<i>Cardozo: A Study in Reputation</i>. By Richard A. Posner

Biography, wrote the great American historian Barbara Tuchman, is "a prism of history," useful as a genre of literature because of two factors. First, "biography attracts and holds the reader's interest in the larger subject." Second, in its best form it provides a structure within which intellectual analysis may find parameters that, far from being restrictive, actually provide a necessary channel for bringing the larger subject matter (a subject matter that transcends the life and work of one individual) into perspective. In Tuchman's words: [Bliography is useful because it encompasses the universal in the particular. It is a focus that allows both the writer to narrow his field to manageable dimensions and the reader to more easily comprehend the [larger] subject.

Given too wide a scope, the central theme wanders, becomes diffuse, and loses shape. One does not try for the whole but for what is truthfully representative