Most biographies are about active people who do several things well but usually do them one at a time. As the publisher’s blurb says, Baldwin Spencer did many things and when Mulvaney came to describe his activities he found that the usual chronological approach used by most was not appropriate; four chapters of the book describe Spencer’s contribution from about 1895 to 1920 to biology, University administration, the Melbourne Museum and Australian art, and the reader must integrate these if he wishes to establish a chronology. Spencer’s anthropological work, including his stint as Special Commissioner for Aboriginals in Darwin in 1911, runs as a thread throughout the whole book. Biographers have to face up to controversies in the lives of their subjects and with Spencer these were the disintegration of his marriage, his lapse into alcoholism in the early twenties, and criticisms of his techniques as an anthropologist.