SOURCE: Samuels, Charles Thomas. “The Heresy of Self-Love.” New Republic 160, no. 2835 (26 April 1969): 28-32.

In the following mixed review of Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Samuels disparages the objectivity of and amount of minute detail in Baker's biographical account.

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story tells so inconclusive a tale about so narrowly conceived a life that it is hard to acknowledge Baker's virtues without seeming smug. Commend his factual abundance, and you seem to be praising unglamorous gifts like industry and perseverance; whereas the abundance is so striking that one means a more handsome compliment. During seven years, Baker examined nearly 2,000 letters and unnumbered manuscripts yet to be published, and interviewed or corresponded with so many people that his acknowledgments run to four pages of names in Lilliputian type, his documentation to 102 pages. Commend his easy prose, with its unobtrusive quotations, and you seem to imply a mechanical fluency...