A Robert Capa bio by the numbers.

Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa By Alex Kershaw St. Martin's Press, 304 pages, $25.95 As the dissonant title indicates, Robert Capa's life was one of strange and extreme juxtapositions. Capa was a brilliant war photographer who moonlighted as a bon vivant, a man who swilled champagne to get the taste of blood out of his mouth. Born Andrei Friedmann in prewar Budapest, Capa emerged as the preeminent war photographer of his era, shooting the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Israeli War for Independence, and the Vietnam War. He also spent his leisure time as a sort of freelance man-about-town, constantly in search of the next and latest sensation.

Alex Kershaw's biography of Capa is pro forma, devoting one chapter to each war zone of his career, and detailing the constant motion of his wanderer's life. After a bizarre opening gambit, in which World War II veterans comment on some of Capa's photographs (in all likelihood, some leftover material from his WWII book The Bedford Boys), Kershaw settles down to business. Kershaw is good with the details of Capa's constant financial travails, devoting significant space in Blood and Champagne to his impressive ability to run through any amount of money that momentarily strayed into his possession. Capa's dedication to the temptations of wine, women, and gambling was legendary, and contributed to his lifelong nomadic disposition.

Kershaw is on shakier ground with the details of Capa's photographic work. For the most part, he avoids discussion of specific photographs, choosing to focus on Capa's life. It is, however, a glaring absence in a biography of a photographer to refrain from a close analysis of the subject's work. In addition, how does one publish a Robert Capa bio with no Capa photographs? Amazingly enough, Blood and Champagne does just that, leaving newcomers to Capa's work entirely in the dark as to what the big fuss is all about.

Blood and Champagne is somewhat more assured when it concentrates on the playboy-ish tendencies of its protagonist, gallivanting from one swinging party to the next. Over the course of his travels, Capa befriended such writers as John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, fellow photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Hollywood royalty, such as Ingrid Bergman. A notorious womanizer, Capa had one of the most sustained relationships of his life with the mercurial actress. Ultimately, however, Bergman could not sacrifice the success she had achieved for a life outside the public spotlight, and Capa went back to his well-rehearsed bachelor's ways.

It is unfortunate that so interesting a character as Robert Capa is the subject of so dull a biography as Blood and Champagne. One can imagine Capa himself, presented with this book, choosing a night of gambling and carousing rather than slogging his way through the uninspired retelling of his career. On the whole, I am inclined to agree, and recommend such activity (with commemorative photograph taking, of course) as a far better celebration of Capa than this tepid and wearisome book.