filmmakers and doing other menial tasks. He then graduated to film cutter, demonstrating he had a good eye and helping out directors who could not master the Moviola, a contraption that synchronized picture and sound. And before long Lean had become a superb editor. In principle, this should have qualified him to be a commanding director: Visuals, not the words, are what predominate in cinema. Get the montage right — as he did in "Pygmalion" (1938)... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/it-takes-a-city/45788/ Wed, 27 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Mention that a biography is unauthorized and all sorts of presumptions come into play: This is a hostile takeover, and the subject will be savaged; access to the subject and sources has been limited because the biographer has gone negative; it is best to wait for the full life — presumably the one the authorized biographer publishes. Put aside the possibility that the authorized biographer operates under limitations as well — such as the psychological and perhaps even legal burden of being... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/hanoverian-home-life-with-brother-george/45502/ Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST "George III: America's Last King" (Yale University Press, 448 pages, $35) adds much to our knowledge of the monarch and his reign. I was intrigued to learn about George's reading and how much writing he produced. He was an earnest, if not very subtle thinker. The word often applied to him is stolid. The biographer's research is impressive, but I'd recommend that you clear your calendar and wear a pair of noise-canceling headphones whilst (as the Brits say) you attempt to decipher Jeremy Black's... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/dancing-master/45105/ Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST Can there be too much of a good thing when it comes to biography? If there is someone Amanda Vaill did not interview, if there is a document she overlooked, if there is an archive or other source of information she could not access, it is news to me. I have to second Terry Teachout's claim, "I can't imagine a better book about Robbins ever being written." Of course there will be other books because, to quote Mr. Teachout again, "Jerome Robbins is the great subject of American theatrical... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/walk-like-a-man-write-like-a-woman/44688/ Wed, 6 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST "Naked in the Marketplace" is Henry James's phrase for George Sand's parading of her affair with Alfred de Musset in her fiction. James, needless to say, preferred more discretion in his aesthetic. Sand shocked and titillated her contemporaries even more when she took up with Chopin, a liaison that lasted nearly nine years, during which the composer produced half his works of genius. Sand's fiction is not much read today, although her letters are now complete in 26 volumes, and yet her life is... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/uncovering-the-story-of-a-forgotten-founder/44332/ Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST So why is George Mason a forgotten founder? As Jeff Broadwater notes in his new biography, "George Mason" (University of North Carolina Press, 352 pages, $34.95), "during Mason's lifetime only Washington ranked higher in public esteem." An agile debater, Mason had a major impact on the Constitutional Convention. As principal author of Virginia's Declaration of Rights, his work served as a model for the Bill of Rights. Washington and Jefferson regarded him as indispensable to the revolutionary... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/william-faulkner-modernism-unvanquished/43926/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST What does it mean to be a Faulknerian biographer? In his new book "William Faulkner" (Overlook, 104 pages, $19.95), M. Thomas Inge supplies the answer right off: Faulkner wrote as if there were no literature written in English before him, no century and more of convention and literary tradition established before he put pen to paper. He recreated fiction anew and set the novel free to better serve the twentieth century through a powerful, discordant, and irresistible torrent of language that... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/spy-who-came-in-from-the-circus/43569/ Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST Not to keep you in suspense any longer: The secret is that Harry Houdini may have been a spy, an operative for the U.S. Secret Service, and other police organizations here and abroad. Unfortunately, the evidence is circumstantial, the biographers' conclusions inconclusive. To be sure, Houdini hung out with cops and ops. He was, after all, the handcuff king, escaping from every kind of lock and chain the fuzz fettered him with — including treacherous thumb cuffs that tore the skin on Houdini's... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/man-who-loved-children/43140/ Wed, 8 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST First the bad news: Uncle Walt is not in deep freeze somewhere in Tomorrowland. Neal Gabler, the spoilsport biographer, delivers the news in "Walt Disney" (Knopf, 851 pages, $35) that he was, in fact, cremated and his ashes interred "in a remote corner of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, not far from his studio." Well, at least his spirit hovers near the epicenter of the American imagination. It was Disney's genius to create and stabilize, as it were, the geography of the... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/you-cant-take-it-with-you/42694/ Wed, 1 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST Why did Andrew Carnegie give away all of his money? This is the question that Carnegie's biographers have to confront. David Nasaw's authoritative new biography goes a long way toward answering the question, even if he cannot—perhaps no biographer can—ultimately fathom Carnegie's complex motives and temperament. Mr. Nasaw deftly dismisses the conventional explanations. Carnegie did not feel guilty about accumulating a vast fortune. He did not feel he had earned his wealth immorally, let alone... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/outsiders-with-the-ultimate-inside-scoop/42208/ Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Two Metro reporters at the Washington Post, both in their late 20s — one a dogged investigator who writes badly, the other rather a flake who writes well — team up to take down a president of America. The plot for a bad movie? No, actually the scenario for a rather good one, "All the President's Men," and, improbably, a true story — although to give the whole credit for Watergate to Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein is (as Huck Finn would say) a stretcher. Why were Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/documenting-life-artifice/42058/ Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST How has Annie Leibovitz attained her extraordinary kind of fame? Renowned as a commercial photographer who has produced celebrated covers for "Rolling Stone," "Vanity Fair," and "Vogue," she has also established herself as a museum piece, so to speak, a fixture in Britain's National Portrait Gallery and other venues for high art. Now there is "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005" at the Brooklyn Museum. What separates Ms. Leibovitz from the glamour and the glitz of many other... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/turning-a-blind-eye-to-a-brutal-party/41768/ Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST "Compilations of correspondence are necessarily biographies of a kind—biographies of individual consciousness with less intrusive mediation and interpretation than one finds in a traditional biography," Peter Y. Sussman, editor of "Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford" (Alfred A. Knopf, 744 pages, $35) writes. But what constitutes "less intrusive mediation"? Jessica Mitford supplied an admirable answer, which Mr. Sussman quotes: "The whole point of letters is to reveal the writer & her... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/dianas-luminous-life-sarah-bradfords-version/41294/ Wed, 11 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Diana — the countdown: Andrew Morton, "Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words" (1992), Anthony Holden, "The Tarnished Crown: Princess Diana and the House of Windsor" (1993), Anne Edwards, "Ever After: Diana and the Life She Led" (1999), Sally Bedell Smith, "Diana in Search of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled Princess" (1999). Sarah Bradford's simply titled "Diana" (Viking, 464 pages, $25.95) is meant to surpass these representative earlier productions of the Diana industry, as her portentous... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/40870/ Wed, 4 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Art history is a matter of provenance; art collecting an affair of prestige. Commerce in art is the ineluctable confluence of provenance and prestige. Han van Meegeren (1889–1947), a talented painter who despised the work of modernists such as Picasso, understood that he could only succeed as an artist by obliterating himself and becoming his 17th-century avatar, Vermeer. To Han, as Frank Wynne calls him throughout this lively biography, "I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth... CARL ROLLYSON http://www.nysun.com/arts/audreys-timeless-allure/40435/ Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST "Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn" (Harmony, 352 pages, $25.95) enters a crowded field. Barry Paris's encyclopedic "Audrey Hepburn" appeared in 1996, Alexander Walker's astute "Audrey" in 1994, and Diana Maychick's chatty "intimate portrait" in 1993 — just to mention Donald Spoto's immediate predecessors. At this point, the impatient reviewer is supposed to complain, "Do we really need another biography of Audrey Hepburn?" This is almost always the wrong question. Biography by its very...