Lord Beaverbrook: A Life

This exhaustively researched biography of the powerful British press baron and cabinet minister (1879-1964) candidly describes Beaverbrook's dark side as well as his successes. The book's immersion in the intricacies of British political history, however, may limit its interest to Anglophiles. Husband-and-wife team Davie ( Titanic ) and Chisholm ( Nancy Cunard ) reconstruct Beaverbrook's upbringing as Max Aitken in Canada and suggest that his passion for inside information, which he displayed as a member of Churchill's wartime cabinet, had roots in his early entrepreneurial practices. He befriended Rudyard Kipling and Prime Minister Bonar Law; and had romances with writer Rebecca West and, in 1931, with Dorothy Schiff Hall, who later resumed her maiden name and became publisher of the New York Post . He used newspapers like the Daily Express to crusade for protectionism and to ``emancipate'' the class-conscious British society in the 1930s. The authors detail Beaverbrook's isolationism during Hitler's rise, his championing of Stalin during WW II, his influence on postwar governments and his contributions to several memoirs and histories of his era. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)