Executive Editor Bill Keller of The New York Times takes a turn this weekend at being a book reviewer for the paper's famed Sunday book section.

The subject: The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century By Alan Brinkley.

The biography of the creator of Time, Life, Fortune and other publications seems a natural subject for the editor of one of America's greatest newspapers.

About the book, Keller writes: “Alan Brinkley, a scholar of the New Deal and a frequent reviewer in these pages, has a gift for restoring missing dimensions to figures who have been flattened into caricature. 'Voices of Protest,' for which he won a National Book Award, revisited the cartoon demagogues Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and established their important role in forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to pay attention to the economic miseries of the Great Depression.

“In 'The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,' Brinkley performs a similar service. His Luce is a complicated figure, more tragic than malign. That is not to say this is a particularly flattering profile. The book does full justice to Luce's outsider insecurity, his blind affinity for men of power and his defects as a family man. But it is a humanizing portrayal.”

Asked why he wanted to review the book, Keller tells me: “They asked. And I have a hard time saying 'no' to [Book Editor} Sam Tanenhaus.”

He also noted: “I wish I'd thought to include the tidbit Janet Maslin put in her review of the Luce book: that Luce spent is first and only LSD trip reading Lionel Trilling's biography of Matthew Arnold. This is why Janet is a critic and I'm just an editor.”