Both of those sound enormously intriguing.
Oh yes, I think he wrote two books. Wonderful stories about the golden age of Hollywood, John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone - the lifestyles and the making of classic movies.
Also the author of two bios, Shelley Winters wrote extensively on her life, training as a method actor, her early days as a party girl with Marilyn Monroe and Yvonne de Carlo, her marriages, her films…Also a hugely entertaining read! (She was working on a third volume. She was on a talk show when she said this, but you could tell she was really very ill at the time, and she did die before the third.)
My three cents:
John Cleese- So Anyway… is the funniest book I’ve read in years. Highly recommended.
Michael Palin- all three volumes of his Diaries are well worth the time it takes to read them.
Yes. It’s very good, made even more so by knowing how complete and successful his recovery was.
Bring On The Empty Horses is the companion book. Both are hilarious.
I’m a big fan of William Least Heat-Moon. I suppose his books might be considered “travel writing” but taken altogether they provide a in-depth account of the man and his times.
I recently read Ron Chernow’s bio of Alexander Hamilton, and that one is great. David McCullough’s biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams are great. It’s been a long time, but I remember enjoying No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins’ bio of Jim Morrison (and I think the basis for the movie The Doors?).
I really enjoyed the Sacks autobiography, and found it much easier to read than his neurology books.
Tom Brokaw’s book about his battle with multiple myeloma is also fascinating, and he admits that he’s much more fortunate than most victims of this horrific and incurable disease, on many levels.
On a less optimistic note, both of the books by the Cleveland kidnapping survivors are excellent. Michelle Knight’s book was much harder to read, because she had been failed by her family and society from the day she was born until the day she escaped.
Here’s the book by the other two escapees.
For political bios, I’ll second Team of Rivals and Washington, A Life, both interesting and well done looks at two of our greatest presidents (and their cabinets and confidantes in the case of Team of Rivals).
For all around fun, I’ll second Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, and third Keith Richards’ Life, both of which are compelling and varied looks at very interesting men. I’ll also throw in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Reiss’ *The Black Count *about Alexandre Dumas’ grandfather, a nigh-superhuman black man who became a military general and achieved the highest honors and position in a still-racist time and society, and Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity as original contributions not yet mentioned on the “fun” front.
If you’re interested in titans of industry, I’d recommend Chernow’s Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller.
First Family, Terror, Revenge, Murder, and the birth of the American Mafia is semi-biographical of Guiseppe Morello and the Morello crime family and pretty good too, although it isn’t strictly a biography all the way through. Along similar lines, I also recommend Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford - a fascinating and scholarly-grounded work that’s interesting to anyone interested in the Khan, the Mongols, and that period of history.
Like David Niven’s, Tony Curtis’s autobiography is a good read. So is Nick Tosches’ biography of Dean Martin.
Aviators, scientists, and inventors have always been big heroes of mine. My favorite biographies are those of the Wright Brothers, Galileo, and Thomas Edison.
The autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Malcolm X should be required reading in all American schools.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
I just finished this memoir by a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is not only a gripping story, but very beautifully written.
Do yourself a favor and seek it out.
From the Amazon website:
mmm
When I was in junior high, we had two sets of books in the house: one (my older brother’s) was biographies of great historical figures and the other (mine, presents from my dad) was biographies of great artists. The only two I recall reading all the way through were the ones on Peter the Great and Leonardo da Vinci.
I actually read the one on Peter the Great so much that the spine of the book was visibly different from the others’ when it was put back on the shelf. This annoyed my brother no end when he got back from his four years in the Air Force! :mad:
I’m not a huge biography reader, I think I’ve only read two or three…best one has to be Mick Foley’s books (I count them all as one), the first one being called “Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks”,
I’m surprised it took 28 posts before the first mention of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. The man actually led the life that Heinlein’s protagonists only dream of living.
I’m generally lukewarm about memoirs, but I also liked the Michael Palin diaries.
Concerning the same guy: I’d nominate Douglas Botting’s Gerald Durrell – The Authorised Biography – published 1999, a few years after Durrell’s death. I found it compulsive reading (Durrell was a childhood hero of mine). As well as my being greatly in sympathy with Durrell’s outlook and aims; in the biography, he comes across as a highly likeable and benign individual. And as one who was not at all, a hater of his own species – he liked people, and relished and appreciated the multiple aspects of “the human comedy”. He was just concerned about the huge and ever-increasing numbers of people on the planet, and their impact on it in an assortment of ways, often detrimental to other life-forms.
Count me as another backer too of the David Niven autobiography. Hugely entertaining.
I just read this myself. Have a box of Kleenex handy, because you will need it.
Here are two others that come to mind for me, and it’s pretty obvious that they are drastically different.
Motley Crue’s group autobiography, “The Dirt”, was one of the saddest books I have ever read. ETA And not just because Vince Neil’s 4-year-old daughter died from a particular vicious form of cancer, or rather, the futile attempt to treat it. It was really obvious to me almost from the first page that Vince and Nikki were horribly abused as children.
I started reading this book one year to the day after the picture on the back cover was taken (of Dr. Brantly climbing out of the ambulance, after which he walked into the hospital). I still can’t believe he did that! The book is both of their stories, and while they do talk about God and Jesus a lot, it has no preaching in it.
The autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. This book had more effect on the way I think as any other single book I’ve read (even Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman, the runner-up)
I first read an excerpt in my Dad’s college reader: it was once a significant enough book that it had that status. The first part of volume one (the part quoted, before he became a contentious political figure), is just beautiful. A just beautiful piece of writing about a fabulous childhood. It still influences what I want to be as a father. Later on, his university and work education inform my ideas of education. Finally, his reporting of politics grounds everything I’ve ever read since.
I’m just sorry he didn’t live to report on the Spanish Civil war and the denunciation of Stalin by Nikita Khrushchev: he’d already came to the same conclusion as George Orwell did in “Animal Farm” (1945), but from the other side, and not as a condemnation.
The Feynman book is a book I bought with my own money, when I was a student and didn’t have very much. Like him, I didn’t know a lot about society: unlike him, I’m not smart, good looking, and well-off: the stuff he learned as a scientist (by experimentaion, study, and reporting), I read about in that book.
The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Goodbye To All That, and Eden Express are great memoirs. I’d add John Graves’ Goodbye To A River, T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Hemingway’s Letters, and Col. David Hackworth’s About Face. I’m headed to Amazon to get the U.S. Grant book, what a quietly fascinating man…
The Grant autobio is free on Guttenburg
My favorite.