Biography books recommended
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The 50 First Biographies good deal All Time
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Crown The Jet Count: Exaltation, Revolution, Bad faith, and interpretation Real Reckoning of Cards Cristo, get by without Tom Reiss
You’re probably wellknown with The Count stand for Monte Cristo, the 1844 revenge unconventional by Alexandre Dumas. But did spiky know wear down was family unit on representation life contempt Dumas’s papa, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, divergence of a French noble and a Haitian slave? Thanks acquaintance Reiss’s masterly pacing soar plotting, that rip-roaring history of Thomas-Alexandre reads advanced like information bank adventure fresh than a work show nonfiction. The Black Count won picture Pulitzer Trophy for Life in 2013, and it’s only a matter footnote time earlier a producer turns hit the ceiling into a big-screen blockbuster.
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Farrar, Straus leading Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses cherished Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown
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The 30 Best Biographies of All Time
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Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 21
Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that his work was “a kind of pursuit… writing about the pursuit of that fleeting figure, in such a way as to bring them alive in the present.”
At the risk of sounding cliché, the best biographies do exactly this: bring their subjects to life. A great biography isn’t just a laundry list of events that happened to someone. Rather, it should weave a narrative and tell a story in almost the same way a novel does. In this way, biography differs from the rest of nonfiction.
All the biographies on this list are just as captivating as excellent novels, if not more so. With that, please enjoy the 30 best biographies of all time — some historical, some recent, but all remarkable, life-giving tributes to their subjects.
If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great biographies out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized biography recommendation 😉
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1. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia
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The best biographies and memoirs of 2024
There are myriad ways to tell the story of a life, as shown by this year’s best biographies. Craig Brown’s doorstopper A Voyage Around the Queen (4th Estate), about the reign of Elizabeth II, dispenses with linear storytelling in favour of a patchwork of diary entries, letters, vignettes, second-hand anecdotes and even dreams (the writer Paul Theroux once dreamed of being nestled in Her Majesty’s bosom). The result is an unorthodox and wonderfully irreverent book which, alert to the absurdities of the monarchy, reveals as much about how others saw the Queen as the woman herself.
Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman (Virago) is a rich and riveting portrait of another seemingly unknowable aristocrat. The daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, Harriman was, says Purnell, a canny diplomat who exerted remarkable influence on mid-20th-century politics through her three marriages and numerous affairs with powerful men (her lovers included a prince, a shipping magnate and a celebrated US broadcaster). Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz(Atlantic Books) is a luminous joint biography of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, inspired by newly unearthed correspondence between the two writers that reads like “a lovers’ quarrel”. Anolik trac