WILL ROGERS: Cowboy Philosopher

A feeble biography in the People to Know series that reads more like an impossibly expanded curriculum vitae than like a Life. Roughly speaking, it amounts to a list of Rogers's activities, from birth to death, with only a minor attempt to put them into cultural context or historical perspective. Malone (Connie Chung, 1992, not reviewed, etc.) never offers sufficient examples of what it was that made Rogers so popular to begin with, nor why he has become something of an American icon. Instead, there are endless descriptions of his successes without any substantive ideas about how they came about or what they meant. No account of Rogers's life could be entirely lacking in color, of course, but anecdotes can't carry this glorified encyclopedia article.