Lifescapes A biographer's search for the soul

Wroe (Six Facets of Light) draws on her life and her career as obituaries editor for the Economist in this freewheeling exploration of "the unique and essential part of ourselves" most synonymous with the soul and the challenges of capturing it on the page. According to Wroe, the clues to this essential self are found in the particulars: a sugar cake whose sweetness evokes a great aunt; "the gesture of taking someone's pulse, touching the fingers gently to the wrist, then falling silent to listen." Exploring how other artists aim to capture their subjects' "life-force," she notes that figurative artists complete the first study of a figure in "a minute, to catch not the shape or the mass but... to seize something more," while poets including Stanley Kunitz traverse the "boundaries between what they observe and themselves." In the end, Wroe suggests the soul might be best defined as a transitory force that is rooted in a love that operates "according to its own laws. Instead of pausing over our troubles, it pours itself out continually among them." Wroe delivers her perceptive insights into life, death, and the struggle for meaning in luminous prose, though her rapid shifts between topics (she moves from Fidel Castro's mistress to chess champion Bobby Fischer in a few sentences) can feel haphazard. Still, spiritually curious readers will be captivated by Wroe's wide-ranging quest to understand what comprises a life. (Oct.)

The mysteries of lives. Wroe, a biographer and obituary editor for theEconomist, offers a graceful, haunting meditation on her life's work: "catching souls," her term for capturing "the unique and essential part of ourselves, our self-conscious and transcendent core." Some biographical subjects were singularly challenging: Pontius Pilate because there was little direct evidence of his daily life, Percy Shelley because there was so much. "Entering the life of Shelley was permanently exhausting, exhilarating, fraught; I would find myself at dinner parties," she admits, "suddenly holding forth on the freedom of the press or the rights of man, shocking myself as much as anyone else. Because, for a while, I was more than myself." Her sensitivity to her subjects--"the way they walk, sit in a chair, shrug off a jacket, hold their heads; tiny gestures, snatches of talk"--is apparent in the obituaries she references (a list is appended). She delicately evokes the individuality of poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott; singers Miriam Makeba, Joan Sutherland, and Luciano Pavarotti; physicist Steven Weinberg and ebullient tomboy Shirley Temple, among many others. "Life resides in details," Wroe notes, rather than in a résumé of achievements. She learned from the conductor Claudio Abbado, for example, "that there was a certain sound to snow." She brings the same attentiveness to her observations of nature and the precise language of her poetry and prose. "On days of mist or snow," she writes, "the emptier hills and valleys lie like creatures still breathing, as if sheets have been thrown over sleeping bodies or muslin drawn across a face." A failed clarinet player, she exults in the sounds of woodwinds and reeds, "the voices of wild landscapes." From inner lives to windswept hills, Wroe's world is filled with wonder. A lyrical, radiant memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.