Best biography
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Reading the Best Biographies of All Time
I’m an investment banker, private pilot and avid fan of American history. inom also enjoy Thai food, camping and anything containing chocolate. And somehow I’ve ended up with a flower farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains…
About twenty years ago I began traveling overseas frequently and found myself with countless unproductive hours on long-haul flights. To fill the time inom read everything by Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. Then inom turned to great biographies.
I started searching for the best books covering history’s most fascinating people: famous explorers, entertainers, sports figures and other colorful personalities. But inom quickly focused on a genre which consumed almost seven years of my life: presidential biographies.
In 2012, I began reading the 240 best presidential biographies I could find, starting with George Washington. For the past ten years that journey has been documented at www.bestpresidentialbios.com.
I finished the first
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Reading the Best Biographies of All Time
King: A Life
by Jonathan Eig
688 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: May 2023
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” (2005) and “Ali: A Life” (2017).
Until now, David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of MLK (published in 1986) 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 200 members of King’s orbit and inner-circle.
Although Eig’s biography is subst
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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, by Tom Reiss
You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, the 1844 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 Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013, and it’s only a matter of time before a filmmaker turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.
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