skopia
Robert Moses was never elected to anything and remade New York for forty years, throwing up bridges and expressways and flattening the neighborhoods in their way. Caro shows exactly how it was done.
Castrated rather than executed for defending a general, Sima Qian lived to finish his history: twenty-five centuries of China told through emperors, assassins, and merchants. The portraits are alive on the page.
Boswell met Samuel Johnson, who had written the English dictionary, in 1763 and wrote down his talk for twenty years. Johnson steps off the page as somebody you have actually met.
Vasari was a working painter who knew Michelangelo. His lives of the Italian artists, from Cimabue onward, mix workshop technique with pure gossip, and gave us most of what we believe about genius.
Secretary to the emperor Hadrian, Suetonius wrote the lives of Julius Caesar and eleven emperors after him, omens, gossip, last words and all. Our picture of Nero comes straight from these pages.
Plutarch pairs each famous Greek with a Roman, Alexander with Caesar, and judges them, holding that a jest can reveal a man better than a battle. Shakespeare took three plays out of it.
Four Victorian idols go under Strachey's scalpel: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, the headmaster Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon at Khartoum. The malice is so elegant that English biography never went back to reverence.
Orlando starts as a boy at Queen Elizabeth's court and ends as a woman in 1928 London, changing sex without fuss. Woolf wrote it for her lover Vita Sackville-West, and the joy shows.
Ten books of gossip, wills, deathbed jokes and doctrine, written in the third century and now the main reason we know what Epicurus taught or what Diogenes the Cynic said to Alexander.
Branch follows Martin Luther King from the Montgomery bus boycott to Birmingham, moving between black church basements, the Kennedy White House, and the FBI, and ten years become full American history.
The novelist Anthony Burgess called this the greatest literary biography of the century. Ellmann reconstructs Joyce day by day, the debts and the eye operations and the exact Dublin talk that became Ulysses.
Rockefeller controlled ninety percent of American oil refining by the time he was forty, tithed to his church weekly, and saw no contradiction. Chernow makes him legible without absolving him.
Three years of humiliation as Kennedy's vice president, then Dallas, and Johnson seizes a stunned government. Caro tracks it week by week to the civil rights bill the South had blocked for decades.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.