Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie down

For example, Dardis shows that Keaton's childhood was not so pleasant as he's made it out to be, and he traces those mythic childhood stories, like the one about baby Buster being carried aloft by a tornado and deposited safely in the middle of a road, to Buster's father Joe, who was constantly writing press releases for the family's vaudeville act. Yet Dardis, though fair in his critical appraisals and painstaking in his research, doesn't risk the sort of ambitious speculations that make for major biographies, that show us the path a great artist has burned through his own personal jungles in getting to those mysterious places from which he delivers his best, most masterful work.