Litterateurs may not like that vulgar expression, but part of Hemingway’s modernness was his understanding of mass media and of how hard the writer has to work to stay in the public’s consciousness.

The biographer is clear-eyed about Jacob Taubes’s hyperbolic claims to universal knowledge. Taubes, in short, was a performer, perfectly willing to contradict himself and challenge all manner of established thought.

No Carter biographer has had to work like Robert Caro, an outsider who moved to Texas and carefully went to work on President Johnson’s friends and neighbors, proceeding from the periphery to the center of power.

That Dougherty was a woman and that she spoke fluent German are crucial. Much of the book is about the biographer’s effort to pin down Reinhard Heydrich’s wife.

As is Alison Macor’s book, the film is a group biography: Everyone involved believed in their mission not to fudge the trauma of returning home to a society unable to understand what these men went through in World War II.

CARL ROLLYSON