Award-winning biographer and historian Natalie S. Bober is the author of several books detailing the lives of artists and statesmen. She has turned her biographer's eye on poets such as William Wordsworth and Robert Frost, and on visual artists, including American sculptor Louise Nevelson and Russian painter Marc Chagall. The founders of the United States of America and those who participated in that nation's fight for freedom have also provided a recurring theme in Bober's work. A biography of Thomas Jefferson led her to an interest in Abigail Adams, whose life Bober also chronicled. Research in these biographies in turn led to her 2001 publication, Countdown to Independence: A Revolution of Ideas in England and Her American Colonies, 1760-1776. Critics often emphasize Bober's ability to show the human side of her larger-than-life subjects by including details that do not always flatter them. While some critics found her early prose...