"Limned in acid" is how one biographer described Hemingway's last and maybe best book, and indeed it is. Yet A Moveable Feast also captures Hemingway's extraordinary sensitivity to his internal and external environment, his fine sense of humor, and his authentic love for his first wife Hadley.

Feel free to skip whole parts of this -- I still haven't read the parts about the Canadian terrorists -- but I have read and re-read Wallace's writing about Boston AA. The main characters are perhaps intentionally overblown -- Hal is too isolated and asexual, Gately too heroic, and of course poor Himself is too much Himself -- but the supporting cast is highly entertaining, including the delightful Pemulius.

Men should read this book to fully understand how ill equipped we are to listen to the women in our lives ... the truth hurts, boys.

Deserves to be called a masterpiece. Capote's grueling attention to detail is almost as chilling as the murders he writes about and his life post publication of this book offers a warning about the human cost of producing a work of art. Notable and often overlooked is how Capote's beautiful and sensitive reconstruction of the Clutter family -- decent, hardworking, kind and gentle people -- makes their slaughter so awfully hard to comprehend.

What you get when you assign a good writer and tennis player to cover professional tennis. Puts gossip ridden books by established tennis writers to shame, beautifully captures the glory of Connors' run in the 1991 U.S. Open, precisely details the differences between the good and the great.

Highly entertaining but only if you have some deeper understanding of who JFK was beyond an adulterer. The surprising thing about this book is how well Mercurio captures Kennedy's toughness in the face of miltary advisors hell bent on war with the Soviet Union, his courage on civil rights, and his gentleness with his chlldren and fragile wife (yes, depsite and perhaps due to his adultery.)

Juicy and long overdue bio of the Fitzgerald marriage. Mellow should have gone further with Zelda's understanding of Scott as a woman, their marriage as essentially homosexual, and Scott's subsequent panic at this revelation.

A contemporary described Hopkins near the end of his career as looking like an ill fed old horse at the end of a long day, and this book helps you understand why. A highly cautionary tale for anyone who aspires to serve a chief executive.

One of the reasons I joined Library Thing was to do justice to this excellent biography of one of my favorite actors. If you keep a journal, mind that it might someday be read -- or not. Burton's writing is the star of this biography, and Bragg does well to get out of the way and let Burton speak. When you finish reading A Life, you really do feel you understand who one of the most famous actors of the 20th century really was -- kind, sensitive, profane and above all courageous.