Nigel Hamilton: Gamely writing vol. 2 of Clinton bio

oor Nigel Hamilton; he’s having a bad run of luck with big biographical projects. After publishing a respected three-volume biography of the British field marshal Bernard Montgomery, he embarked on the first book of a projected three-volume work on John F. Kennedy. “JFK: Reckless Youth” (1992) was a salacious but well-researched and insightful book about Kennedy’s early years. The experience of writing it, however, was so harrowing for Hamilton (he felt hazed by the “toadies” of the Kennedy family, he said, and had been thwarted by the “fascistic spirit” of the “family loyalists” at the John F. Kennedy library in Boston) that he gave up after just one volume. After “Bill Clinton: American Journey,” the first of a projected two-volume biography, took a critical pounding in 2003 (Michiko Kakutani, writing in The Times, called it “a sleazy new low in the chronicling of presidential lives”) it was an open question whether Hamilton would again feel moved to give up after one book.

But he seems to be gamely forging ahead: “Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency” is slated for publication this summer. In the meantime Hamilton has written “Biography: A Short History,” which might be thought of as a kind of palate cleanser (no doubt Hamilton wants to wash away the bad taste of those reviews). Naturally, one wonders to what degree the main thrust of this book — an apologia for the art of biography — is really an apologia for the art of biography as practiced by Nigel Hamilton. But in any case, he has produced a rich and provocative meditation on the history of biography, albeit one marred by an overblown central argument....