And just as large a part of the problem is Crosby's incredible energy. He recorded so much over so long a period in so many styles of music and with so many different singers and musicians and orchestras and combos that it's virtually impossible to take a young music fan into a CD store and show him a compilation that reflects Bing Crosby's achievement. Jazz with his pals Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang and Louis Armstrong, jazz-flavored pop-swing with Paul Whiteman, duets with the Boswell and Andrews Sisters and the Mills Brothers, country and western (he was the first mainstream singer to record songs like "San Antonio Rose" and was a more popular western balladeer than any singing cowboy), lush Hawaiian pop tunes, sentimental Irish ballads, sophisticated show tunes, musical Americana (Eleanor Roosevelt loved his rendition of "Home on the Range" so much she placed it in the Smithsonian) -- the range and variety is staggering. Not only did he bring all these strains of music together in one place, and then1 out again into the mainstream. He was, for many years, the most popular exponent of nearly all of those styles. But the evidence of Crosby's impact that survives on CD is sketchy, and the fact that most of the best compilations are issued by British companies is a national disgrace.

How is Bing Crosby remembered today? Here's David Thomson's dismissal from his "Biographical Dictionary of Film": "Crosby excelled in that area where film meets advertising. He was the proof that unexceptional, lazy pleasantry was more desirable than prickly, difficult originality. His singing had all the charming naturalness that every amateur crooner believed lay within his grasp ... It is barely noticeable that he is interested in nothing, for interest dies away on his soft voice and drowsy smile." I thinks it's safe to say that if more critics don't share Thomson's view it's because they haven't stopped to think about Crosby at all, and in truth there isn't much of a body of work since 1950 to inspire anyone to search deeper.

Into this void comes Gary Giddins' "A Pocketful of Dreams," a brave attempt to caulk a major crack in the history of American popular culture. To the degree that Giddins succeeds, he doesn't merely explain Bing Crosby; he explains a great deal of what happened to American pop culture from the late '20s to World War II. Giddins begins defensively, acknowledging the legitimacy of Crosby's later critics: "Yet to the swarming generations born after the war, all the reverence was a mystery. He was known to them as a faded and not especially compelling celebrity, a square old man who made orange juice commercials and appeared with his much younger family on Christmas telecasts that the baby boomers never watched. He had long since disappeared from movies and then the hit parade." But "his contemporaries had a more accurate sense of him. Crosby was a phenomenon in the cultural life of the United States long before the war. He had helped lift morale while elucidating the American temperament during the Great Depression ... Combining musical cultures as no one had ever done, he made the country a more neighborly and unified place."

These are big claims, and in most of them, Giddins' points survive his exaggerations. For instance: "A performer of such enormous popularity becomes, inevitably and in spite of himself, a social critic. Crosby, an unreasonably modest man who never took credit for anything musical, let alone social or political, nonetheless played a coercive role in the acceleration of civil rights." As someone who first encountered Louis Armstrong on his father's Bing Crosby records, I'm happy to hear someone say this, however overstated it might be.

Giddins is on firmer ground when evaluating Crosby's musical influence. He was "the first white vocalist to appreciate and assimilate the genius of Louis Armstrong: his rhythm, his emotions, his comedy, his spontaneity ... Bing was the first (pop singer) to render the lyrics of a modern ballad with purpose, the first to suggest an erotic undercurrent." And: "With the microphone elaborating the subtleties of his delivery, Bing was reinventing popular music as a personal and consequently erotic medium."

It's a shame that "A Pocketful of Dreams" doesn't come with an accompanying CD so readers can put the book down and hear what Giddins is talking about.

The more so because it is precisely the musical Bing Crosby who gets lost as the book goes on. The truth of the matter is that while Bing Crosby the artist and Bing Crosby the phenomenon are interesting subjects, Bing Crosby the man really isn't. Giddins has some interesting revelations to throw out -- that Louis Armstrong introduced Bing to marijuana, which he later recommended to his oldest son as preferable to alcohol, that the ultraconservative Hollywood veteran opposed the Vietnam War, that Crosby's fabled friendship with Bob Hope didn't really begin till they had been working together for more than 20 years -- but it seems as if there are at least a hundred pages between them. "A Pocketful of Dreams" moves at a crawl; after Page 163 Bing and his best friends are still relegated to Paul Whiteman's choir, and some readers may start wondering if he's ever going to get to be the Bing Crosby. Every letter to family is quoted in full, every radio introduction is repeated in its entirety. The overall effect of the ocean of detail is to make Bing Crosby seem not closer to us but more remote.

Was 700 pages really necessary to chronicle the life -- excuse me -- the first half of a life -- of the man whose greatest achievement was making his art seem casual? Giddins' critical instincts about Crosby's music fail him as a biographer; the mountains of detail about taxes and diversified business interests and recording contracts only blur the image of a man who comes into focus with remarkable ease in his art.

I don't want to sound ungracious about a book that I devoured as if it were written for me, but I can't imagine who is going to read "A Pocketful of Dreams" as eagerly as I did. I'm still left without a way to introduce my friends to Bing Crosby, and I can only hope that, at the least, this book spurs a set of CDs, with notes by Gary Giddins.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"