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31 January 2008
What's the most interesting biography you've read?
I think, that sympathetic biography of John Adams by McCullough.
In all other accounts of that period, he comes off as the biggest twit ever, but McCullough fleshed him out at bit, while at the same time not glossing over his twitatude that much.
I'm in the middle of reading two memoir-ish things, Slash, by the former Guns 'n' Roses guitarist (and a ghostwriter, natch), and Gang Leader For a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh, whose work was the inspiration for the crack-gang chapter in Freakonomics. Venkatesh's book is better than Slash's in pretty much every way.
I don't read a lot of biography or anything, but Kate Remembered was very nice in audio form. The guy who played the foot-shopping plastic surgeon in Kiss The Girls read it. Katharine Hepburn is by far the preferred Hepburn 'round these parts.
I don't like autobigraphies that much but I love biographies. I seem to like biographies about writers more than any others. My favorite so far has been the one about Honore de Balzac, but I'm not sure which one I read, as there seems to be three of them. I think I still have it and when I get home I'll check it out. He was quite the character - a true eccentric.
I'm currently reading Duchamp's bio by Calvin Tomkins. Not through it enough to really comment on it, but everything I heard about it said it was great. So yeah.
That's a tough one. Your question makes me realize how many I've read (and liked). One of the most interesting was that of Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Rose was actually the one who edited, re-wrote, and shaped her mother's reminiscences into what we know as the Little House books. But she was also an activist right-wing libertarian who used (and changed) elements of her mother's life story to make the Ingalls family appear more self-sufficient and self-reliant than they were, minimizing the role of government land-grant programs, food support, welfare, and charitable aid they received. The biography compared Laura's prose with revisions by Rose and you wouldn't believe the changes in both sense and art.
She was an interesting gal, Rose; - a journalist and a world traveler.
It's not exactly a biography (I'm not sure what you'd call it, actually), but I'm extremely fond of Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson.
In the more traditional biography category, I really like Mary Lovell's The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family. And Meredith Daneman's bio of Margot Fonteyn that came out a few years ago.
which is extremely long but quite enjoyable. Well-written. It's got all that there fancy literary stuff and it also includes such heart-warming anecdotes as:
*the time Faulkner's wife beat the shit out of him with a croquet mallet for cheating on her.
*the infamous "Television is for (people of African descent)" comment
*Humphrey Bogart's attempts to make sense of the dialogue Faulkner wrote for him.
The three volume Robert Caro biography of LBJ is fascinating and a really good read--if a bit of a commitment. I also enjoyed The First American about Ben Franklin. Readable, likeable and full of all the important stuff about early U.S. that you never learn in school.
The most interesting was a thick biography of Sigmund Freud, bought as part of a dollar box at a charity book fair, that blew my mind when I was 11 or 12.
Just about anything about Zelda Fitzgerald I can get my hands on (because she and her husband were so damned interesting!), and I really liked Savage Beauty, the biography about Edna St. Vincent Millay. Again, more for the subject matter than the quality of the writing.
Miles Davis' Autobiography was pretty amazing. But, I'm a fan of jazz and his, and it was interesting to hear it straight from his mouth. Especially about the period where he basically disappeared from the scene. Crazy stuff.
The biography of James Tiptree Jr. is utterly fascinating. James Tiptree Jr. was really Alice B. Sheldon who successfully conquered the gender barrier in the military and then science fiction writing.
I liked "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed", also about Edna St. Vincent Millay. I've got a copy of "Savage Beauty" here, but haven't tackled it yet, so I can't give a comparison. In general I haven't been that big on biographies.
Persepolis was also good. I liked the idea of "Japanese Death Poems" more than I liked the reality of the book. But I'm probably just not enough into Japanese Poetry to really get them. I liked the recent Steve Martin memoir, though I understand that many people don't, and can see why.
The most recent bio of Natalie Wood was good. I loooooove Agatha Christie's autobiography. Any comedian's memoirs are usually good, unless completely ghostwritten and melodramatic.
Heh. One of the first I ever read was "No One Here Gets Out Alive" when I was about 11 or 12. Kinda warped my head a little, I think, but suggested I should read the oft-maligned "On the Road" as soon as I could find it.
Others that I have read and really loved include "This Wheel's On Fire" by Levon Helm, about his life with and without The Band. I also enjoyed the first volume of Dylan's Chronicles. I did enjoy Slash's bio too.
Graham Chapman's "A Liar's Autobiography Volume VI" is a good read with his background in the early days with the Cambridge Footlights to Monty Python, an honest look at his alcoholism and on coming out and being a "pouf" (in his words). I also liked Bob Geldof's "Is That It?", growing up in Ireland, the punk rock thing with The Boomtown Rats all the way up to Live Aid.
"Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life Of Brion Gysin", WS Burroughs' collaborator, and a great background on the Beat Poets in France and elsewhere. Admittedly it could be better written, but I liked the insights and background enough to overlook that.
Capote was a great. Every other page has at least a mention of some other notable person, so it's like being backstage to the literary scene and the social set during their last big heyday and reign. It's also so readable it's the last book i think i tore into and absorbed so quickly and with such gratification.
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