BS: Your Favorite Biography

Subject: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Mickey191
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 05:11 PM

Name two or three of your favorite biographies and the reasons why you enjoyed them.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: GUEST,Canadienne
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 07:02 PM

There are just so many I hardly know where to start -

Just as a "classic" "Flushed with Pride - The story of Thomas Crapper" - a must for the "bathroom library"

"Turlough" by Brian Keenan - it does what it says on the cover "…evokes the terrors of the dark, the beauty of song, and the pain from which it springs….."

"Jacques Brel" by Alan Clayson - just because he's such a fantastic singer/songwriter

Could I also add some autobiographies…..

"An Awfully Big Adventure" by Beryl Bainbridge - a personal experience of "coming of age" in Liverpool in the 50s by an excellent writer


"Your Dinner's Poured Out" by Paddy Crosby - a boyhood in a Dublin that has disappeared

"A Ragged Schooling" by Robert Roberts - life in the streets of Industrial Salford before the First World War

I love these because they open up worlds we have forgotten or never knew……….

Thanks for the opportunity to share just a few Mickey

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 07:17 PM

Can't recall the title or author, but it was the life of Maxwell Perkins----the editor at Scribners for Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and others.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 07:18 PM

I think his last name was Berg...

Art

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Rapparee
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 07:22 PM

My favorite biography...hmmm...the one one I'm living is pretty good. I can't put it down!

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: DannyC
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 07:41 PM

"Theodore Rex" - Edmund Morris

"Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer" - John Mack Faragher

"Gladstone" - Roy Jenkins
"Parnell" - F.S.L. Lyons

"Robert Graves: Life on The Edge" - Miranda Seymour
"Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen" - Ira Nadal

"Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart" - John Guy

*********************************

Wonderful looks into the lives of various lunatics...

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Beer
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 07:57 PM

Errol Flynn

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: wysiwyg
Date: 05 Jun 07 - 09:24 PM

Art, that's one of my favorites too.

The bio of Robert Moses, who invented "authorities" as taxing bodies (port auth, bridge auth) and who wrote the book on using a non-elected position to grab total power. Moses also gave us pretty parkways along expressways. Also he was a master of writing legislation that had nifty little items that no one spotted at the time, that gave him and/or his progams amazing authority once the implementation phase kicked in. I used that technique to protect a grant I wrote from being subsumed in the business-as-usual BS of the org I worked for. Boy were people surprised when they discovered that they couldn't hijack that money for their own cronies-- and that I had done it on purpose, not as a newbie's error!

Another character in the bio is an innocent, harmless little old lady who sits in on big meeting quietly knitting away in the corner.... and then comes up later with the most amazing syntheses of everything that happened, and great advice on how to navigate around the roadblocks inherent in the power group in question.

~S~

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Joe Offer
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 03:14 AM

I really enjoyed Woody Guthrie: A Life, by Joe Klein. I started reading Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie, by Ed Cray, but it didn't grab my attention. The Klein biography is a good exploration into what made Woody tick. I question some of Klein's speculations about the effects of Woody's Huntington's Chorea - but the ties between the disease and the family's house fire problems are certainly fascinating.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 08:31 AM

Let's start with autobiographies. Some I really enjoyed were:

"The Ragman's Son" - Kirk Douglas
"My Wicked, Wicked Ways" - Errol Flynn
"Out On a Limb" (and several others by...) - Shirley MacLaine
"And a Voice to Sing With" - Joan Baez
"Chronicles" - Bob Dylan
"Samurai" - (the remarkable story of Japan's greatest surviving navy fighter ace of WWII, Saburo Sakai) (this one was co-written by Sakai and an American author)

There have been some rather good biographies of Bob Dylan too, Anthony Scaduto's being the first of them that was really notable. I ended up knowing so much about Bob after awhile that it was like he was my brother or something...

When I was a kid I really enjoyed reading Julius Caesar's account of his campaigns in Gaul too. For some reason I am fascinated by military history.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: fat B****rd
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 09:12 AM

All George Melly's memoirs. Human and entertaining.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 10:23 AM

I read a lot of biographies, but can't remember a single title! There are so many fantastic stories, like that of the pauper lad from Stratford-on Avon, or the aristocratic 18th century sisters, or the lady-in-waiting to Queen ...

I might just take a look in my library's catalogue & get back to you.

sandra

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Wesley S
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 10:50 AM

John Houston - An Open Book

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Rog Peek
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 03:26 PM

Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan
Such a clever, resourceful and ruthlessly patriotic man. He personified the term 'Larger than Life.'

Phil Ochs by Michal Schumacher
Phil Ochs by Marc Eliot
Talented, uncompromising, and in his own way patriotic. (Although J. Edgar was not convinced.) Unfortunately also a manic depressive at a time when there were not the treatments there are these days, so not a story with a happy end.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 03:34 PM

I would have to say Caro's book on Robert Moses. Long and very detailed---and yet detailed.

Another would be also very long detailed (not technically a bio)--WIlliam Shirer's --The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich.

One more new one to add to the list----also long, detailed, and you feel you know the subject personally---that would be Clay Eals---Steve Goodman---Facing The Music


Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Cool Beans
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 04:40 PM

I agree with Joe Offer's assessment of Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie biography. I reviewed it when it came out. The quote on the back cover of the paperback "What a life! What a book!" That's me. Deathless prose, huh?
I also recommend "Robert Frost" by Jay Parini.
I second DannyC on "Theodore Rex" (Theodore Roosevelt).

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 05:33 PM

Typo above re: Caro's book--"....long and very detailed...and very readable".

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: GUEST,Eouard
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 05:43 PM

Lyndon johnson and the American dream.
The author travelled wuth the foirmer president. The family did not endorse his biography. Sure gave an inside story about this guy.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Biography
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 06 Jun 07 - 05:53 PM

The Spike Milligan war diaries - 'Hitler, my part in his downfall' et al. Have me alternately laughing my ass off or sobbing my eyes out. "Plunger" Bailey's shows after lights out have had me removed from train carriages before now, for laughing so hard.

Although I've only just started reading it, 'The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid' by Bill Bryson has already gotten me several funny looks on the tube - it's hysterical too.

On a more serious note, Christopher Lee's autobiography - the man has so many difference facets to his life - such a wealth of experiences that he relates without glorifying the deeds or himself, something a lot of writers can't manage.

LTS