Streisand: Her Life

Streisand: Her Life James Spada (Crown, $25) Lately the celeb-bio genre seems to have settled into two quite divergent trends: quickie bodice rippers (''He got caught with who?! Quick — do a book!'') and long, ponderous histories (''The reason he's a star must be in there — his childhood, his young adulthood — somewhere''). James Spada's opus on the woman known in gossip columns as La Streisand falls squarely into the second category. Tracing Streisand's life in excruciating detail from her birth in 1942 to her speech at Harvard's Kennedy School in February of this year, Spada covers her childhood mental abuse by her stepfather, her debut in the cabaret underground, the evolution of her peculiar fashion sense, her many affairs (including Beatty and, Spada claims, Elvis), and her success as a director, producer, writer, and so on. He does all this without ever evincing a definitive point of view, which makes reading his work oddly akin to reading an extended curriculum vitae. For those who already know how they feel about Streisand — and don't want their opinion changed one way or the other — this may make for an invaluable book. For the rest, stick to her albums. They're more evocative. B-