skopia
The finest life written of an American coach. Maraniss takes Lombardi from a Brooklyn butcher's son studying for the priesthood to the Packers dynasty, and shows what the discipline cost his family.
The artist Robert Irwin gave up the image, then the frame, then the object, until only seeing was left. Weschler recorded three decades of his talk, and reading it retrains your eye.
Five ships left Seville in 1519 and one came home three years later with eighteen men aboard. Zweig tells the circumnavigation as the story of an obstinate will set against an unmapped ocean.
Chris McCandless gave his savings to charity, burned the cash in his wallet, and walked into the Alaskan bush in April 1992. Krakauer refuses to file him under either fool or saint.
A shy Memphis truck driver walks into Sun Records and remakes American music. Guralnick carries Elvis to the Army with no sneer and no myth. Bob Dylan said it cancels out all others.
Four generations of one bank, from Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Chernow's Pierpont Morgan locks New York's bankers in his library until they agree to end the Panic of 1907.
Lee refuses the fragile madwoman of legend and gives back a working writer: funny, ambitious, hard on her friends. She holds the breakdowns and the novels together and lets neither explain the other.
The finest modern life of a poet. Holmes walks Coleridge's roads and brings him back talking, from "The Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's company to the laudanum and the sailing for Malta.
Born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, Hamilton reached New York at seventeen, wrote most of the Federalist Papers, and built American finance. Chernow drives it all toward the duel.
Hitler kept lazy hours and rarely issued a written order. Kershaw explains the machine anyway: officials across Germany competing to anticipate what the Führer wanted, radicalizing policy from below into genocide.
A minor German princess arrives in Russia at fourteen, deposes her husband eighteen years later, and rules for thirty-four. Massie writes her from the inside, drawing on her own candid memoirs.
Antarctic pack ice crushes their ship in 1915, leaving twenty-eight men on a drifting floe. Shackleton sails an open boat eight hundred miles for help. Lansing reconstructed it all from the crew's diaries.
Each chapter opens with Stalin on his dacha floor in 1953, unattended for hours. From the archives Khlevniuk builds the rest: a micromanager who read everything and signed the death lists himself.
Having written six volumes of Churchill's official biography, Gilbert put the whole life into one book, from the cavalry charge at Omdurman to 1965, drawing on twenty years inside the papers.
The standard one-volume Lincoln, and the method is severe: Donald allows him only the information he actually had when he acted. Out of it comes colossal ambition joined to a fatalist's passivity.
McCullough gives the difficult, honest second president his full size: a marriage to Abigail conducted in letters across an ocean, and a friendship with Jefferson that broke and was repaired in old age.
An asthmatic Manhattan boy remakes himself as a Dakota rancher, a Rough Rider, and the youngest president in American history. Morris swept the major prizes for this volume alone.
Du Bois took the first Harvard doctorate given a Black American, wrote The Souls of Black Folk, and helped found the NAACP. Lewis won Pulitzers for this volume and for its sequel.
The marble Washington was a performance: Chernow finds a man of hot temper, sharp ambition, and constant calculation underneath, and follows him from surveying to Mount Vernon's slave quarters to the presidency.
Einstein's physics taken as seriously as Einstein's life. Pais knew him at Princeton, could follow the mathematics, and produced the account against which every later scientific life of Einstein is measured.