"Human beings cannot live fully or joyously unless their sense of beauty is exercised and proclaimed," Norman Cousins wrote in the June 1981 issue of Saturday Review. "It is the writer's job to deal with these things of beauty in order to provide not necessarily a joy forever but a touch of loveliness that will last as long as society's capacity for beauty will last." Cousins did this job and many others. He was an author, photographer, syndicated columnist, editor, diplomat, negotiator, philosopher, medical humanist, and professor. He tried out most of his hunches on himself and wrote books and articles in which he admitted his own frailties and fears. In "Healing and Belief" (April 1982), an autobiographical essay, he wrote, "I can imagine no greater satisfaction for a person, in looking back on his life and work, than to have been able to give some people, however few, a...