- in Grouped Reviews by Mal Warwick
Great biographies I’ve reviewed: my 10 favorites
I’ve read a lot of biographies since I began posting book reviews in January 2010. I’m listing here more than 50 that I can recommend, omitting many that underwhelmed me (in addition to others I couldn’t finish reading).
These books cover a wide range of both historical and contemporary figures, every one of them prominent in a significant way, from Cleopatra and Catherine the Great to Clarence Darrow, Allen Dulles, and Steve Jobs.
As you can see, most of these more than 50 biographies fall into a few categories that describe some of the topics I’m most interested in: espionage, science, business, and American history. The categories are arbitrary: many of these books fall into more than one. However, I chose just one for each book, not wanting to list any titles twice. Each title below is hyperlinked to my review.
Although I was forced to be somewhat arbitrary, my 10 favorite great biographies appear in the first list below. Those titles are later repeated in the four categories.
Within each of the five lists, titles appear in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names.
This post was updated on January 6, 2021.
Great biographies: my 10 favorites
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, by John A. Farrell
Jonas Salk: A Life, by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs
The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough
The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Munk
The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, by David Nasaw
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News — and Divided a Country, by Gabriel Sherman
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T. J. Stiles
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, by David Talbot
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, by Andrea Wulf
Great biographies: science
The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram, by Thomas Blass
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox
Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex, by Michael Hiltzik
Jonas Salk: A Life, by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs
The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic, by Ginger Strand
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, by Andrea Wulf
Great biographies: business
The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King, by Rich Cohen
The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers
From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives by Jeffrey E. Garten
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover from Great Success by Tracy Kidder
The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T. J. Stiles
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, by Ashlee Vance
Great biographies: American history
Pelosi, by Molly Ball
American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church, by Alex Beam
The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #4 of 5), by Robert A. Caro
Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary by Geoffrey Cowan
American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford by Roland de Wolk
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, by John A. Farrell
Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild
Freedom’s Detective: The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan and the Man Who Masterminded America’s First War on Terror by Charles Lane
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable
The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, by David Nasaw
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News — and Divided a Country, by Gabriel Sherman
Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, by Les Standiford
Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T. J. Stiles
America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century, by Gabriel Thompson
David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement, by Tom Turner
Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye
One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, by Tim Weiner
Great biographies: espionage
Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Scott Anderson
The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, by Kai Bird
Hitler’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Story by Richard Bassett
The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg by Nicholas Dawidoff
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone
Nancy Wake: The gripping true story of the woman who became the Gestapo’s most wanted spy by Peter FitzSimmons
King of Spies: The Dark Reign of an American Spymaster by Blaine Harden
The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer
Code Name: Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became World War II’s Most Highly Decorated Spy by Larry Loftis
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, by Ben MacIntyre
An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews
The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley
Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown by Jim Newton
Spies in Palestine: Love, Betrayal, and the Heroic Life of Sarah Aaronsohn by James Srodes
Agent Storm: My Life Inside Al Qaeda and the CIA, by Morten Storm, Paul Cruickshank, and Tim Lister
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, by David Talbot
Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller
Other outstanding biographies
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang—They shaped twentieth-century Chinese history
The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un by Anna Fifield
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, by Masha Gessen
Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness by Tracy Kidder
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie
The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Munk
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee
Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff
And So It Goes — Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, by Charles J. Shields
Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber
For further reading
You might also be interested in 20 top nonfiction books about history plus 80 other good books and Top 20 popular books for understanding American history.
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