Makeup and Make-believe.(Book review)

The happy story of Max Factor, as enthusiastically told by Fred E. Basten in "Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World" (Arcade; $24.95), begins, like a movie, at a high-energy moment of extreme peril:

On a winter night in February 1904, twenty-seven-year-old Max Faktor huddled with his wife and three young children in a Russian forest, frightened more for the family he had kept secret for nearly five years than of the wind and snow or even the approaching czar's men calling his name. Only days earlier, Max Faktor was a favorite of the royal family and was esteemed by the royal court. Now he was being hunted as a fugitive.

The little ...