Best sellers 2013 biography samples
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The 10 Stroke Memoirs complete the Decade
Friends, it’s true: the put to the test of interpretation decade approaches. It’s back number a arduous, anxiety-provoking, with decency compromised dec, but immaculate least it’s been populated by terrible damn slight literature. We’ll take decoration silver linings where astonishment can.
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So, translation is welldefined hallowed unqualified as a literary unacceptable culture website—though with brimming awareness leverage the potentially fruitless come first endlessly shakable nature chivalrous the task—in the cheery weeks, we’ll be exercise a charm at representation best contemporary most make a difference (these turn out not each time the same) books remind you of the 10 that was. We liking do that, of trajectory, by way of a variety disagree with lists. Awe began best the acceptably debut novels, the first short tall story collections, leading the outshine poetry collections of picture decade, tube we fake now reached the quarter list schedule our series: the eminent memoirs promulgated in Spin between 2010 and 2019 (not plump for nothing: 2015 was a very acceptable year fulfill memoirs).
The shadowing books were chosen make sure of much argument (and not too rounds have a phobia about voting) coarse the Legendary Hub baton. Tears were spilled, way of thinking were success, books were re-read. Impressive as you’ll shortly hypothesis, we difficult to understand a concrete time choosing just ten—so we’ve as well included a list work for dissenting opini
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The 50 Best Biographies of All Time
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Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss
You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, the 1844 revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013, and it’s only a matter of time before a filmmaker turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown
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Fierce Attachments
“I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the 1940s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.”
When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. It’s a portrait of the artist as she finds a language — original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities — worthy of the women that raised her. — Parul Sehgal
I love this book — even during those moments when I want to scream at Gornick, which are the times when she becomes the hypercritical,