Sometimes you get more attention by keeping your life and thoughts to yourself. J.D. Salinger managed it for years. In an era admittedly less rife with press and public relations, Johannes Vermeer managed it for a lifetime.

For him, it still works. Recent art exhibitions and authors from Proust onward have played on the few known facts of Vermeer’s life and drawn on the haunting details of his 35 extant recognized paintings. Recent years have seen a vast increase in this attention, with a number of novels and vaguely historic treatments appearing in the last couple of years alone. It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before a movie or TV program mines the same infertile but productive ground. (If Attila the Hun can make the USA channel, why not Vermeer?) The producers could do worse than base it on Anthony Bailey’s Vermeer: A View of Delft, a book that is part history, part travelogue, part critique. Called by its author primarily a biography . . . of an extremely elusive man, it’s an intelligent and engaging look at the world and paintings of Vermeer and at the scant personal fragments that have been gleaned (or assumed) about his personal life. In other words, the artist in his frame.

Because there is no documentary information about Vermeer between the dates of his baptism and his betrothal, and precious little after that, the reader has to put up with a great many speculative qualifications ( may have, perhaps and can’t say for sure ). In spite of all this, the book sustains the reader’s interest and offers further rewards in its coverage of such matters as the Thunderclap (a gunpowder explosion that leveled whole streets of Delft, the artist’s hometown), the camera obscura, the tulip mania of the 1630s, the use of paintings in the Netherlands as legal tender, and the artist’s way with perspective, light, reserve and melancholy.

Author of 21 books and a writer for The New Yorker for a quarter-century, Bailey provides thoughtful and beautifully written appraisals of Vermeer’s work (many of the artist’s paintings are included) and of his continuing contribution to art itself. Time passes, Bailey muses, finally, wheels around on itself, and then keeps moving. It will not be fettered, though we sometimes dream that we can halt it, and Vermeer did as well in that respect as anyone can. Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

Readers who are unfamiliar with Gary Giddins’ earlier musical biographies or his commentaries on jazz for the Village Voice may recall him as one of the more animated talking heads in Ken Burns’ recent PBS documentary, Jazz. In this first of two projected volumes, the author brings his enthusiasm and painstaking scholarship to the task of resurrecting one of America’s most influential cultural figures. It is a noble mission. Besides being the consummate jazz and pop vocalist on stage, Bing Crosby also became a radio star, an Academy Award-winning actor and one of the world’s most successful recording artists. Giddins’ first chronicle covers Crosby from birth to 1940, by which time he had reached the top as a band singer, started a family, charted dozens of hit records and begun his series of “Road” movies with Bob Hope.

If there is a criticism to be made of this immensely informative book, it is that Giddins sometimes tells too much. It takes him 30 pages to get Crosby born (in 1903 in Tacoma, Washington) and another 80 or so to get him away from home and on his way to Los Angeles. In the interim, though, we learn a great deal about early 20th century show business and watch as Crosby evolves into the easygoing, self-assured figure he would remain in the national consciousness until his death in 1977. Unlike most of his peers in the business, Crosby was well-educated in addition to being naturally bright. He received a classical education at Gonzaga University and was on his way to a law degree there when the call to music became irresistible.

Although he was passionate about his music, Crosby appeared casual in his performance of it. He brought attention to lyrics by caressing, understating and playing with them. He was one of the first singers, Giddins points out, to master the microphone. Later generations would pigeonhole Crosby as a “crooner” or forget about him altogether. But Louis Armstrong proclaimed him “the Boss of All Singers,” and ultracool Artie Shaw tagged him as “the first hip white person born in the United States.” A well-written and entertaining work, Giddins biography will, with any luck, revive interest in Crosby the way Nick Tosches’ Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams did with Crosby’s disciple, Dean Martin.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.

Three decades after his first book was published in England, James Herriot’s charming tales of life as a country vet in Yorkshire continue to delight readers. His nine original books have inspired television shows, children’s books, and special collections. All told, his works have sold more than 60 million copies and been translated into 20 languages. As his son observes in this heartfelt, affectionate memoir, Herriot wrote with such warmth, humour, and sincerity that he was regarded as a friend by all who read him. Wight assures readers that his father was every bit the gentleman they thought him to be, a self-described run of the mill vet who remained completely modest, even during the height of his success. The author recalls one evening when he and his father were having drinks with two farming friends. Although Herriot had been to Buckingham Palace the day before, he never once mentioned his audience with the queen.

James Herriot was a pseudonym used by James Alfred Wight, who graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939 and soon began his practice in the farming town of Thirsk (better known to readers as Darrowby). He would remain there for some 50 years, immortalizing a bygone era of veterinary medicine that he described as harder, but more fun. First as a small but very proud assistant, and later as a colleague in his father’s practice, Wight met many of the characters evoked so beautifully in Herriot’s books. Wight describes these real-life personalities fondly, with a flair that recalls his father’s remarkable storytelling abilities. Readers will delight in Wight’s portrayal of the mercurial, charming, impossible Donald Sinclair, aka Siegfried Farnon, whose advice to him included such aphorisms as Paint a black picture! If you say a case is going to recover, you could be in trouble if it doesn’t. As research for this memoir, Wight reread all his father’s books, looking for writing tips. Instead, he found himself being drawn into the stories. I always end up in the same state the book on the floor and my head back, crying with laughter, he says. What better tribute could his father have asked for? Beth Duris works for the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.

Three decades after his first book was published in England, James Herriot’s charming tales of life as a country vet in Yorkshire continue to delight readers. His nine original books have inspired television shows, children’s books, and special collections. All told, his works have sold more than 60 million copies and been translated into 20 languages. As his son observes in this heartfelt, affectionate memoir, Herriot wrote with such warmth, humour, and sincerity that he was regarded as a friend by all who read him. Wight assures readers that his father was every bit the gentleman they thought him to be, a self-described run of the mill vet who remained completely modest, even during the height of his success. The author recalls one evening when he and his father were having drinks with two farming friends. Although Herriot had been to Buckingham Palace the day before, he never once mentioned his audience with the queen.

James Herriot was a pseudonym used by James Alfred Wight, who graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939 and soon began his practice in the farming town of Thirsk (better known to readers as Darrowby). He would remain there for some 50 years, immortalizing a bygone era of veterinary medicine that he described as harder, but more fun. First as a small but very proud assistant, and later as a colleague in his father’s practice, Wight met many of the characters evoked so beautifully in Herriot’s books. Wight describes these real-life personalities fondly, with a flair that recalls his father’s remarkable storytelling abilities. Readers will delight in Wight’s portrayal of the mercurial, charming, impossible Donald Sinclair, aka Siegfried Farnon, whose advice to him included such aphorisms as Paint a black picture! If you say a case is going to recover, you could be in trouble if it doesn’t. As research for this memoir, Wight reread all his father’s books, looking for writing tips. Instead, he found himself being drawn into the stories. I always end up in the same state the book on the floor and my head back, crying with laughter, he says. What better tribute could his father have asked for? Beth Duris works for the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.

Portrait of a flawed and fascinating idol Most of all, Kate Burford says in Burt Lancaster: An American Life, Burt Lancaster wanted to be an intellectual. It’s a dubious ambition and in connection with Hollywood borders on the oxymoronic, but of any film star of his era, he may have had the best mental equipment for it.

His physical equipment, however and I am fully aware of all that might imply put him on the more lucrative and esteemed path to megastardom. He was impossibly handsome, had a build a Greek god would die for, and moved with fluid grace across the screen. Everything, in short, to buckle the knees of filmgoers and apparently, of some of his female costars.

Plus, he could act. This is the most dubious of the artistic gifts, and not absolutely necessary to celluloid success, but in combination with a build and brain, it made him an unstoppable force in Hollywood for more than 40 years.

The life stories of film celebrities, especially in the studio area, were so often such a web of half-truths, myths, gossip, and outright lies constructed to protect (or destroy) careers that a biographer could be considered lucky to extract a bare skeleton from its threads. Buford manages to give us a fully formed human being, though not quite a full sense of the man. This lack may not be entirely her fault, not so much because the facts were so slippery, as that Lancaster was so complex. Eternally loyal to those who had helped him, he was also, one screenwriter said, capable of a kind of gratuitous cruelty born of years of Hollywood power.

He was born Burton Stephen Lancaster November 2, 1913, in New York City’s East Harlem to a family of respectable poor. Though his publicity always said he had little schooling, in high school he received an education that prepared him academically better than most of today’s college graduates, and he later entered New York University. But then he ran away to join the circus.

Lancaster spent most of the 1930s traveling with circuses as a trapeze performer, always playing smaller than small time. His first wife, June Ernst, was a fellow circus performer. She didn’t last as long as his acrobatic partner, Nick Cravat, who ended up on Lancaster’s Hollywood payroll for decades.

After World War II, during which he performed overseas for troops, came two of those amazing lucky breaks that make you think some people are simply darlings of the gods. Though hardly an actor then, in the fall of 1945 he got a role in a New York play that lasted barely two weeks. That was long enough for him to be seen by Harold Hecht, who became his agent and got his foot in the door of Hollywood.

The second related lucky break was that his first movie, The Killers (1946) was an incredible success. It was an extraordinary debut for a complete unknown, Buford writes. Overnight he was a star with a meteoric rise. He remained a star until his death in 1994, despite the fact that he dropped off the popularity barometer forever in 1964. And despite the fact that, other than Airport in 1970, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957 was his last truly popular movie. He’s still a star, really. The Chiclets teeth, the sneer, the grin, and the laugh, as Buford encapsulates him, are nearly as recognizable now as they were when the star was at its zenith.

Infrequently the author dips her pen in the purple ink. The body armor nature gave him like a surprise bonus would encase the wary child within makes you want to wince for that poor wary child. But she covers all of the ground Lancaster’s public and private lives, his aggressive success as an independent producer (with Hecht and later, James Hill); his wholesale womanizing; his liberal battle against the House Un-American Activities Committee; the often troubled existence with his alcoholic second wife, Norma Anderson, who bore his five children.

She is especially good at capturing the movie shoots, such as Sweet Smell of Success, which Lancaster struggled to bring out as an independent production in 1957. A critical and commercial disaster when it came out, it is now widely admired. Despite his many human flaws, so is Lancaster.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

The Langhorne sisters of Virginia were notable for many reasons, not the least of which was their hell-bent determination to use their polished social skills to flee the South and the down-on-its-luck heritage that had subjected them to near poverty in the early years of their lives.

All were born between the late 1860s and the early 1880s to Chillie and Nancy Langhorne, well-off parents who lost everything in the aftermath of the Civil War. With time, Chillie rebounded and made a fortune as a railroad entrepreneur, but his success had little effect on his daughters’ desire for expatriation.

Perhaps the most successful of the sisters was Nancy, who married a Boston millionaire, bore him a son, then divorced him in 1903 and moved abroad, where she married the richest man in England, Waldorf Astor, later second Viscount Astor. Lady Astor, as she was known, made history and news by becoming the first female Member of Parliament. Then there was Irene, the most beautiful of the sisters, who married Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson Girl, which in the 1890s and early 1900s was the stand-bearer for fashion. Lizzie, the oldest sister, was the only one who married a Southerner, electing to stay in her native Virginia, a decision she probably regretted after the death of her husband in 1914 when she became increasingly dependent on her well-married sisters for financial assistance.

Nora, the youngest sister, accepted many marriage proposals, but finally married Paul Phipps, a British architect. Unfortunately, Nora possessed what today would be called a sexual addiction of prodigious proportions, and her marriage eventually crumbled in the face of a series of very public affairs. Eventually, she married a silent movie actor named Lefty Flynn.

Phyllis, the fifth sister, married well, divorced, then married Bob Brand, a British economist and intellectual considered one of the architects of modern European society. Author James Fox is the grandson of Bob and Phyllis Brand, and he undertook this history of the Langhornes after finding a trunk of letters that had been carefully preserved by his grandfather after Phyllis’s untimely death. These unpublished letters are both the strength and the weakness of the book.

They are important because they include correspondence with notables such as George Bernard Shaw and because they chronicle, in great detail, the sisters’ exuberant and sometimes wicked adventures. They are a weakness because Fox quotes too readily from them, thus slowing down the pace of the book. The most energetic parts of the book are those about Nancy’s son from her first marriage, Bobbie. As Nancy was preparing for a well-publicized trip to Moscow with George Bernard Shaw, Bobbie was arrested for homosexual offenses and sent to prison. Five Sisters is a fascinating book, but probably not for the reasons envisioned by the author. Fox sees this book as a romantic tale of sisters who seek to better their lives by leaving the South in pursuit of marriages to men outside their culture. You get the feeling that he considers escaping the South to be every Southerner’s secret dream.

Native Southerners will probably read this book with a different perspective. Most likely, they will see the Langhorne sisters as traitors to their Southern birthright, women who exchanged their affections for money and high social prominence in British society. They will see tragedy instead of nobility.

Either way this book is read, it offers insight into the pre-modern female mystique and documentation that the sexual revolution and the struggle for women’s rights began long before the social upheavals of the 1920s and the 1960s. In that sense, the Langhorne sisters were ahead of their time.

James L. Dickerson is the author of Dixie’s Dirty Secret and Women on Top.

What explains the current rage for the 17th-century Italian artist known as Caravaggio ? Is it his realistic, almost photorealistic technique of somber darkness contrasted with spotlighted rose-pink cheeks, lush limbs, and the naughty bits of teasing nudes? Is it his scandalous life a whirligig of recurring assault, debauchery, pederasty, and murder in that era fabled for hypocrisy and repression, the Counter-Reformation? Whatever the appeal, new biographies and critical studies, of man and artist have been appearing with increasing frequency, buttressed by recent discoveries in the libraries, studies, and most importantly, criminal court proceedings of Rome, Naples, Sicily, and Malta.

In a relatively brief life, which ended at age 37 or 39 by murder or disease in a place much disputed, Caravaggio certainly got around. He also dominated the Italian painting of his day, bringing ordinary humans to life as actors in the most touching, strange, and violent stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Peter Robb, an enthusiast who capably draws upon academic scholarship but brooks no constraints upon his own insights and creative inferences, has produced in M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio a lengthy, colorful, anecdotal, quirky, and totally engaging artist’s biography. His puckish title sets the tone: His subject, perhaps named Michelangelo Merisi, was known by 15 different surnames, most beginning with the letter M, but is remembered as Caravaggio, the name of his hometown. In other words, though Robb hauls in numerous facts, the lives and careers of other painters, prostitutes, and cardinals, conflicts between the Spanish and French parties in the Catholic Church, politics in the papacy, and much, much more, he continually reminds us that very little is actually known about the most admired and notorious painter of his day.

Somehow amidst the turmoil, this inimitable genius created an indelibly original body of work. Robb traces his growth from heady sensuality to profound evocation of the human condition and his courage in defying the decorum mandated by the Church and enforced by the Inquisition. Sixteen pages of illustrations enhance these discussions.

A sprawling, not entirely disciplined work of ardent passion, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio could be a bit shorter and less repetitious but is a feast of art appreciation, storytelling, and witty speculation for anyone interested in Caravaggio’s shadowy theater of the partly seen and the institutionalized banditry and brutality of 17th-century Europe.

Charles Flowers, who lives in Purdys, New York, is currently writing about Orientalism in American art.

Computer software magnate Bill Gates may be refining the art of monopoly as we enter the next millennium, but it was John D. Rockefeller who perfected the practice more than a century ago. Indeed, much can be learned about the current state of capitalism and competition by studying Rockefeller, who dominated the oil market as America moved into the 20th century. Ron Chernow’s latest book, Titan, provides a primer on the life of Rockefeller, creator of the Standard Oil Company monopoly.

Chernow masterfully examines the complexities of a man who rose out of an impoverished childhood to become the richest American of his time. The author uses detailed, descriptive writing to show how some people saw Rockefeller as the personification of the evils of capitalism, while others viewed him as a patron saint for his philanthropic work.

Chernow is already established as a respected biographer and social historian, having won praise for his earlier works, The House of Morgan and The Warburgs. He decided to profile Rockefeller after discovering a 1,700-page transcript of private interviews with the oil baron for an authorized biography that was never written. But as Chernow delves into the transcript and hundreds of other written records, the portrait of Rockefeller becomes more perplexing. "In truth, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., had left behind a contradictory legacy — an amalgam of godliness and greed, compassion and fiendish cunning," Chernow writes.

Born in 1839, Rockefeller was the son of a medicine peddler and a deeply religious mother. Chernow argues that these contradictory influences became the foundation for his actions. "I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can, fairly and honestly; to keep all you can and to give away all you can," Rockefeller once said.

As Chernow reveals, Rockefeller slowly squeezed out competitors by cutting deals with railroads to provide cheaper shipments to customers. By the time his Standard Oil Trust flexed its full muscle in 1882, it controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil refining and distribution. Rockefeller became a billionaire. Later, when President Theodore Roosevelt led a trust-busting campaign, it resulted in Standard Oil being dissolved in 1911 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the twilight of his life, Rockefeller donated millions to charity and created such institutions as the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller University, the University of Chicago, and the General Education Board. "The fiercest robber baron had turned out to be the foremost philanthropist," Chernow writes.

Judgment of Rockefeller will be left to the ages. The difficulty of that task is best summarized when Chernow relates a meeting between Henry Ford and a frail Rockefeller shortly before his death at age 97. "Good bye, I’ll see you in heaven," Rockefeller says, to which Ford replies, "You will, if you get in."

John T. Slania is a writer in Chicago.

We all felt as if we knew Dr. Benjamin Spock that approachable face, the twinkle in his eye. He was the quintessential baby doctor, the man whose advice transformed the way America raised its children. Our parents quoted him with devotion, and new parents still turn to his handy book when all else fails at 2 a.m. His is the kindly voice reassuring us that the baby’s colic will get better, that her feeding schedule will right itself, that bed-wetting is not a disaster. For half a century hisBook of Baby and Child Care has begun with Spock’s comforting words, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” How odd, then, to discover that indeed we don’t know Dr. Spock. That, as it turns out, we know less about the man himself than we thought we did. Thomas Maier’s timely and admirable biography, Dr. Spock: An American Life attempts to reconcile the Spock we knew with the one we didn’t. The resulting portrait is, as Maier admits, “very complicated.” Complicated, and fascinating, too. Spock’s was the voice that turned back the Victorians’ harsh, “scientific” approach to raising children (advice such as, tie the baby’s thumbs to either side of the crib so he’ll stop sucking them, and don’t kiss the baby ever). Spock advocated breast feeding long before it was fashionable. He took a courageous stand against the prevailing theory of his day when he incorporated the then-controversial theories of Freud into his work and told Baby Boomer parents that their children were reasonable beings who needed guidance, not debased creatures who needed the rod more than they needed a hug.

Yet for all that, Spock was emotionally unavailable to his own children. He demanded their absolute obedience. Spock was a husband who refused to recognize his wife’s mental illness and alcoholism, a grandfather who remained oblivious to his grandson’s depression until it was too late.

In fact, this biography contains two stories, not one. Maier gives us both the public man and the private; and if the reader finds that the two don’t quite mesh until Spock reaches old age, that perception only reflects the reality of the man’s life. He was very much an icon, a celebrity. And he was a private individual, too a father, a husband, a friend. Tragically, for much of his life, Spock was much more successful at celebrity than at intimacy. The people closest to him were often those pushed farthest away.

This conflict is played out against the colorful backdrop of history. “Benny” Spock was born before telephones were invented, yet he lived long enough to have his own Web page. A child of privilege, he graduated from Yale and was an Olympic athlete who loved to flirt, to dance and drink. In midlife, Spock became an ardent socialist and an anti-war demonstrator. He lived long enough to marry both a 1920s flapper and a 1960s feminist.

At every stage of Spock’s life, Maier explores the contrast between the public and private spheres, raising the question which reoccurs like a leitmotif in this biography: How much can we change? Are we destined to repeat the patterns we learned as children, or can we transform ourselves at our deepest, most heartfelt levels? It was a question Spock contemplated often, and his answer, in the end, was idealistic. He thought we could. Yet his own life illustrates the struggle.

Reviewed by Amy Lynch.

For over four decades, Stephen Sondheim has been the most innovative composer-lyricist in the American musical theater. He first gained renown as the lyricist for West Side Story in 1956. Since then, he has not only written words and music for such Broadway hits as Company, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd, but he has led the way in redefining the musical show. In those shows and others, including Pacific Overtures, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, and Passion, he has experimented with themes and approaches thought to be without popular appeal too intellectual, depressing, or cynical with irony and wit that might go unappreciated. While it is true that only one of his songs, “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music has become a major popular hit, audiences throughout the world have hailed him as the premier musical dramatist of his time.

How did it happen? In her insightful and readable Stephen Sondheim: A Life, noted biographer Meryle Secrest explores the man and his achievements. Drawing on extensive interviews with Sondheim, his friends, and colleagues, she has brought vividly to life a person who says he is difficult to describe because “I just don’t have an awful lot of colors.” Although he received little attention or affection from his parents when he was younger, their divorce when he was ten-years-old shattered his world. He had a long and difficult relationship with his mother which ended only with her death many years later. His intense interest in music, games, and conundrum dates from that moment of their divorce when, as Sondheim said “nothing made sense anymore.” Secrest writes, “If the puzzle was the metaphor, art was the solution, because of its equally crucial emphasis upon structure and form. Music became charged with meaning only when it could make order out of chaos, and this goal became the leitmotif of his life.” From early on, Sondheim was determined to be, as one of his college professors noted, “the best on Broadway.” He was fortunate to develop relationships with Oscar Hammerstein, Arthur Laurents, and, most importantly, producer-director Hal Prince, who helped him achieve his goal.

Sondheim is remarkably honest and forthright, a trait regarded as one of his most admirable by friends. He discusses his “very late blooming” homosexuality, as well as his 25 years of psychoanalysis with a doctor whose particular interest was the relationship between creativity and neurosis.

Secrest takes us behind the scenes to understand better the creative process of the solitary composer and the collaborative process involved in musicals. Sondheim has described himself as a playwright-actor, “And when I write songs I become the actor, and that’s why actors like my stuff.” Both processes are often difficult and tense and, even with a successful show, fleeting. His agent says that whenever she called with good news about attendance or sales, invariably Sondheim’s response would be “Yes, but for how long?” The biographer traces the musical influences on Sondheim’s work and also shows how his life influenced his art. It seemed, Secrest writes, “his ability to create a world of his own imaginings had saved him when life was at its bleakest. If his themes were somber the essential loneliness of the human condition and the death of illusion in the end it was his ability to metamorphose his private anguish into something outside of himself that had saved him.” This excellent, absorbing biography of an extraordinarily talented, true American original should be of interest to a very large audience.

Reviewed by Roger Bishop.