Literature and film faculty member and noted biographer Steven Bach’s new book, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, has garnered considerable attention from publications such as Booklist, The New Yorker, O magazine, Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, the Los Angles Times, and now on the cover of the Sunday, March 25, New York Times Book Review.

The Times joins crowds of publications reviewing the book with utmost favor, with critic Clive James noting that Bach's "deep personal experience as a high-echelon film executive" informs a revealing and compelling biography of Nazi filmmaker and propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

The LA Times writes: “It is difficult to overpraise Bach's efforts: Living the biographer's nightmare, trapped for a decade with a loathsome subject, Bach is determined to present her coolly, ironically, without loss of his own moral vector. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work.”

O magazine recently hailed Leni observing that “Bach does a marvelous job of unraveling Riefenstahl’s tangled love affairs and of describing the extraordinary lengths to which she’d go to get the shots she wanted.” O continues, “Throughout, he makes a compelling attempt to fathom this endlessly enigmatic woman who always maintained she’d known nothing about the Nazi genocide.” Concluding that the Leni is a “gripping” and “fascinating biography.”

The Washington Post praises Bach for unearthing the buried facts and the truth behind the lies. The Post continues, writing “But he also gives us a better sense of the swirling drama of her life… [he] makes the vivid and exasperating Riefenstahl come back to life and stand before us to be judged. His research is deep and his sourcing…meticulous.”

Publishers Weekly has called it, “A lively, incisive look at a compelling and somewhat appalling figure who demonstrated that beauty isn't always truth;” While Booklist effusively reviewed it as “a superbly well-written biography.”

To access the full transcripts of noted reviews, please click on the corresponding links.

Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl is available in bookstores now, to order online click here.

To read more about Steven Bach, or to access some of his course offerings, follow the corresponding links.