“Mike Nichols: A Life” by Mark Harris, Penguin Press, 2021, 673 pages, $35
It will be hard to find readers of a certain age whose lives weren’t touched by the work of the director/performer of both stage and film who is the subject of “Mike Nichols: A Life” by Mark Harris.
Until his death at 83 in 2014, Mike Nichols both embraced and appraised critically the country he became a part of for the first time at age eight. Part celebration, part exhaustive biography, “Mike Nichols: A Life” is also a social and cultural history of America in the last half of the 20th century.
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