By DIANA NELSON JONES, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ROBERT REDFORD: THE BIOGRAPHY"

By Michael Feeney Callan

Knopf ($28.95)

A biography about one of Hollywood's greatest leading men should be hard to put down, especially considering his off-screen achievements and real love interests.

Instead, "Robert Redford" is a slow read from the start with its lengthy lead-in about the actor's forebears.

Like most children, Randy Gilson grew up seeing himself through the eyes of others. He was "a funny-looking little kid" whose family was poor and who made C's, D's and E's in school.

But he kept the Randy he would become safe inside, and when he found the Central North Side neighborhood in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, he says, "I replanted myself."

Ken Burns' six-part series, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," will make you want to swoop like an egret in the Everglades, romp like a young gray wolf over lichen-covered rocks in Yellowstone.

This gorgeous 12-hour series -- a project that took six years to film -- will air on PBS at 8 p.m. EDT on six consecutive nights beginning Sunday.

Appalachia is in a rarefied limelight this Thursday when PBS airs the first part of an engrossing and beautifully filmed and illustrated series subtitled "A History of Mountains and People."

As luminous as his life was in just 38 years, Roberto Clemente's post-life has been static in the media 35 years since his death. Even if you couldn't watch him enough when he played and sit riveted to every rehash of clips, footage and remembrances of him, new tidbits are welcome.

With World War I imminent, future medic and ambulance driver Paul Tarrant sits in his life class in London -- an all-male session drawing a nude in complete silence -- and sees his work diminish with each footfall of the approaching professor.