Biographers may be thrilled to have their books labeled "comprehensive" and "respectful." Their publishers, however, crave reviews with such attention-grabbers as juicy, scandalous, gossipy and never-told secrets.

Shawn Levy falls into the first category.

His biography is an excellent, warm overview of Paul Newman, who died last year at 83, providing a performance-by-performance guide to his career, an examination of his personal and professional lives and the sorts of details that good reporters ferret out, such as:

His childhood dog was named Cleo; in 1952, he and his first wife, Jackie, paid $60 a month in rent on Staten Island; he developed a later-in-life passion for backyard badminton; and he once gave his second wife, Joanne Woodward, his electrocardiogram for Christmas.

"By accounts, he still acted around Joanne like he was hopelessly in love," Levy writes. "He held her hand on walks or as they sat at the symphony or the ballet. He surprised her with phone calls, flowers, little gifts."

I would have sacrificed some of the tidbits for the voice of Newman or Woodward. Levy, a film critic for the Portland Oregonian, writes in the acknowledgments at book's end that he never spoke with the late actor although he tried several times.

By late 2005 when Levy hatched the idea for the biography, Newman and Woodward had resolved not to accept any more honors -- or to assist in projects such as this. So Levy did the next best thing by exhaustively researching what the actor had told others and speaking with about 50 people who knew Newman and felt it proper to talk.

Although some early promotional material made much of it, a supposed affair between Newman and a divorced Hollywood journalist named Nancy Bacon is put into perspective. Levy devotes five of his 490 pages to the fling, reportedly started on the set of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," and continued back home for a year and a half.

He puts it into chronological context, doesn't overdo it (a gossip magazine reported it at the time) and concludes of Newman and Woodward, married for 50 years:

"It would often be praised as a fairy-tale marriage. And perhaps because it contained and overcame a dark and perilous episode, it was worthy of the name."

When word surfaced last year that Newman might lose his battle with cancer, I went to the library looking for some solid reference books on the actor. With its cradle-to-grave look at the legendary actor, this is exactly what I needed.

It arrived too late for me, but not for fans who may not find fresh interviews but will find an intelligent overview worthy of its subject, a man who was "ridiculously handsome and trim, with a face that belonged on an ancient coin, eyes that stunned and dazed even cynics, and an athlete's compact, lithe, and peppy body."

A man who once said, "What I would really like to put on my tombstone is that I was part of my time."

And Levy shows us how, taking a marvelous measure of the man.