In Truman Capote, Plimpton has an infinitely more important subject, who worked his way down from the top into the shallow pit of druggy celebrity. His book doesn't knock the definitive biography Capote off the shelf, but it's much more fun to read. Plimpton interviewed more than a hundred people--from Capote's childhood to his peak period, 1966, when his Black and White Ball defined high society and In Cold Blood launched the true crime genre, all the way down to his last, sad days as a bitchy caricature of himself. Joanna Carson complains that Plimpton's book is "gossip," which it gloriously is. But it's also brimming with important literary history, and it helps in the Herculean task of sorting out the truth from Capote's multitudinous, entertaining lies; for instance, In Cold Blood turns out to be not strictly factual. James Dickey, whose similar self-destruction is chronicled in Summer of Deliverance, delivers here a good definition of Capote's true gift to literature: "The scene stirring with rightness and strangeness, the compressed phrase, the exact yet imaginative word, the devastating metaphorical aptness, a feeling of concentrated excess which at the same time gives the effect of being crystalline." --Tim Appelo
]]>Television's longest running, single-topic documentary series Biography on A&E Network is not only one of the most successful shows -- it is one of the most popular. Biography has profiled more than 900 people in its fifteen years.
]]>In this smart collection edited by George Plimpton, some of the best writers on baseball (Robert W. Creamer, Roger Angell) and some of the best American writers, period (Don DeLillo, John Updike), provide unique portraits of famous sluggers (Ruth, Williams, Aaron, and Josh Gibson, to name a few), their myths, and the circumstances of famous home runs (with nods to the pitchers who served them up). And as a bonus, Plimpton includes a chronology describing a century's worth of milestones.
These writers do vastly more than document baseball history: they write about something they love, and write with conviction. For example, Japanese ballplayer Sadaharu Oh, who hit 868 career homers (to Aaron's 755), describes the feeling of hitting one out in "A Zen Way of Baseball": "As the ball makes its high, long arc beyond the playing field, the diamond and the stands suddenly belong to one man. In that brief, brief time you are free of all demands and complications.... In this moment [you] are free." --Michael Ferch
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