Also of interest. . .

Ethel Merman

by Brian Kellow (Viking, $26)

Ethel Merman lived a “mostly empty life” offstage, said Robert Gottlieb in The New York Observer. Raised in Queens, she burst into Broadway stardom in 1930 and thereafter strung together “triumph after triumph,” thanks to her big voice and innate stage smarts. Of two new better-than-decent Merman bios in stores now, Brian Kellow’s is the more fluent. The Opera News editor captures the rhythms and challenges of theater, the only setting in which Merman was truly worth watching.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Young Stalin

by Sebastian Sebag Montefiore (Knopf, $30)

Josef Stalin has for too long been misconstrued as a party hack turned tyrant, said William Grimes in The New York Times. Sebastian Sebag Montefiore’s lively and authoritative new work should put an end to that. It vividly re-creates his hardscrabble boyhood, his artistic and intellectual precocity, and his “wild years” as a revolution-minded bank robber, arsonist, and extortionist.

Boone

by Robert Morgan (Algonquin, $30)

Daniel Boone was apparently as heroic as legend makes him out to be, said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. He didn’t kill many Indians. He was a serial failure in business. He didn’t even “discover” the Cumberland Gap. But Robert Morgan’s “comprehensive and deeply sympathetic” biography shows the peripatetic frontiersman to have been brave, tolerant, soulful, and charismatic. Though “a trifle long,” it’s otherwise perfect.

Alice

by Stacy A. Cordery (Viking, $33)

Alice Roosevelt Longworth was “America’s first megastar,” said Sandra McElwaine in The Washington Times. An insouciant 17-year-old when her father, Teddy, moved into the White House, she charmed and scandalized the press, then transformed herself into a salon hostess and stayed intimate with power for another half-century. Unfortunately, the book Stacy Cordery has written is “more dissertation than biography.” There are delicious nuggets of new information, but they’re buried in dull prose.

Nureyev

by Julie Kavanagh (Pantheon, $37.50)

This “superbly researched” biography delivers all the dirt anyone could want about the most dynamic male ballet dancer of the past half-century, said Toni Bentley in The New York Times. But Rudolf Nureyev’s artistic genius gets overpowered by the meticulous chronicling of his bad-boy antics and “very busy” sex life. In depicting his impoverished Soviet boyhood and his final battle with AIDS, Kavanagh makes Nureyev poignantly human. In between, he’s reduced to mere celebrity.