Currently, I’m reading a nice one called Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero. It’s lightly written, and very enjoyable. I didn’t realize that Ness was more Cleveland’s hero than Chicago’s. Or that he had a squad called the Unknowns in Cleveland as opposed to the Untouchables in Chicago.
Other people whose biographies I’ve read include:
Davy Crockett
Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson
Vlad the Impaler
George Washington
More Abraham Lincoln ones than any other biography.
Ulysses S. Grant
James K. Polk
Al Capone
Dean O’Banion
Livia, wife of Augustus of Rome
Ignaz Semmelweis, the guy who noticed that washing hands was a good thing for doctors to do before delivering babies.
Aaaaand others that I can’t think of right now.
Whose biographies have you read? Feel free to name a specific book if it was a particularly good one.
Truman
Andrew Jackson
John Adams
George Washington (not quite done)
Florence Harding
Frances Perkins
Gen. George Thomas
Einstein (my grandfather and I are mentioned in it).
Benjamin Britten (my grandfather and father are mentioned in it; Britten was for a brief time in love with my father)
Churchill and Gandhi (a joint biography; the two men’s lives were intertwined in many ways).
I’ve read both and I didn’t count it. That’s more of a fictionalized history written by an author posing as an auto-biographer. Both excellent books though.
I am hopelessly addicted to celebrity biographies, autobiographies, and tell-alls. Hopelessly. Whether weighty tomes on the lives of Montgomery Cliff or Bette Davis, or ‘My Husband, Rock Hudson’ by arranged marriage dummy Phyllis Gates. Frank Sinatra’s butler wrote a book. Stewart Granger has a good one. Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis, Peter Lawford - quite similar lifestyles of the rich and famous are revealed in these last three. Doris Day led quite a sad life, as so many others.
Well, they’re heavily based on the works of Suetonius, which I guess is the closest we’ll ever come to a contemporary history of Rome, though they were written long after the Julio-Claudians ruled and were somewhat biased.
Lincoln
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Both Roosevelt presidents
Eleanor Roosevelt
John Speke
Richard Francis Burton (explorer, not actor)
Stanley
Livingston
Mungo Park
Percy Fawcett (explorer)
Edmund Hillary
Patton
Roy Orbison
Cynthia Twist (John Lennon’s first wife, autobiography)
Storm Large (singer, autobiography)
King Leopold
William Dampier
Captain James Cook
Magellan
Richard and John Lander (explorers)
Gordon Laing (explorer)
Solomon Northrup
George Custer
John Wesley Powell
Shackleton
I’m in the process of reading BLM’s memoir. No, not “Black Lives Matter” or “Bureau of Land Management”, but “Bernard Law Montgomery”. He’s pretty insufferable. I understand why so many Americans hated him during the war.
I read mostly historical biographies. I just finished one about Victoria’s childhood, beginning with the death of Princess Charlotte and the mad dash to produce another heir for the throne, and ending with Victoria’s marriage to Albert. There is apparently a sequel by the same author about the early years of the V&A marriage I want to get hold of.
At Chatsworth this spring, I picked up a nice, big biography of Arbella Stuart.
I have Antonia Fraser’s biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, the wives of Henry VIII, and Charles II. Also an older book about life of the Duchess of Hamilton.