Until his death in 1996, Bill Monroe was so formidable a presence that it was almost impossible to discuss him in human terms. He was too towering, too original to fit the normal templates of analysis. While he keeps Monroe’s musical genius at the forefront, biographer Richard D. Smith also reveals a man who was arrogant, petty, jealous, volatile, generous, solicitous, and a relentless womanizer. In other words, his real life measured up to his myth. A graceful writer and a dogged researcher, Smith begins with the assertion that Monroe was “the most broadly talented and broadly influential figure in the history of American popular music.” That’s saying a lot considering the immense cultural impact of such titans as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong. But Smith has a case. Elvis Presley’s first Sun Records single was a hopped-up version of Monroe’s already famous composition, “Blue Moon Of Kentucky.” Buddy Holly mimicked elements of Monroe’s style on the way to creating his own. Jerry Garcia trekked all the way across the country to audition for Monroe’s band, lost his nerve and went back to California, soon after to found the Grateful Dead. In addition, virtually all the architects of modern bluegrass music got their early training as members of Monroe’s famed Blue Grass Boys.

William Smith Monroe was born in 1911 in rural western Kentucky, far from the Appalachian Mountains with which bluegrass music is now most identified. He was not from a poor family, but he grew up with hard work and few amenities. The last of eight children, Monroe was afflicted by poor vision and a shyness made bearable by an early-blossoming talent for music.

The nucleus of Monroe’s distinctive sound, as it emerged over many years, was his high mournful tenor voice and precise, rapid-fire mandolin picking. Moreover, he was a prodigious songwriter who often idealized his bucolic upbringing in his lyrics. All these elements supported by the ensemble of acoustic guitar, fiddle, banjo, and bass came together to produce the music that would ultimately be called “bluegrass.” Besides illuminating Monroe’s art and character, Smith explains the place of bluegrass in the folk music movement, as well as how and why bluegrass festivals came into being. The mercurial Monroe never settled on an official biographer. In Smith, we have something better.

Edward Morris writes on music, politics, and book publishing from Nashville.

On June 8, 1972, a photographer captured the now infamous image of Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, running naked down a Trang Bang highway, her clothes and skin incinerated by American napalm. The photograph was featured in news periodicals around the globe, immediately altering the international perspective of the Vietnam conflict. To the world, Kim became “a living symbol of the horror of war.” In this well-researched, easy-to-follow (and exhaustive) biography, Denise Chong attempts to give an overview of the Vietnam confrontation, and a fair one at that. She focuses on Kim Phuc’s family and has successfully painted through her own on-site research, reading, and interviews the simple peasant world in which they lived, and the attacks they endured from all sides: Invasion by ruthless Chinese-sponsored Communists from the north; manipulation by self-serving, faraway nations in the West; deceit and corruption by greedy leaders within their own ranks; and betrayal by disingenuous neighbors and even family members. Essentially an entire generation of children grew into adults knowing only terror, maiming, death, manipulation, distrust, and self-imposed silence; the latter only if one wanted to live.

Within this world Kim Phuc, fighting daily pains that only a burn victim could know, found her destiny.

Each chapter of Kim’s life a snapshot of almost 40 years roils with emotion, beginning with the miracle of surviving her initial burns. From that tragic moment forward, her mother and family overprotected her and treated her as a weak and ugly burn victim, a woman destined to live her life alone. From high school on, she spent her life shadowed by “minders,” individually assigned hawks for the Vietnamese government who watched her constantly for any transgression of word or deed. Dismissing Kim’s ambition to be a doctor, the Vietnamese Communists took away that dream when they realized she could be used more effectively as a propaganda tool. And as that tool, she suffered the dual life of being pampered as a celebrity when abroad, but treated with disdain, poverty, and starvation when at home. Yet, two words kept falling from Kim’s lips and strengthening her faith: “I forgive.” The South Vietnamese people sought only basic needs. They desired to be left alone, to feed their children, to laugh at each other’s jokes, to work, to worship, to sleep and dream; they didn’t ask to be pawns of superpowers, or victims of land-grab, of endless and esoteric debates concerning communism and capitalism. And Kim Phuc wanted only to be “normal.” It took the face of one child, screaming in pain, nakedly frozen in time, to help bring us all to our senses.

From her modest beginnings in Vietnam to her successful new life in Canada, her dramatic story will set you on fire.

Clay Stafford is a writer and filmmaker who lives near Nashville.

Arthur Koestler’s novel of ideas, Darkness at Noon, was originally published in England in 1940 to great acclaim. It has been called one of those books that has ceased to be a work of literature and has instead become a monument. In 1998, the editorial board of the Modern Library named it the eighth best novel of the century.

But Darkness at Noon was just one work among many others reportage, essays, autobiography, history of science and the paranormal, as well as other novels on a wide range of subjects by its author. Koestler (1905-1983) was one of the major intellectual voices on the Cold War and other issues in the English-speaking world of his time. A native of Hungary, he was a complex, controversial activist whose life and writings bore testimony to a relentless search for identity, meaning, and community.

Biographer David Cesarani painstakingly chronicles Koestler’s life, times, and writings in his Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. He points out that Koestler was the classic homeless mind: the

Imagine yourself in the attic at Graceland. There within bulging trunks and boxes lie the masses of photos, letters, telegrams, legal documents, ticket stubs, and receipts that mark Elvis Presley’s uneven passage through life. Imagine further that assiduous elves have laid out all this fascinating material in chronological order for you to savor. Well, that’s pretty much what this book offers.

Peter Guralnick knows more about Presley than Boswell ever suspected about Johnson. He has illuminated the King in numerous articles and the minutely detailed two-volume biography, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Guralnick’s co-author, also an Elvis scholar, has co-produced boxed sets of the singer’s music and annotated his recording sessions.

Here the two researchers go far beyond the information they amassed personally for their own works to plumb the Graceland archives, which now contain, among other treasures, thirty-five tons of records and memorabilia from the estate of Presley’s longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Guralnick credits Parker and Presley’s father Vernon with holding onto material they knew would eventually have great historical interest.

Elvis Day by Day stretches from April 12, 1912, the day Presley’s mother was born, to October 3, 1977, when a CBS-TV special aired Presley concerts filmed earlier that year. It is, as Guralnick says, a kind of biographical exoskeleton. Besides citing Presley’s routine daily activities, the book also lists the dates and places of his live performances and recordings, as well as the release dates of his records. Every known woman Elvis dated a prodigious list to be sure is dutifully noted here.

But the most appealing feature of the book at least to those who are not scholars or zealots is its wealth of photos. There are more than 300 of them, many published for the first time. Among them are pictures of Elvis’s early grade cards, a receipt for his gaudy TCB pendants, bills for jewelry and costumes, numerous candid shots from family and friends, reproductions of movie posters, and a vast array of publicity photos. They offer private glimpses of a man who, for most of his life, had no privacy.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer and journalist.

Vaclav Havel is one of the genuine political and moral heroes of the last half of the 20th century. A highly regarded and influential playwright in Czechoslovakia, he became the most prominent dissident leader in his country from the late 1960s until the Velvet Revolution ousted the Communist government in 1989. Since then he has served as the elected president of Czechoslovakia and, later, the Czech Republic. Throughout the years of his struggle of harassment and imprisonment by the Communist regime and also in his later role as a world statesman, Havel has written some of the most eloquent and insightful essays of our time about such subjects as the nature of totalitarianism, the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy, and civil society. Havel’s life and public career appear to represent the triumph of conscience, decency, democratic values, and civility over tyranny and oppression. John Keane, a British political scientist and writer who has known Havel since the early 1980s, has a somewhat different view. He recognizes that Havel will be judged by posterity as among the most distinguished political figures of the century. But, as he explains in his compelling new biography, Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts, his subject is a tragic figure whose misfortune was to be born in the 20th century and whose fate was politics. Keane, best known in the United States for his well-received biography of Tom Paine, sees Havel as an actor in a prose drama riddled with calamities, injustices, and unhappy endings. Keane shows how Havel’s early life (he was born in 1936) was affected by the ambitions and the military and diplomatic machinations of Hitler and others. Young Vaclav’s parents were wealthy by European standards and part of a cultural elite. But under the Nazi rule of the Second World War, their country became a killing field where moral and ethical restrictions were not relevant to the rulers. Havel’s family suffered in a variety of ways. The end of war did not bring relief; just before Vaclav’s 11th birthday, the Communists assumed the power that they held for over 40 years.

During Havel’s youth, his mother took responsibility for her son’s education. There were also family friends whose conversations with Vaclav kept him in touch with a wider world. He became particularly attracted to literature and philosophy.

Of special interest is a remarkable circle of literary friends and acquaintances drawn together in 1952 by Havel and his mother. Called the Thirty-Sixers (they were all born in the same year), the group met to discuss a wide range of literary and other subjects.

Keane illuminates the relationship between Havel’s art as a playwright and his role as a dissident. His plays often deal with themes of depersonalization and the failure of language.

Two of the most enlightening sections of this biography concern subjects closely identified with Havel. The first is Charter 77, a petition that deals with the importance of civic and human rights. Released in early 1977, it pointed to the discrepancy between law and reality in socialist Czechoslovakia. Havel wrote the first draft and was deeply involved in the final product. The second section is a detailed exposition of Havel’s famous essay, The Power of the Powerless. At its heart it proposes that under any circumstances the downtrodden always contain within themselves the power to remedy their own continuing subordination. Keane discusses Havel’s imprisonment and the letters from prison that he wrote to his first wife Olga, a popular figure. His controversial second marriage, his serious health problems, and his personal flaws and misjudgments, are all covered. The author wisely shows events in context, and we are able to make up our own minds about the life of this often wise and courageous leader.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Hemingway: The Final Years is the final installment in a multi-volume biography that has occupied Michael Reynolds for the last 20 years. This volume follows the writer’s life from 1940 through 1961. It is a superb account of Hemingway’s rise to literary stardom and public success contrasted against his private weaknesses and volatile relationships with women. This biography is such a well-crafted story that it seems more like a novel than nonfiction. Every chapter takes the reader deeper into the psyche of Ernest Hemingway, following his personal decline until his suicide in 1961 at the age of 62. Reynolds uncovers some of Hemingway’s lesser known activities as a journalist who briefly joined the French Resistance in World War II, as a civilian patrolling the waters around Cuba scouting for Nazi submarines, and other political acts that were kept secret until years later. His love of danger and espionage are a foreshadowing of his obsession with death. Reynolds notes, Part of Hemingway wanted to be the warrior he imagined himself as a young boy part of him was half in love with an honorable death, not one that he sought, but one that found him. Yet another part of him simply no longer cared if he lived or died. A major focus of the book, however, is his intense emotional relationships with his third and fourth wives, Martha and Mary. Reynolds skillfully exposes the dichotomy in Hemingway’s character, revealing how he could be a controlling bully and a vulnerable, insecure man at the same time. Hemingway was drawn to strong, career-minded women, yet he wanted them to submit themselves to him and leave their personal pursuits once they became involved with him. As soon as a passionate woman became his wife and mother to his children, he began to feel trapped; but should that woman leave him alone for longer than a week, he became morose, vulnerable, and began to speak of his own death. In his final years, as his depression worsened, Hemingway’s reputation and accolades increased. He became, as the biographer states, a man pursued, a writer not able to outrun his demons. Complementary to Reynolds’s biography of Hemingway, the writer and the man, is a smaller book focusing on the places he visited and made famous. In A Hemingway Odyssey: Special Places in His Life (Cumberland House, $12.95, 1581820240), H. Lea Lawrence creates a kind of travelogue, revisiting Hemingway’s favorite fishing and hunting spots in Michigan, Idaho, and Wyoming, as well as other vacation areas and homesteads in Europe and the Caribbean. It’s no surprise that the author has written articles for various fishing and wildlife magazines. His descriptions of Hemingway’s old stomping grounds could make any reader want to take up fly fishing. Lawrence’s biography is a unique approach to revealing how Hemingway’s favorite places and interests shaped the man and his writing. You don’t have to be an outdoorsman to appreciate this biography, but it may inspire you to become one.

Kim Spilker is a writer in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The miracle of Last Train to Memphis, Peter Guralnick’s portrait of Elvis Presley’s early years, was that it erased the memory of that bloated caricature of a performer who staggered across the stage in Las Vegas and elsewhere in his final years and presented us instead with the exuberant young man of the 1950s who was in the throes of fashioning a new kind of music.

Expect no such happy miracle in Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the second volume in Guralnick’s excellent and exhaustive biography of the King of Rock and Roll. This book is, as Guralnick himself writes in his opening note, a tragedy. It follows Elvis from his years in the Army in Germany, through his strange, prolonged courtship of Priscilla, his unfulfilling career in the movies, his triumphant return to live performance, his growing isolation and seemingly inexorable decline, and, finally, his death in Memphis in August of 1977.

In laying out this tragedy, Guralnick avoids the two great temptations of the modern biographer: mistaking the salacious detail for the telling detail and indulging in easy psychologizing. Sure, there is plenty here to titillate the willing reader. This is, after all, Elvis, the most famous musician of his era, a performer who brought an electrifying sexuality to slumbering, black-and-white, post-World War II America. Should we be surprised that he was not a one-woman man?

Guralnick neither excuses nor glosses over the details. But behavior that looks tawdry, or worse, resembles a tabloid headline, looks quite different in the context of this biography. In fact, one of the most fascinating and endearing revelations about Elvis is that until the final few years of his life, when his drug addiction altered not just his physical appearance but his personality, he was unfailingly polite and thoughtful of others, forever Gladys’s dutiful son. This was a character trait that was universally remarked upon. Even the descriptions of Elvis’s slow, solicitous seduction of Priscilla—and of other girl-women—are more likely to raise questions about Elvis’s psychological complexity than to provoke disgust.

Guralnick, who has written extensively about popular music and musicians, is at his best in describing Elvis the musician and performer. He conveys the special intensity Elvis brought to his performances—and the remarkable contrast between this Elvis-in-the-spotlight and the almost shy, and increasingly withdrawn, private Elvis. Careless Love documents what a truly extraordinary—and wide-ranging—musical sensibility Elvis possessed. This is its single-most important contribution to our understanding of Elvis Presley.

But what happened to that sensibility and why? The easy answer has always been to blame the drugs, or to blame the over-protective crowd of hangers-on, or to blame the manipulations of Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Careless Love makes clear that there’s blame enough to go around—and that blame is an insufficient explanation. The truth is, there are no easy answers. You watch it coming. You wish you—or someone—could stop it. It’s perplexing and it’s tragic, and you know that Elvis himself is helping it happen.

Or as Peter Guralnick writes succinctly, "He constructed a shell to hide his aloneness, and it hardened on his back. I know of no sadder story."

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

The artists and writers of the American cultural and literary movement known as the Beat Generation are popularly credited in the U.S. for having laid the groundwork for the explosion of personal freedom and expression that culminated in the 1960s. While the movement had a worldwide impact, most of the Beat artists’ works had a distinctly American flavor. However, like many eccentric American exiles and expatriate artists of the early 20th century Modernist Movement, a handful of the Beat’s luminaries Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and company made their homes in a small dive on the Left Bank in Paris. From 1957

Franklin Delano Roosevelt rarely mentioned his wife’s political influence or gave her credit for a job well done. But, according to historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, little of significance was achieved without her input, and her vision shaped the best of his presidency. The first of Cook’s projected three-volume biography, Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume I, 1884

Hail to the King! When Ginger Rogers died they said of her dancing that she did everything her more lavishly praised partner, Fred Astaire, did, and she did it backward and in high heels. Her artistry therefore was that much more difficult and, by implication, greater.

Something like that comment occurred to me while reading Daniel Mark Epstein’s biography, Nat King Cole. As a singer, Cole did everything his more lavishly praised contemporary, Frank Sinatra, did, and he did it in the face of fierce racial discrimination, all the while being one of the country’s premier jazz pianists.

His artistry may have been harder to achieve, but was it greater than Sinatra’s, to which it often has been compared? It’s not for an amateur enthusiast like me to say, though I think that anyone who could make out of such odd, haunting songs as Nature Boy and Mona Lisa boffo hits that turned into enduring ballads has got to be a vocalist of extremely high caliber.

The author doesn’t say, either, remarking only that Cole ranks with the greatest ballad interpreters of all time, including Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith. But he gives us the judgments of experts like Nat Hentoff, who in the 1950s wrote that Cole’s sound, placement, diction, phrasing and beat are the best in contemporary pop or jazz. Whatever his place in popular music, he achieved it in only 45 years. He was born Nathaniel Adams Coles on March 17, 1919, in Montgomery, Alabama, the son of a wholesale grocer. He died February 15, 1965, in Santa Monica, California, of lung cancer, brought on by a lifetime of smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day.

The central place in his life, however, was Chicago, to which his family moved in 1923 when his father decided to quit the grocery business and become a minister. Chicago was the capital of jazz when jazz was at its peak. Cole was mad for the music, and he learned directly from its Founding Fathers: Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton.

He was an apt pupil of these men, though not of school, which he quit at 15, by which age he already had a highly developed talent, a band, and a following. Dropping the s from his surname, he took the band on the road, one that, with occasional rocky patches, led steadily upward, from the creation of the Nat Cole Trio in the late 1930s to Cole’s emergence in the mid-1940s as a leading pop singer. The Golden Age of Jazz had segued into the Swing Era, and, in Epstein’s estimation, the trio largely defined the term swing, because, despite their modest number, no group on earth could swing like Nat Cole’s Trio. Purist historians and biographers might not entirely agree with Epstein’s approach ( Written with the narrative pacing of a novel, the publicity material says), nor with his sometimes lyrical, not to say purple, language. It is also hard to discern why he switches back and forth, calling his subject Cole and Nat and Nathaniel.

Style aside, this is a full biography, covering not only Cole’s show business career but his domestic life: his two marriages, his five children, and his flagrant philandering that culminated, in his final months, in an intense infatuation with a 19-year-old Swedish-born actress. Though, regarding this subject, methinks the author doth protest too much how devoted the Coles were. It rings as unnatural as calling him Nathaniel.

Yet he was also, according to Epstein, a kind and decent person, rare qualities among artists in any medium. Also rare were his great self-discipline (in musical if not personal areas) and gift of friendship.

And he rarely complained, not even when he suffered the indignities that African-American performers routinely encountered then. Some were not so routine: In 1956 a band of Alabama white supremacists cooked up a loony plot to snatch him from a Birmingham stage to what end, neither they nor anyone else could say. Cole’s mild reaction to this assault earned him the scorn of many black leaders, but ultimately his cool behavior redounded to his credit.

It’s too bad he smoked all those cigarettes. He might still be with us now, at age 80, a white-haired senior citizen of song. But then, so many of his jazz idols, like Fats Waller, died extremely young. It’s one of the few places Cole fits a musical pattern.

Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., A Beautiful Mind, is a remarkable tale about one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century. Nash is renowned for his contributions to both pure mathematics and to fields to which mathematics is applied. His work in game theory has become a cornerstone of the modern theory of rational human behavior, and his work in economics revolutionized the field, ultimately winning him the Nobel Prize.

Sylvia Nasar offers one of the literary surprises of the year, which should appeal to a wide audience. A Beautiful Mind recounts achievement and tragedy in a tale of compassion, redemption, and the ultimate triumph of the human intellect over adversity. It is also a fine piece of science writing. In her well-crafted and meticulously researched saga, Nasar depicts Nash’s meteoric rise to one of the most eminent mathematicians of our time. He was brash, young, ambitious, and original, in both his professional and his private lives. He startled the mathematical establishment with a sequence of profound discoveries reached by very creative and highly unorthodox methods. Yet, there is a dark side to this tale of glittering youthful success. By the time he was 30, Nash began to display disturbing signs of a mental instability which rapidly led to a complete destruction of his life.

The author poignantly chronicles Nash’s slide from eccentricity into madness diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. For 30 wasted years, he endured repeated hospitalizations with failed treatments. Although his name was prominent in scientific journals, Nash was clouded in obscurity. Many assumed him dead with only the cognoscenti aware of his existence. Miraculously, his family, friends, and colleagues who had staunchly stood by him observed that Nash, as though awakening from a deep and troubled sleep, began to emerge from his dementia. He began to manifest signs of heightened awareness and competence and to regain his former mental acuity. The chronicle of his continued recovery is perhaps as startling as the record of his scientific discoveries. A Beautiful Mind is a major contribution to modern intellectual history. It is also a moving biography of a mathematical giant which offers captivating insights into both genius and madness.

Dr. Fitzgibbon is professor of mathematics at the University of Houston.