51�Թ�

The themes in “Desi Arnaz” are familiar from Amy Poehler’s 2022 documentary, “Lucy and Desi,” though the book provides more detail and context.

Like the film, the biography benefits from the cooperation of the couple’s children, Desi Arnaz Jr. and especially Lucie Arnaz, who opened private family archives to the author.

His pharmacist father became the reformist mayor of Santiago, and the youthful Desi — born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha in 1917 — a bit of a hellion.

“Desi had become so used to being underestimated and taken for granted that when it was finally his turn to control the narrative,” Purdum writes, “he sometimes took too much credit.”

Desi Arnaz’s life ricocheted between privilege and economic hardship, creative peaks and alcoholic lows — the stuff of high drama.