Diva bios, in my humble experience, generally fall into two distinct categories: Those that gush and those that dish. Either the writer is so enthralled by his subject that he fills page after page full of infernal praise to the expense of fact or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, he's so envious of the talent he's chronicling that he does nothing but dissect it, twisting tales to suit his thesis, tiptoeing past pieces of information and, indeed, whole periods of time that if reported upon would straighten out his slant, and generally attempting to claim some otherworldly knowledge that allows him to explain away how every bit of success and recognition came his diva's way.
Good bios fall between the two extremes. They present the facts in a balanced fashion that allows the reader to come his or her own conclusions. Sadly, Tom Santopietro's "The Importance Of Being Barbra" ($22.95 from Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press), the latest in a long list of Barbra Streisand books, is not a good bio. It falls firmly under the second distinction and is more a review of Streisand's life by the author than an attempt by him to chronicle it. At only 189 pages, it is anything but thorough.
Santopietro, who is not, to my knowledge, a music critic of any note but rather, according to his bio, a theatre manager, even goes so far as to include a 14-page "career scorecard" at the back of book, where he proceeds to grade – and rip apart – Streisand's films and albums. My favorite Streisand album of all time, 1977's "Superman," which contains the tender and touching title track and the timeless "Answer Me," as well as the classics "New York State of Mind" and "My Heart Belongs To Me" is given a C and casually classified as "Okay, nothing more."
Let me state emphatically that I'm not a Streisand fanatic. I've never been to one of her concerts, I've seen probably about half of her films and I've got less than a dozen of her albums. But I appreciate her for the remarkable talent that she is. Skimming through Santopietro's scorecard, however, I'm left to wonder he even bothered to write about Babs.
As a comprehensive, fact-based bio I give Santopietro's book the same grade he flippantly gave Streisand's 1984 "Emotion" album, another of my favorites: F, Totally unnecessary and forgettable.
New Streisand bio author has bad case of diva envy
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