%1

It is a little unusual for a biography (William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience) to be published when its subject is not only alive but is the author of his own just-published best-seller (Credo). Bill Coffin, however, is anything but usual. As Harvey Cox says, reviewing Warren Goldstein’s biography, “There is only one Bill Coffin.”

A good biography, expertly researched and finely crafted, conveys not just the trajectory of someone’s life but also a feeling for the era in which the person lived. This superb telling of the “still far from finished” life of William Sloane Coffin is just such an accomplishment.