There are documentaries and memoirs out there on a bunch of subjects, but there are two subjects in particular that fascinate me:
Long-term kidnapping victims - The crime of being locked up and tortured, hidden from the world, and only one or two people in the world knowing where you are is the singular most horrible thing I can think of. Because it’s so horrible, I am incredibly curious to hear how someone mentally copes with the situation, such that they come out the other end alive, healthy, and not completely broken.
Conjoined twins - Having your own body is one of the most fundamental concepts of existing as a human. So to hear about what everyday life is like for a person whose body is attached to someone else’s fascinates me.
So many actors had surprisingly non-standard childhoods. Many actors you associate with one country were actually born in another.
E.g., Liv Ullman was born in Tokyo. Jayne Meadows was born to missionary parents in China and didn’t learn English until her family moved back to the US.
One of the more interesting family background takes is Brian George. Babu on Seinfeld and Raj’s father in The Big Bang Theory. He’s on my mind since he was on the episode of Hill Street Blues we watched the other night. From IMDb:
“… Brian George was born in Jerusalem to Jewish parents in July 1952. Both of his parents had immigrated to Israel from India. His father was born in Iraq but raised in Bombay and his mother was born and raised in India. When Brian was a year old, the family immigrated to London. Brian attended an all-boys school in London. In 1966, the family moved to Toronto and he attended public high school, followed by the University of Toronto, where he became involved in theater. … He joined The Second City, where he trained with comedy greats including John Candy, among others.”
So your standard Jewish Arab-Indian Israeli British Canadian. Got it.
Perhaps there is something about having an “international” early life that leads to more plasticity which helps in acting.
I mentioned recently the tale of Merian Cooper, the guy who came up with King Kong. His own story is worthy of a Hollywood Epic.
I am fascinated with serial killers, and what led up to them being the way they are. One such story is told on Investigation Discovery channel, narrated by the brother of Glen Rogers, who confessed to the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, as well as killing many other people. I also like stories about the Dahmers and Green River Killers of the world.
Harriet Tubman has always stuck with me. As a young girl she was struck in the head with an iron, and was narcoleptic afterward (or cataplectic?) For the rest of her life, all those trips leading the Underground Railroad, there was a danger she’d fall over asleep at any minute. It’s the kind of terrifying condition that could make a person agoraphobic, but instead she was traveling in the rough, shepherding fugitives. Amazing.
Captain Michael A. “Hell Roaring Mike” Healy, the former slave who rose the ranks to become captain of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear, the forerunner of the US Coast Guard.
Healy’s story was retold in James Michener’s novel Alaska, and I have always thought it would make a rollicking good movie.
I love to read diaries. The one I like best are by women in wartime. This started with Ken Burns use of them in his PBS specials. I have read many I’m always looking for them. I am currently reading book about Queen Elizabeth (1st). It is partly based on a bunch of her ladies-in-waiting and close contacts and diaries and letters of the time. Very interesting. There is a good book on Tolstoy, based on diaries. I haven’t found it yet. I have just read excerpts.
I generally like biographies. But, like the OP I like to read about people who have harrowing life stories and medical issues.
I am fascinated by cult survivors. I am pretty strong willed and find it fascinating the things people can get talked into doing. When I first learned of the term flirty fishing, I was reading first hand survivor accounts for days.
Ditto on the serial killers, cult survivors and musicians. I also like to read the life stories of celebrities I admired as a kid. Cary Grant, Paul Newman and Debbie Reynolds are some examples. I also like stories of people who have survived some horrific ordeal, like the neurologist who had a stroke as a young woman, and the guy who had to cut his own arm off to free himself. I also love stories of people who are successful despite a tough start in life, like The Glass Castle and Hillbilly Elegy. I have read a lot of “end of life” memoirs, written either by the person dying (like When Breath Becomes Air and The Bright Hour), or the caretaker (like Bettyville). Also books by people whose professional achievements are interesting to me, and that runs the gamut from chefs, restaurateurs, medical professionals, travel industry people, and mortuary/funeral people of all things. I am also almost always up for a good dog themed memoir.
I like I.D. because they do a lot of stories about women criminals, who I find much more interesting than men criminals mainly because it’s often so unexpected when something terrible turns out to have been done by a…WOMAN.
One of my interests is medical history, and people who make it are almost always fascinating to me, whether they set out to do so or not.
The experiences of the early astronauts, especially during the Apollo program and Skylab. Andrew Chaikin’s book on the subject is the definitive history of their story, and reading it changed my life. I now fly airplanes for a living (applied to NASA a while back and got a very short, but polite letter in response).
Great intellectual accomplishments by people of limited formal education.
George McJunkin is one of my favorites. Born a slave, he became a cowboy, and was observant enough to put together evidence that completely reversed theories about the origin of native Americans.
H M Tomlinson was a young London shippingg clerk who had the chance to sigh aboard a sea-going thip that explored the Amazon, and wrote an amazing book about his adventures.
Daniel Lewin - Had trouble as a child, but then grew up to join Israel’s elite commando unit Sayeret Matkal where we was an officer. After doing that he went to college to study technology, and ended up a grad student at MIT. He helped create algorithms that kept the internet going when traffic was high. At the peak of his wealth, he was worth many (possibly hundreds) of millions of dollars on paper.
But he was on flight 11 on 9/11. Supposedly he was the first person killed that day because he tried to use his commando training to take down the terrorists. Had he not died, maybe he would’ve been one of the silicon valley great entrepreneurs. Supposedly the research he helped pioneer is why the internet didn’t crash on 9/11.
Black WW2 and Korean war veterans who defended the civil rights movements from domestic terrorists in the south - When people think of the civil rights movement they think of MLK and peaceful protesters. But part of the movement was black military veterans who had weapons and weren’t afraid to brandish and use them. People got sent to Europe in WW2 where they killed people, slept with white women, etc and then they were asked to go back to the south and accept being submissive and they weren’t having it.
A guy named C.O. Chinn may not have been a veteran, but he took no shit (he was born in Mississippi in 1919) and he let it be known if any harm came to the SNCC while they fought for civil and voting rights, or if the KKK came to intimidate them that he’d be there with his rifles, pistols and shotguns to take as many down as he needed. I’m reading stories about black veterans standing guard outside meeting houses where volunteers got together to discuss how to register people to vote, and it is really a delightful visual image of them truly acting as what the military and police are supposed to be. An armed force for good.