Book excerpt: Biography is an endlessly fascinating subject for a wide variety of readers. The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography is the most up-to-date and comprehensive, single-volume, biographical reference of living and dead Americans available. The book contains 9,000 entries written for general readers in fluid narrative style. Each entry is self-contained and does not assume any historic or geographic knowledge. What sets this book apart is its breadth of coverage--living and dead, famous and forgotten American figures, of diverse careers, from colonial times to the present day--and its attention to women and minority groups. The Dictionary has been originally compiled--not derived from older work--with the help of over one-hundred consultants. It also contains two exceptionally useful indexes: one by occupation and the other by names mentioned in the entries (whether or not they are entries themselves). The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography is written for anyone interested in owning an eminently readable reference to living contemporaries and their achievements as well as to historically important figures. John Bowman, an accomplished author and editor, has been assisted by an editoral board of distinguished American scholars.