Paul Elie

Paul Elie’s first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist. It has just been published in paperback.

Giacometti by James Lord (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $25). Lord, who knew Alberto Giacometti well, seems to have acquired the great sculptor’s sense of the power and mystery of the human figure seen in the round. In Lord’s sentences, which have the grace of Flaubert’s, Giacometti stands before the reader as a physical, indeed a sculptural, presence.

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage by Richard Holmes (Vintage, $13). The biographer of Shelley and Coleridge here puts himself forward as the anti-Boswell. Whereas Boswell’s Life of Johnson is the most complete of biographies, this book takes a single early friendship of Johnson’s—with the doomed poet Richard Savage—and through it refracts Johnson’s life story. In so doing, Holmes offers an ars poetica for the art of biography.

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Edmund Campion by Evelyn Waugh (out of print). The devotional work as an act of the historical imagination. In this short biography of the martyred recusant English Jesuit, Waugh vividly evokes the Catholic England vanquished by Henry VIII and his successors, and so puts forward his own ideal of the Catholic faith: learned, steadfast, heroic, stylish.

Erasmus by Johan Huizinga (out of print). Though the Dutch historian Huizinga is expert in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s many works, this is not a literary biography or a life of ideas but a work of biographical portraiture—an image of the man as might have been fashioned by a Dutch master.

God: A Biography