Title: Bruce Lee: A Life Author: Matthew Polly Publisher: Simon & Schuster

MORE than 40 years after Bruce Lee’s sudden death at age 32, journalist and author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee’s life.

It’s also one of the only accounts. Incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee.

Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee’s family, friends, business associates and even the mistress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon.

There are his early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father’s struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a trouble-making teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; to his beginnings as a martial arts teacher.