Can a biography capture the complexity of a long life?

To declare, as Walt Whitman did, “I am large. I contain multitudes,” is fair for a poet. But it poses something of a challenge for a biographer. The life of James Lovelock (pictured), an English scientist who, through his writings on what he called Gaia, provided new ways to think about the degree to which life on Earth makes the Earth alive, was not just long. (He died two years ago at the age of 103; for the last decades of that long life this reviewer was a friend.) It was also large, and rich in the contradictions that Whitman thought a life allowed.