Norman Stockwell.

• Author: Stockwell, Norman
• Position: BOOKS

In hearings before the U.S. Senate in February 1973, journalist Victor Navasky was quoted as saying that nonfiction writers deserve the same Constitutional protections as news reporters because, in reality, they are "simply slow journalists." Taking the analogy further, I think biographers are simply "narrow historians"--giving readers a better understanding of a time and a place through the lens of one or perhaps a few people's lives.

The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press) by Nicholas Buccola is a classic example of that dynamic, with regard to the racial divide in twentieth-century America. The book zeroes in on Baldwin and Buckley in the years leading up to their debate at the Cambridge Union in England on February 18, 1965.

Exhaustively researched with eighty-two pages of notes and bibliography plus an appendix containing the full transcript of the BBC-recorded debate, this book captures a historical event as well as its larger context. "I didn't enjoy debating the racial issue," Buckley told reporters afterwards in the hall. "It's so emotionally overloaded." Just a few days later, Malcolm X was assassinated during a talk in Harlem's Audubon Ballroom.

Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt), gives an unflinching glimpse into the life of the chemist and CIA operative who fed LSD to unsuspecting study...