Biography.

NONFICTION

****

Charlatan

America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam

By Pope Brock

The con man who got America's goat.

What do country music, modern political campaigning, and the American Medical Association have in common? They were all tied to the life of one great con man, Dr. John Brinkley, who treated impotence by transplanting goat glands into humans and made a killing in the process (often literally). Charlatan chronicles Brinkley's rise to preeminence in the 1920s and 1930s, first by exploring the world of quack medicines and patent cures, then by following the goat doctor into his forays into broadcasting and politics. His foil was Dr. Morris Fishbein, the indomitable editor of the Journal of American Medical Association, who struggled for years to expose Brinkley's quackery. The lives of both men intersect with many of the most interesting figures and events of their time, making for a curious journey through America's interwar years.

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Crown. 336 pages. $24.95. ISBN: 0307339882

Chicago Sun-Times ****

"Pope Brock reaches into the past and captures an incredible story--that of Dr. John R. Brinkley, whose goat gland implants promised restored vitality to men who today would simply pop a Viagra and get on with their business. ... Brock's writing is a blowtorch through butter, with none of the padding, none of the look-I-did-researching showing off of lesser writers." NEIL STEINBERG

Chicago Tribune ****

"With a vast and wild cast of characters, and filled with issues and topics that resonate through the years and are as close as the nearest computer, Charlatan begs comparison with Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City and deserves to be a best seller." RICK KOGAN

New York Times ****

"Presentation is everything in telling this elaborate, many-faceted story. ... Charlatan also has the good fortune to revolve around high drama." JANET MASLIN

USA Today ****

"Brock masterfully captures this amazing and amusing history. A talented storyteller, he digs deep into the personal secrets of his characters and fleshes out this oddball slice of American drama with cameo appearances of famous historical figures such as Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, the Duke of Windsor and Sigmund Freud." DON OLDENBURG

Denver Post ****

"Pope Brock's well-researched tale of a medical con artist reads like a novel and covers ground ranging from the evangelical movement to the birth of the modern political campaign to the radio airwaves." JANNA FISCHER

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Reviewers across the board bought what Pope Brock is selling. The author reeled them in with the incredible Brinkley, a quack who was one of a kind yet revealed so much about the era in which he lived. Critics were mesmerized by Brock's ability to connect Brinkley's life to other episodes in American history and fill them with vitality. Yet the true potency of Charlatan derives from Brock's storytelling skill: many critics spent much of their reviews retelling the highly entertaining tales from the book. Like the work to which it was most often compared, Erik Larson's Devil in the White City (*** May/June 2003), Charlatan will surely prove to be popular with those who love American history as well as with those simply in search of a good yarn.

****

Bill Mauldin

A Life Up Front

By Todd DePastino

The front lines, thickly inked.

Some of the most memorable characters from World War II were the people recording the memories: the writers and reporters who saw the war as it happened. One of the most eccentric of those journalists was Bill Mauldin (1921-2003), the cartoonist best known for his characters, infantrymen Willie and Joe. From the front lines to the home front, these two hardscrabble soldiers brought a bit of irreverence to their real-life counterparts and a bit of insight into civilians, too. DePastino's biography, which is generously illustrated with Mauldin's cartoons, focuses mostly on the war years and the impact of Willie and Joe. However, DePastino also chronicles the cartoonist's complicated homecoming from Europe and subsequent career--which, Mauldin's life suggests, can never really be separated.

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Norton. 320 pages. $27.95. ISBN: 0393061833

Philadelphia Inquirer ****

"Vibrant, moving, and full of wonderful cartoons, DePastino's book breathes life into a fascinating American genius." CHRIS PATSILELIS

San Diego Union-Tribune ****

"A Life Up Front is well-paced and written in an honest, straightforward manner. ... True, the book will likely resonate with almost any member from the Greatest Generation, but Mauldin's life was so interesting, and his stamp on the culture so indelible, that this is an enjoyable read for anyone with even a cursory interest in history." STEVE BREEN

Wall Street Journal ****

"Mr. DePastino gets behind the gauziness, fills in details and extends our knowledge of Mauldin's remarkable postwar career as a newspaper editorial cartoonist. ... It's all in Mr. DePastino's book--the gore of the beach landings, the close combat, the hassling that GIs took from the military police, and Mauldin's own battles with the brass." SETH LIPSKY

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ****

"Todd DePastino has written a commendable, readable first biography of Mauldin. ... DePastino's analysis of the significance of Mauldin's work and its changes over time is one of the strengths of the book." ROGER K. MILLER

Providence Journal ****

"This often grim, but inspiring biography is amply illustrated with Mauldin's work. ... But for all who remember him--and perhaps for today's soldiers, too--it is well worth a browse if not a full-fledged read." PHYLLIS MERAS

NY Times Book Review ***

"[DePastino] proceeds cautiously to understand the hard-working, hard-drinking soldier-cartoonist who stood up to Patton and was liked by Ike. ... Mauldin's story has much to say about the development of an artist, but in this telling it seems almost as if a censoring hand has cut out pieces of what might have been a classic narrative of art's paradoxically redemptive and imprisoning power." DAVID MICHAELIS

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Every critic who reviewed A Life Up Front welcomed this biography; apart from Mauldin's own memoir, Back Home (1947), it is the first full-length biography of the man. Because DePastino was the first to provide such a work, critics were inclined to be forgiving even when they found failings, such as a focus on career over personal life. The book's sympathetic subject and engaging illustrations couldn't have hurt either. While a few reviewers suspected DePastino of hero worship, they also appreciated his thorough research and his candor in describing the difficult episodes of Mauldin's later life. Given the usual glowing treatment of "The Greatest Generation" and "The Good War," the overall assessment was that A Life Up Front is a respectful but balanced biography.

****

Chasing the Flame

Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

By Samantha Power

A brilliant career tragically cut short.

On August 19, 2003, a bomb ripped through the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 officials. Among the dead was the charismatic Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Described as "a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy," the Brazilian-born Vieira de Mello had joined the United Nations in 1969, having graduated from the Sorbonne. He served through some of the worst humanitarian and political crises of the last 30 years--Rwanda, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo--while courting some of the most notorious leaders to broker agreements. He gradually traded in his youthful idealism for a more practical approach to the world's despots and saved countless, innocent lives in the process. His career and ideological transformation, Power argues, reflect the challenges faced by the United Nations today.

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Penguin. 640 pages. $32.95. ISBN: 1594201285

Economist ****

"Samantha Power's detailed and sympathetic biography tells the tale of a Brazilian expatriate whose world outlook was shaped by the left-wing idealism of Paris in 1968 but then tempered by ever-increasing doses of reality. ... As a person, he remains a bit of a puzzle."

Milwaukee Jrnl Sentinel ****

"Commendably, Power doesn't obscure the fact that Vieira de Mello's renowned charm included a smarmy quality; he tended instinctively to cozy up to those politicians and warlords--however unsavory--who wielded power. Yet Power demonstrates that even while exuding geniality toward sadists such as Serb militia leader Radovan Karadzic during the Bosnian war, Vieira de Mello engineered the escape of hundreds of Bosnian civilians from besieged Sarajevo by smuggling them aboard U.N. cargo planes." RAYYAN AL-SHAWAF

NY Times Book Review ****

"In the end, the book does not make a persuasive case that the United Nations will ever be able to evolve into an organization that can deploy adequate amounts of hard power or take sides in contentious political disputes. ... But surely the life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello is a good place to begin a serious debate about the proper way to manage world order in the future." FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

San Francisco Chronicle ****

"Despite occasional lapses in judgment, he's an appealing character in Power's portrait, someone whose humanitarianism owes more to an intuitive generosity of spirit than to an abstract commitment to the universal rights of man. ... But while [Power] nimbly excavates colorful artifacts from Vieira de Mello's life, her workmanlike writing dampens their effect, and her prose often fails to ignite." BEN TARNOFF

Washington Post ****

"Her book is an ambitious effort, a long, meandering narrative that in the end succeeds brilliantly but is so slow-paced, especially in its early pages, as to leave the reader wishing Vieira de Mello would grow up, move on or find some epiphany amid the serial catastrophes. ... The strength of the book lies in Power's use of Vieira de Mello's life (and death) as a well-placed window on the international community's successes and failures." JAMES MANN

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard, met Sergio Vieira de Mello when she was a journalist in Bosnia in 1994. Although he charmed her as he did everyone else, she has written a balanced biography of the flawed but dedicated and likable man. While Power impressed the critics with her research, she failed to convince all of them of her arguments. Several reviewers also noted that Power's writing, laden with detail and subtle layering, doesn't rise to the level of her Pulitzer Prize--winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002) until the very end, when she recounts Vieira de Mello's last moments. As much a critique of the United Nations and its policies as the story of a man battling injustice, Chasing the Flame, despite being cited as a somewhat slow read, is a significant contribution to our understanding of global affairs and the future of peacekeeping.

****

The Man Who Made Lists

Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus

By Joshua Kendall

The psychology behind the Thesaurus.

Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), the creator of Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), classified throughout his life. According to journalist Joshua Kendall, this "categorical imperative" stemmed from a self-protective, psychological urge born of loss. When his father died young, Roget was left with his unstable mother and mad sister; his uncle, a father figure, later committed suicide. Roget, who found solace in compiling lists of words, finished a draft of the thesaurus in 1805, but he put it aside to marry a lovely woman (until she, too, died) and to become a prominent physician, scientist, and mathematician. To ward off depression, he returned to his thesaurus years later. He never intended it as a book of synonyms, but an elaborately constructed set of knowledge.

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Putnam. 297 pages. $25.95. ISBN: 0399154620

Los Angeles Times ****

"Word geeks--who fancy a nuanced discussion of synonyms; whose temperatures rise reading a history of the various editions, additions and excisions; who lock horns in lusty debate over the utility of, or damage wrought by, this ubiquitous semantic aid--must look elsewhere. ... It is not etymology that awaits, but psychology." CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD

NY Times Book Review ****

"Kendall's style is plain and sensible; he gets the job done with sympathy and speed, occasionally entertaining the reader with a novelistic flourish. ... [He] convinces a reader of the psychological roots and therapeutic success of the Thesaurus." THOMAS MALLON

Wall Street Journal ****

"Mr. Kendall calls Roget's Thesaurus an 'immortal book' and a 'literary masterpiece.' Immortal it may be, but is it a masterpiece? ... [M]ost readers ignore the categories and hunt for the synonyms." STEPHEN MILLER

Seattle Times ***

"[Kendall is] good at covering the reference-book precedents to Roget's Thesaurus and explaining how Roget improved upon them, but less convincing at scene-setting prose (complete with dialogue that seems largely invented--the book comes with no notes or bibliography)." MICHAEL UPCHURCH

Washington Post ***

"[Kendall] ought to build toward the climactic event of Roget's life, the publication of the Thesaurus, but that arrives almost as an afterthought and is given only a few perfunctory pages. ... The Man Who Made Lists is unlikely to be the last word on Peter Mark Roget." JONATHAN YARDLEY

CRITICAL SUMMARY

The title tells all: rather than a discussion of etymology, The Man Who Made Lists examines Dr. Roget and his creation through a psychological lens. Critics couldn't help but compare the effort to Simon Winchester's acclaimed The Professor and the Madman (2001), about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Incidentally, in the Atlantic, Winchester criticized Roget's Thesaurus for fostering "poor writing" in its indiscriminate cataloging. While even those reviewers who agreed with Winchester's assessment acknowledged the value of Kendall's subject matter, they diverged on its execution. A few thought the book well-written, a fine balance between historical research and novelistic flourishes. Others found forced dialogue and scenes, slack narrative, and factual errors. Still, The Man Who Made Lists is a fascinating look at a man, an era, and a now-iconic book.

***

Riding Toward Everywhere

By William T. Vollmann

Destination nowhere.

At 47, a request for a divorce sent William T. Vollmann to the rails, where he "catches out" on a journey meant to be an anecdote to the "unfreedom that is creeping over America." The world of the hobo--the novice rider Vollmann refers to himself as a "fauxbeaux"--symbolizes both freedom and nostalgia for a world that may never have existed. On his travels in much of the West (the book contains 66 pages of photos), Vollmann meets the kinds of characters you might expect--witness Badger and Pittsburgh Ed, and the "Diesel Venuses," among others. Many of their stories evoke a bygone era; just as many hint at the desperation of such a peripatetic life. Vollmann's conclusion grounds the shadowy, seductively romantic world of train hopping in an inevitable reality: "When you gamble on a freight train, it is so much like life: You don't know the future."

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Ecco. 271 pages. $26.95. ISBN: 0061256757

San Francisco Chronicle ****

"Vollmann is too smart by half to let riding the freights become an exercise in machismo. ... [A]s Vollmann so ably renders in writing as pungent as diesel fumes, but a whole lot more bracing to absorb, the 'myriad reversals of fortune and feeling' that attend train hopping brings him to life, simplifying reality to make it more easily marveled." PETER LEWIS

Boston Globe ****

"Vollmann's lyric prose manages to convey both the velocity of train travel and the intensity of the sensual experience, a jolting achievement in an era of 'comfort travel' that has sought mostly to annihilate our relationship with the landscape. ... When you ride with him, a measure of glorification is included in the price of the ticket, and hardly diminishes the larger wonders of the trip." STEVE ALMOND

Christian Science Monitor ****

"[A] highly personal, high-risk, all-over-the-place text about illegally hopping freight trains to travel up and down and across the United States for no discernible reason except perhaps the best reason of all--wanderlust, living free, looking for a dream place to inhabit that he calls 'Cold Mountain. ...' And yet, despite the surface disorganization of the book, Vollmann never loses or confuses the reader." STEVE WEINBERG

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette **

"Lyrical passages of plaintive beauty and sharp portraits of the hoboes infuse this book with Vollmann's quiet power as a writer, but this is a diary, no more or less. We learn of his appetite for prostitutes (although he borrows cars, rather than use his own to pick up them), fondness for semi-automatic pistols and Jack Daniels for breakfast, and raw hatred of President Bush, but these and other elements don't add up." BOB HOOVER

Los Angeles Times **

"As a polemic, Riding Toward Everywhere is shrill and unconvincing. ... This may well be the road to enlightenment, but as the train trips blend into one another they get a bit tedious in the retelling." MARC WEINGARTEN

NY Times Book Review **

"Vollmann has shown himself in the past to be a beautiful stylist, but the prose here is surprisingly rough. ... With no purpose, no destination, no story, his epic journey to Everywhere becomes a round trip to nowhere, and the reader, no matter how much he may admire Vollmann, can't help feeling relieved when it's time to hop off." J. R. MOEHRINGER

Oregonian *

"Vollmann isn't the first rich guy to parade his exploitation of subcultures as Grand Revelations, and unfortunately he won't be the last. ... Call it what you want: class tourism, slumming or just plain self-indulgence--it is enough to make you gag." RENE DENFELD

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Vollmann has spent a good deal of time in some rough places--he made a reputation for his reporting from Bosnia and Afghanistan--and his talent as a writer is hardly disputable. A prolific fiction writer and essayist (Poor People, *** May/June 2007; Rising Up and Rising Down, **** Mar/Apr 2004; Expelled from Eden; The Rainbow Stories), he won a National Book Award in 2005 for his novel Europe Central (**** July/Aug 2005). A chronicle of his adventures on the rails (the book is expanded from a 2007 piece for Harper's), however, meets with less success. Although much of the book bears the unmistakable punch of Vollmann's prose, critics comment on the graceless prose and the lack of continuity and aim in the narrative ("no purpose, no destination, no story," as the New York Times puts it). Still, Vollmann aficionados will find something here, even if first-timers might be better off picking up, say, Europe Central.

RELATED ARTICLE: Rock On

An Office Power Ballad

By Dan Kennedy

In Elvis Costello's giddy, anticorporate ballad "Radio, Radio," the famously angry young man sings, "I want to bite the hand that feeds me, I want to bite that hand so badly." In his memoir about writing ads for what turned out to be the last 18 months of the life of Atlantic Records (think a campaign to sell Phil Collins's love songs), Dan Kennedy goes ahead and sinks his teeth in. What he spits out is a story of a corporate oyce environment that has become a parody of itself but that, like many other workplace spoofs, seems frighteningly familiar. Alternating between geeked tributes to his favorite rock icons (including Led Zeppelin, whom he worshipped in his youth) and caricatures of his corporate colleagues, Kennedy discovers that when you stare into the abyss of cool, it sometimes just sucks.

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Algonquin Books. 224 pages. $14.95. ISBN: 1565125096

Los Angeles Times ****

"Rock On is packed with stories about the fakery and sellouts in the music biz, but although it all makes for star-spangled fun, it could have taken place in any office building in America. It's less about rock 'n' roll than about being a fish in a swivel chair." ERIKA SCHICKEL

Oregonian ****

"Kennedy tars and feathers these yes-men (and women) with his sharp reportage. But there's still a degree of respect, a benefit of the doubt, for the creatively dead bottom-liners who push such ideas into the consumer world." KEVIN SAMPSELL

USA Today ****

"Imagine a love child born of The Office and High Fidelity. ... You don't have to care about music to enjoy Rock On. You only need to have sat through a corporate meeting." DEIRDRE DONAHUE

Rocky Mountain News ****

"Kennedy's running commentary is hysterical, and his thoughtful inner monologue makes this a page- turner, more than a few times inducing laugh-out-loud moments followed by a whisper of 'That's sooo my office.' ... Kennedy has written a hilarious and enjoyable read that belongs on the bookshelf of every fan of the self-deprecating hipster memoir." VINCE DARCANGELO

CRITICAL SUMMARY

Given his association with the McSweeney's set (authors like Dave Eggers and Sarah Vowell), it's no surprise that critics found Dan Kennedy's book to exhibit the self-conscious-yet-genuine wit to which that journal aspires. Many reviewers go gaga for this sort of thing; others think it's a tone whose time has passed. But even the latter group enjoyed Kennedy's memoir, whether because of the subject matter or the author's true respect for honest creativity and the people who, for better or worse, have to market it. The most common criticism was that the story ends too soon, but given Atlantic's rapid demise, these critics will have to direct their complaints to the manager--or, more likely, the manager's manager.

ANOTHER OFFICE SATIRE

THEN WE CAME TO THE END | JOSHUA FERRIS (2007): Toward the end of the 1990s Internet boom, the days of an urban advertising agency are numbered. What's there to do but steal oyce chairs, decode e-mails from management, and gossip? (**** SELECTION May/June 2007)

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