Best biographies of all times
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The 50 Best Biographies of All Time
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Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, bygd Tom Reiss
You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, the revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the pris Prize for Biography in , and it’s only a matter of time before a filmskapare turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, bygd 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 • King: A Life Jonathan Eig&#;s &#;King: A Life&#; was published early last year to nearly instant acclaim and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Biography earlier this year. Eig is a journalist and author previously best-known for his biographies &#;Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig&#; () and &#;Ali: A Life&#; (). Until now, David J. Garrow&#;s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of MLK (published in ) was widely considered the standard review of King&#;s life. Eig&#;s biography, however, is the first book on MLK built upon a towering base of newly released documents including thousands of pages of White House and FBI transcripts, oral histories recorded by MLK&#;s father and wife and interviews with more than members of King&#;s orbit and inner-circle. Although Eig&#;s biography is substantial, with pages of text, it could easily have been much longer. But whil
Reading the Best Biographies of All Time
by Jonathan Eig
pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: May