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.

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.

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