This is an exhaustive biography, and I can totally understand why some readers would feel bogged down by it; a good editor could have pruned some of the content and eliminated the names of people who are only referred to a few times but who the reader has to look up in the index as a reminder when they recur many pages later. I do admire Carolyn Burke's dedication to painting a full portrait of Miller, a woman with a great lust for life who, like many women who participated on the frontlines of World War II, had difficulty adjusting to civilian life after the war ended. Miller was often overshadowed by her husband, Roland Penrose, and Burke doesn't shy away from probing into the reasons for that while also honoring the love they shared over several decades. And I like that Burke delves into Miller's passion for cooking, which sustained her throughout the postwar years and probably served as a form of therapy for what she had endured as one of the first war correspondents to photograph the liberation of the death camps (at one point, Miller had 2,000 cookbooks--I hope these were given to an archive!). Although Miller's subsequent disavowal of her past as a photographer and her difficulty with completing magazine assignments in the 1950s and '60s is a sad postscript to a freeform and inspiring career, Burke's careful writing illuminates the reasons for this and corrects the notion that Miller's postwar life and marriage to Penrose were complete repudiations of her promise. ( )

I wish I would stop reading reviews before finishing the book! I was intrigued and found her early years fascinating. The surreal years were surprisingly bland! One famous person after another, escapade after another, affair after affair....country after country yout need some type of score card to keep it all straight. I have laid it down, she is now a war correspondent and I find the story line here no way was engaging as MBW's biography. No where do I feel the atmosphere of danger and the horror or war. I feel that Lee herself is disengaged.

I'll finish it later. ( )

I knew nothing whatsoever about Lee Miller nor about her existence and work before I got this book as a b-day gift. Because I didn't start reading with any enthusiasm about her as a subject, I found it slow-going at times. But I did learn a LOT about her life and her work. ( )