I’d pick nearly any other genre of book besides biography, but here I am reading one. There are two types of biographies: those that capture a life more vividly in words than it was lived by its subject, and those that are only more indebted to their subjects at the turn of each page.
Black Sun, by Geoffrey Wolff, is one of the latter. Harry Crosby’s brief life is a fascinating story no matter whose doing the telling. Crosby’s thoroughly absorbing life is captured in some occasionally wonderful paragraphs.
