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.

Back to where they once belonged: the Beatles score more hits There are at least a dozen clever and cute ways I thought about starting this piece. When I had four books to cover, a play on

Back to where they once belonged: the Beatles score more hits There are at least a dozen clever and cute ways I thought about starting this piece. When I had four books to cover, a play on

It is astonishing that the inventor who brought us the lightning rod, bifocals, and the odometer; the writer who brought us Poor Richard’s Almanack; and the negotiator behind the 1784 Treaty of Peace with Great Britain, were in fact just one man. The Benjamin Franklin National Memorial in Philadelphia showcases Franklin’s many inventions and ideas from fire insurance to a urinary catheter. These inventions and the stories behind them reveal Franklin’s practical nature. The First American reveals Franklin’s passions, as well.

Imagine Franklin, in waning health, undertaking a month’s journey to France, where he was to win French support of the colonies’ quest for independence. When he sailed to France as the American commissioner in 1776, he asked a monarch for no less than total support for a cause that was to destroy the underlying principles of a monarchy. H.W. Brands tells us that instead of rejecting Franklin, the French very nearly adopted him. Some pointed out that "Franquelin" was a common French name; many affectionately referred to him as "Doctor Franklin." He eloquently courted and politely strong-armed King Louis and his foreign minister, de Vergennes, by memo, and ultimately, he accomplished his mission using persistent, practical prose as his primary tool.

With similar vigor, he pursued several French women again, with his pen. Some of the best passages in this book are Franklin’s appealing appeals to these women, excerpted in the aptly titled chapter "Salvation in Paris." In his romantic pursuits, Franklin skillfully and sometimes lightly employed theology, natural law, and the rules of war in a single love-letter. Franklin’s favored females, and the recipients of these letters, typically were not single. "If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing." Franklin did both during his 84 years; this book provides some worthwhile reading on an American worth remembering.

Diane Stresing is a writer in Kent, Ohio.

Catch a rising star For a warp-speed career leap, it’s hard to surpass what’s happened to Ewan McGregor. He was known for his performances in iconoclastic cult films. Then came the role of the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the breathlessly awaited Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace. Suddenly, McGregor is being touted as the hottest Scottish import since Sean Connery. Certainly, he is an undeniably visible presence and not just on the screen. For McGregor is the subject of several recent and upcoming books. Aimed squarely at the actor’s fans, and those of the crowd-pleasing Star Wars franchise, the various books are odes to a performer distinguished by his determination to be an actor rather than a star. Of the tomes, Ewan McGregor: The Unauthorized Biography by Billy Adams takes honors for the most in-depth portrait. Based on interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, as well as existing materials, it details his road to success. Shooting Star: The Ewan McGregor Story (Ballantine, $5.99, 0345427246), by Janine Pourroy, moves film-by-film to explore McGregor’s emergence as the ultimate GenX icon. His life (29 years, so far) and career (15 movies in just five years) are also chronicled in titles including: Ewan McGregor by Chris Nickson (St. Martin’s, $5.99, 0312969104), Ewan McGregor: Rising to the Stars by James Hatfield (Penguin, $5.99, 0425169006), Ewan McGregor: An Unofficial Biography by Martin Noble, (DK/Funfax, $5.95, 0789446677, ages 4 and up), and Ewan McGregor: From Junkie to Jedi by Brian J. Robb (Plexus Publishing, $16.95, 0859652769). The latter title refers to McGregor’s rise to fame as the heroin-addicted central character of the off-beat film Trainspotting. McGregor will also be among the cast members of the various Phantom Menace tie-in books from Ballantine, to include Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Illustrated Screenplay by George Lucas, The Making of the Phantom Menace, and a novelization by popular fantasy author Terry Brooks. Books were the impetus for many of McGregor’s earlier films, including Trainspotting, based on the controversial Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, and Jane Austen’s Emma, for which McGregor donned period costumes. He bared all for The Pillow Book, the story of a writer who uses her boyfriend’s body on which to write the chapters of her book. The screenplay is included in The Pillow Book (Distributed Art Publishers), in which Peter Greenaway discusses his adaptation and reinterpretation of the Oriental classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (Columbia University Press), which examined life in 11th-century Japan. And next up for McGregor is an adaptation of the Marc Behm psycho-thriller, Eye of the Beholder, in which he’ll play a private eye stalking a serial killer. Let’s just hope The Force is with him.

Biographer Pat Broeske’s latest book is about Elvis Presley.

Brian Shepard was born on the 4th of July, 1949 in Kankakee, Illinois. This real, live nephew of his Uncle Sam grew up to become an FBI agent, spending his first six years of service in New York City. He returned to his home state in 1983, assigned as the sole agent in Decatur. Mark Whitacre was the wunderkind of Archer Daniels Midland Company, or ADM (yes, the same ADM of the classy Supermarket to the World television advertisements). Whitacre is also the duplicitous hero of The Informant. In this true account that has more spy action than some Tom Clancy novels, we get double-crossing, dirty dealing, lying, conniving, and wiretapping . . . and that’s just the FBI agent and his informant. Add to the mix Whitacre’s high-school sweetheart and loving wife, Ginger, who thinks all will be cured if her poor, beleaguered husband simply tells the truth. But, alas, Ginger, the truth isn’t simple, and neither are Whitacres’s colleagues at ADM, especially head-honcho Dwayne Andreas. Andreas pulled political strings worldwide for decades, even before heading ADM: He met Gorbachev before Reagan did, dined with Yitzhak Rabin before he was Prime Minister Rabin, and helped David Brinkley find an apartment. All the while even when his friend Richard Nixon got in a bit of a mess in 1972 he managed to stay out of the public eye. Does our meager FBI agent have a chance? The truth is a complicated matter, and in the case of The Informant, much stranger than fiction. The truth is The Informant is more deceitful and more spellbinding, than many works of fiction. The phantasmagoric story behind the so-called “Supermarket to the World” rocked Decatur and much of the world, and it will certainly change the way you look at your grocery bill. It may also change the way you think about your neighbors when a strange car pulls into their driveway.

While Diane Stresing admits she was born under an assumed name, she claims she has never been an FBI informant.

George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large The French writer George Sand has fascinated readers since she burst on to the literary scene in 1832 with her best-selling novel Indiana and her shocking lifestyle. Sand was the best-selling and best paid novelist of her time, but she eventually became more famous for her unconventional life than for her iconoclastic, highly personal, and immense body of work. Sand was a social and political radical, a feminist, an ardent republican and a socialist. She was also friend and lover to some of the most prominent men and women of her time. Sand was born Aurore Dupin in 1804, into an unconventional and unhappy family. Jack describes Aurore’s childhood as a tutorial in the nuances of class, inequality, and insecurity. Her father Maurice was a soldier from an aristocratic family, her mother Sophie-Victoire was “. . . a dancer, no, less than a dancer . . .” When Maurice married Sophie, his family was horrified. Maurice was often absent and in debt, so his wife and child had to rely on his mother, the formidable Madame Aurore Dupin, who despised Sophie for her lower-class, undisciplined ways. Torn between “two rival mothers,” little Aurore’s life changed dramatically when Maurice died and Mme Dupin decided to pay Sophie an income for leaving Aurore in her care. Mme Dupin made sure young Aurore received an excellent education, but she was dismayed at the girl’s active fantasy life and her failure to become a proper lady. Aurore was sent to a convent. Instead of reforming her, the solitude and time away from her family enabled her to spend time thinking and writing. Later, her unhappy marriage to Casimir Dudevant convinced her that marriage was a “primitive” institution designed to subjugate women. Aurore continued to write, to express her emotions, and explore intellectual and romantic alternatives. As she and Casimir began to lead separate lives, she required an independent income. She moved to Paris, worked for Le Figaro, collaborated on a novel with her lover Jules Sandeau, and created her own identity: George Sand the writer.

George Sand wore men’s clothing and smoked in public. She had affairs with famous men she lived eight years with Frederic Chopin, had a disastrous fling with Prosper Merimee, and a lengthy affair with prominent lawyer Michel de Bourges. A passionate affair with actress Marie Dorval brought more fame and notoriety. The author Belinda Jack proposes that Sand often expressed feelings and ideas in writing before acting. Jack uses material from Sand’s five-volume autobiography, and her extensive diaries and correspondence to create a condensed, balanced portrait of an artist exploring her own life and engaging the issues of her time.

Mary Helen Clarke is a writer and editor in Nashville.

An American Story “I wasn’t worth a damn until I was thirty.” Such bluntness is typical of An American Story, Debra Dickerson’s inspiring new biography. The daughter of former sharecroppers, she literally started at the bottom of life and worked her way up to become the Air Force’s chief of intelligence in Turkey and, later in her career, an award-winning journalist and commentator.

This is a rags to riches story, but it isn’t as pretty as Cinderella. By writing An American Story, Dickerson has taken a mental evolutionary trip that few will ever dare to explore.

For all she’s accomplished including a law degree from Harvard Dickerson went through much of her early life without a winner’s attitude. “My hair was only one of the many things to be ashamed of. My big, fat nigger nose. Ugly, gnarled nigger toes.” While in her 20s, she writes, “What I’d wanted most in life was not to be me: black, working class, female.” Looking at the beautifully defiant face on the cover of the book, one would never know.

Dickerson’s father, a former Marine who received no credit for his military accomplishments, ruled his St. Louis home resentfully, as if everyone present served under him in a strict military environment. She escaped the rigors of her home life through reading. “I wanted that special knowledge to which only whites had access,” Dickerson says. That knowledge inspired her, but it didn’t come without a price. Her father would beat her simply for being curious.

Dickerson floundered until she joined the Air Force (following her father’s military example), which built her self-confidence and gave her opportunities she would never have had in St. Louis. She became a Korean linguist and a distinguished Air Force intelligence officer during her 12-year career. After hitting the glass ceiling for women in the military, she applied to Harvard Law School and went on to build a successful career as a writer for such publications as the Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, Essence, and Salon. An American Story is a fascinating chronicle of ambition; family anger; loneliness; double standards; poverty; racism; military inequity; drunkenness; rape; career burnout; sheer will; final success; and most of all, hope. For readers who can take the heat, Debra Dickerson is definitely in the kitchen.

Clay Stafford is a writer and filmmaker.

The Gentleman From New York : Daniel Patrick Moynihan Daniel Patrick Moynihan describes his extraordinary career as public servant, academician, and public intellectual as a series of "chance encounters and random walks." He has been called "the best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." For over 40 years, in various roles both inside and outside of government, including 24 years as a U.S. senator from New York, Myonihan has addressed a wide range of domestic and foreign policy concerns. Before he was elected to the Senate, he was the only person in American history to serve in the cabinet or subcabinet of four successive presidents.

Geoffrey Hodgson, a keen observer of the American political scene and author of several fine books on our political thought and personalities, including a superb biography of statesman Henry Stimson, has known Moynihan for four decades. In his enlightening and insightful new book, The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Hodgson masterfully focuses on the interplay between "ideas and action" in his subject’s career. Those ideas and actions such as helping to prepare legislation for the War on Poverty in the 1960s and being a key player in Congressional reform of welfare policy in 1987 have earned him the respect and admiration even of those who disagreed with him. At other times, he has been misunderstood or ahead of conventional thinking on an issue. In the latter category is the frequently misrepresented Moynihan Report, about which Hodgson writes: "What was truly original, and remarkably courageous, is that Moynihan was willing to come out for affirmative action." But, "no episode in Moynihan’s life, perhaps . . . has been so misunderstood as his crossover to the Nixon White House." As Hodgson explains, however, Moynihan believed certain things needed to be done, and "it seemed logical to see what other alliances might be available." The biographer also explores Moynihan’s reaction to the Watergate scandal and his thoughts about Richard Nixon.

Hodgon’s carefully researched book probes Moynihan’s writings and interviews with his friends and colleagues to help identify his core principles. John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, points out that "You will never understand Pat in terms of commitment to Left or Right. He has a mind wholly free of ideological commitments. His long-term commitment is to the cities, to the poor, and especially to poor children." James Q. Wilson notes that "Pat has always been a Democrat. He always believes that the job of politics is to help those who can’t help themselves. But he has a scholar’s reluctance to accept the proposition that the government knows very much about how to help people who can’t help themselves." Hodgson thinks a 1967 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard comes as close as Moynihan ever has to defining his political philosophy. The speech, Hodgson writes, reveals "a complex, subtle attempt at reconciling freedom and order, the public and the individual, pessimism and pride, in the effort to build an inhabitable society on foundations of truth." It has been a long journey since Moynihan’s father abandoned his mother and three young children. Hodgson shows how the three years his subject spent in England at the London School of Economics were crucial to his development. He details Moynihan’s tenure as ambassador to India and gives the background of Moynihan’s eloquent speech at the United Nations where he spoke against a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

We learn of the key role played in Moynihan’s life and career by his wife, Liz, who, among many other duties, has served as her husband’s campaign manager in his last three Senate races.

This finely wrought biography vividly illuminates the rich life and thought of a unique and influential American.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.