Carl Rollyson: Reading Biography.(Shorter notices)(Book Review)

Carl Rollyson Reading Biography. IUniverse, 105 pages, $12.95

Carl Rollyson reads biographies. He writes biographies. He writes about reading biographies. He writes about writing biographies.

Writers are the subject of many of the biographies he reads and writes. Whew! Add up this reading and writing and you arrive at a sum of literary arithmetic called "On Biography," Rollyson's regular column for The New York Sun. Part book review, part essay, always timely and interesting, "On Biography" covers biography's subjects and the subject of biography in a two-for-one deal. Reading Biography is Rollyson's first collection of these essays, which he began writing in Spring 2003.

Emerson wrote that "There is properly no history; only biography." Disraeli: "Read no history; nothing but biography, for that is life without theory." Carlyle: "History is the essence of innumerable biographies." Rollyson knew he was onto something when he took up the subject of biography. But why biography now? "Historians distrust biography," Rollyson writes in a review of two books on Stalin. "Modern historiography has rejected Thomas Carlyle's 'Great Man' theory of history in favor of complex explorations of historical process, of the forces and factors that shape ...