From Publishers Weekly
For those who agree with Weinberg that the public has a right to know everything about a public figure--and who have no qualms about invading privacy--this study will be a boon. Yet although he is critical of certain biographers, among them Kitty Kelley (exempting her Frank Sinatra book, His Way ), for their tell-alls, he fails to clearly define distinctions as to why an expose of, say, Henry Kissinger or Ron Hubbard, is justifiable but not, for example, a similar work on Jacqueline Onassis, only expressing disapproval of exposure "for exposure's sake." Some readers might feel personally threatened, with cause, as the author details his own research for his biography Armand Hammer : he obtained data about Hammer's land transactions, his secured loans, the tax returns of his foundation and, using Lexis, a legal data base, he was able to search through foreign court systems. Arguing his thesis that a background in investigative journalism is the best training for a biographer, Weinberg identifies one-time reporter Robert Caro as in the vanguard of investigative biography with The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York , published in 1974; he then singles out Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele's 1979 biography of Howard Hughes, Empire , as the "most important post-Robert Moses biography." Weinberg is at his most interesting when he follows the paper trail of these authors' researches, but decidedly less so when he reprints a fulsome 1989 article from the Los Angeles Times about Armand Hammer . Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Book News, Inc.
Weinberg shows how a new generation of biographers is revealing the lives of powerful individuals in dramatic and important new ways. Tracing the evolution of the craft of biography up to the present, he draws on interviews with some of the best current biographers, as well as his own experience with his unauthorized biography of Armand Hammer, to highlight the careers of some of the writers whose work exploded the boundaries of traditional biography. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Author of his own controversial unauthorized biography of Armand Hammer, Steve Weinberg here shows how a new generation of biographers is revealing the lives of powerful individuals in dramatic and important new ways. Trained as investigative journalists, today's writers have entered a domain once dominated by university scholars. Unlike their more academic predecessors, who often wrote nonjudgmental books on the public lives of long-dead individuals, these new biographers are willing to tackle such powerful, living subjects as Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Hugh Hefner, Pete Rose, and Fidel Castro. Few of these books are adoring. Without cooperation from their subjects, and sometimes under threat of lawsuit, these writers are probing into private lives and enabling readers to make up their own minds about public figures. Tracing the evolution of the craft of biography up to the present day, Weinberg draws on interviews with some of today's best biographers, as well as his own experience with the Hammer biography, to highlight the careers of some of the writers whose work exploded the boundaries of traditional biography. When Robert Caro became the first journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his book on Robert Moses, it marked the dawn of a new approach to the craft. Weinberg also explores the techniques of Philadelphia Inquirer journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele, whose jointly authored biographies of Howard Hughes and Nelson Rockefeller mark another sign of how far the genre of biography has come. The book is enriched by samples of investigative biography at its best, including a scathingly honest profile of the reigning queen of unauthorized biography, Kitty Kelley, and Calvin Trillin's fascinating New Yorker profile of the Miami Herald's inimitable police reporter Edna Buchanan. "The living of a life is more difficult than the chronicling of it, but the chronicling is certainly no simple task," writes Weinberg. "Telling somebody else'

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

For those who agree with Weinberg that the public has a right to know everything about a public figure--and who have no qualms about invading privacy--this study will be a boon. Yet although he is critical of certain biographers, among them Kitty Kelley (exempting her Frank Sinatra book, His Way ), for their tell-alls, he fails to clearly define distinctions as to why an expose of, say, Henry Kissinger or Ron Hubbard, is justifiable but not, for example, a similar work on Jacqueline Onassis, only expressing disapproval of exposure ``for exposure's sake.'' Some readers might feel personally threatened, with cause, as the author details his own research for his biography Armand Hammer : he obtained data about Hammer's land transactions, his secured loans, the tax returns of his foundation and, using Lexis, a legal data base, he was able to search through foreign court systems. Arguing his thesis that a background in investigative journalism is the best training for a biographer, Weinberg identifies one-time reporter Robert Caro as in the vanguard of investigative biography with The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York , published in 1974; he then singles out Philadelphia Inquirer reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele's 1979 biography of Howard Hughes, Empire , as the ``most important post-Robert Moses biography.'' Weinberg is at his most interesting when he follows the paper trail of these authors' researches, but decidedly less so when he reprints a fulsome 1989 article from the Los Angeles Times about Armand Hammer . (Oct.)

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