Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind—while still in his twenties, he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Where he arrived is even more astonishing given where he had begun: born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he and his younger brother were sent to America on a ship in 1939. The young immigrant boy caught very few breaks. He was bullied and ostracized—an allergic reaction had rendered him permanently hairless—and his father died when he was just twelve, leaving his mother alone and overwhelmed. The gulf between these two sets of facts explains a great deal about Nichols's transformation from lonely outsider to the center of more than one cultural universe. Mark Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always flattering, but its ultimate impact is to present the full story of one of the most consequential figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen