As a biographer, top jazz critic Gary Giddins seems to have created his own niche: rescuing musical giants from their own iconic status. Giddins' 1988 biography Satchmo: The Genius Of Louis Armstrong embraced the totality of Armstrong's career, reversing the trend of relegating his importance to his trailblazing early years. With the scrupulously detailed A Pocketful Of Dreams, Giddins attempts, with no small success, to retrieve Bing Crosby from a slow fade into oblivion. An entertainer whose influence is so widely dispersed that it's become almost subliminal, Crosby arrived at just the right time to revolutionize pop singing in a fashion that no successor has yet overturned. One of the first masters of the microphone, Crosby used his soft, intimate voice to put his predecessors out of business almost overnight. Vaudeville megaphone crooners and effete tenors now seem like the products of another time; everyone from Celine Dion to D'Angelo to Fred Durst still lives in a universe that Crosby played an important part in shaping. Both a convincing portrait of Crosby and a vivid rendering of his times, Pocketful follows its subject from his relatively humble beginnings in Spokane to his almost accidental stardom, first as a member of Paul Whiteman's homogenized jazz band and later as a radio and film star. Never presumptuous, Giddins operates in service to the facts, in part to put to rest the monstrous, enduring figure created in a hostile 1981 biography. This approach reveals a man whose happy-go-lucky image actually had some basis in reality, even if his easy charm masked a tendency to avoid intimacy and shirk responsibility. Giddins takes a similarly evenhanded approach toward Crosby the artist. He's quick to emphasize the importance of Crosby's accomplishments, but never too awestruck to keep his critical distance, particularly as his subject's innovations take a backseat to his stardom. Crosby's greatest gift, Giddins observes, might have been his popularity, which he sustained over many eras by subtly redefining himself to fit the times—but popularity rarely comes without a price, both creative and personal. Concluding shortly before America enters WWII, Pocketful doesn't so much end as hit a wall, with the Crosby story still very much in progress. Giddins is currently preparing a second volume, covering the more troubled later years only alluded to here. If he sustains Pocketful's quality, his books should join Peter Guralnick's two volumes of Elvis biography as definitive portraits of one of the past century's defining figures.