Biography category: 101305 books

Based on new sources—the definitive biography of Rasputin, with revelations about his life, death, and involvement with the Romanovs A century after his death, Grigory Rasputin remains fascinating: the Russian peasant with hypnotic eyes who befriended Tsar Nicholas II and helped destroy the...

ABOUT THE BOOK 2012 is a year of celebration -- festivals, readings, theatrical shows, films, seminars, tours -- all in honor of the great and inimitable Charles Dickens, on his 200th birthday. Dickens, one of the most celebrated authors in English-language history, was wildly popular...

The first biography of a major figure in early US and African American history A household name and unparalleled hero revered in every African American household, Benjamin Banneker was a completely self-taught mathematical genius who achieved professional status in astronomy, navigation, and...

Kathleen B. Jones brings a scholar's insights and a lyrical voice to this philosophical memoir about her thirty-year fascination with Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century's most controversial thinkers. With Arendt as her guide, Jones recounts stories from her own life interwoven with Arendt's life...

Written in the tradition of Stefan Zweig’s biographical studies, Haffner’s Churchill is a concise, effective, warts-and-all analysis of one of the giants of the twentieth century. Beginning with a brief history of the Churchill family, Haffner examines the future Prime Minister’s childhood;...

The long-awaited literary biography of the supreme "poets' poet" John Clare (1793-1864) is the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now...

“A shapely experiment, mixing memoir with biography . . . [Elizabeth Bishop] fuses sympathy with intelligence, sending us back to Bishop’s marvelous poems.” — Wall Street Journal Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become...

Author Rex Stout created one of the best-known and popular fictional detective characters in history, Nero Wolfe, along with Wolfe's unforgettable and talented personal assistant, Archie Goodwin. With Nero Wolfe, Stout has been described as a puppet master who manipulated a character until it took...

There's hardly a person who does not heard of Vladimir Putin. Most of the Western media describe him as an aggressor, dictator and autocrat. We are going to eliminate some of the common myths about Putin and see the "real Putin" behind the scenes.Vladimir Putin, though leader, excellent...

As Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Tolstoy experienced both glory and condemnation during their forty-eight-year marriage. She was admired as the muse and literary assistant to one of the world’s most celebrated novelists. But when in later years Tolstoy became a towering public figure and founded...

My Brother, Ernest Hemingway was the only biography Ernest knew about, and he was pleased with it?although he asked his brother to postpone publication while he was still alive. First published in 1962, Leicester’s biography provides a revealing and intimate portrait of one of the great writers of...

ABOUT THE BOOK "I am certain there is too much certainty in the world." Michael Crichton Born on October 23, 1942, John Michael Crichton was raised in Long Island, New York. His parents John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller Crichton also gave birth to two girls, Kimberley...

Biography of Sir Francis Bacon. From the first chapter: "The life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a pain to write or to read. It is the life of a man endowed with as rare a combination of noble gifts as ever was bestowed on a human intellect; the life of one withwhom the whole purpose of living and...

In an astonishing feat of literary detection, one of the most provocative critics of our time and the author of In the Freud Archives and The Purloined Clinic offers an elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography. In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath...