From Ulysses S. Grant to Juneteenth, Sylvia Plath to James Baldwin, here are biographies that make you think again about famous historical events and trailblazers.
CHRISTINA HARCARJUNE 7, 2021
I was pondering—as one does—what makes history come alive, and I noticed listeners often say, “This is the biography X deserves!” when they love a title. Sometimes biographies are about multiple people or a famous event, but a great biography manages through deep research and narrative arc to provide a fresh take on a familiar subject. Here, I’ve curated my favorite biographies that reveal a “household name” in a whole new way in audio; all of them feature rich historic detail and unpausable, stellar narration. Enjoy!
Jesus Christ
Zealot
By Reza Aslan
Zealot
A fascinating, provocative, and meticulously researched biography that challenges long-held assumptions about the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth….
To look at the historical Jesus within the context of Roman-occupied Palestine seems to fascinate everyone: Christians, atheists, and adherents to other religions. The author’s narration adds to the experience of Zealot.
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
By Jack Weatherford
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400….
It took an anthropologist—who spent years learning Mongolian, living on the steppes for a part of each year, and listening for the truth of Genghis Khan’s life—to flesh out a biography of a man whose life may actually have been bigger than his myth.
George Washington
You Never Forget Your First
By Alexis Coe
You Never Forget Your First
With irresistible style and warm humor, You Never Forget Your First combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have listeners – including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads – inhaling every word….
The father of our country, up close and personal. Alexis Coe delves into primary sources to assemble a picture of Washington that includes but is not limited to the truth about those wooden teeth, his complex and loving relationship with family members, the enslaved people he owned, and of course his political and military wisdom.
Ulysses S. Grant
Grant
By Ron Chernow
Grant
Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant….
The Civil War didn’t win itself, people. Grant was a brilliant military supply problem-solver who inspired the loyalty of those he commanded, and he was an underrated president too. Ron Chernow’s prose and Mark Bramhall’s narration are both sublime!
Juneteenth
On Juneteenth
By Annette Gordon-Reed
On Juneteenth
The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth’s integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Texas native….
Almost everyone has heard of Juneteenth, but it took Annette Gordon-Reed’s essays to drive home the deep and multifaceted meaning of the holiday. Growing up in Texas, she shares how Juneteenth history is a part of her state’s, and our nation’s, history.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Prairie Fires
By Caroline Fraser
Prairie Fires
Since her wholesome familial autobiographies are almost universally read and nearly synonymous with her name, you might think you know all there is to know about Laura Ingalls Wilder. But through the unfiltered eye of an outsider, Prairie Fires brings the dramatic and tumultuous life of America’s most famous pioneer girl into full light for the first time. As the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series, author Caroline Fraser is perhaps more familiar with Ingalls Wilder than anyone else alive. Meanwhile, narrator Christina Moore’s broad background in children’s lit (you may recognize her as the voice behind classics like Practical Magic, Go Ask Alice, and Julie of the Wolves) makes her the perfect selection to illuminate the woman behind one of the world’s most treasured storybook collections.
I love the Little House books, although they aren’t perfect. Prairie Fires explores how the real Ingalls family was playing a pioneer game they couldn’t win, and how Laura Ingalls Wilder overcame and transmuted her personal grief into beloved, and flawed, works of fiction.
Winston Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile
By Erik Larson
The Splendid and the Vile
John Lee is known for narrating some epic books: Ken Follet’s Kingsbridge novels, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. He’s a narrator, actor, and producer who has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine. With over 500 audiobooks under his belt, he has plenty of experience narrating everything from epic fantasy to fascinating nonfiction.
I tried not to be a fan of this book (I was Churchill-ed out, I guess), but Editor Kat’s interview with Erik Larson, and John Lee’s narration, brought out the greatness of the story. I got chills when I listened to Churchill’s 1941 Christmas Eve speech (included in the audiobook), and to know what was behind it.
Nazi Scientist Diaspora
Operation Paperclip
By Annie Jacobsen
Operation Paperclip
Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into one of the most complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secrets of the 20th century….
Annie Jacobsen draws upon declassified American and German documents to sketch out Operation Paperclip, the government program to repatriate (formerly?) Nazi scientists from the defunct Third Reich to America after World War II.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing: The Enigma
By Andrew Hodges
Alan Turing: The Enigma
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis….
The genius of Alan Turing is as much about what he overcame as about what he accomplished. Bonus: This is the book upon which the film was based!
Henrietta Lacks
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
By Rebecca Skloot
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences….
Henrietta Lacks wasn’t a household name when I was growing up, but she is now, thanks to this riveting bio. It traces the all-too-brief life of a poor Black mother with cancer, whose cells were used without her consent to pave the way for breakthroughs from the polio vaccine to cancer treatments.
Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg
By Anne Sebba
Ethel Rosenberg
New York Times best-selling author Anne Sebba’s moving biography of Ethel Rosenberg, the wife and mother whose execution for espionage-related crimes defined the Cold War and horrified the world….
Executed after her conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage (not even actual espionage!), Ethel Rosenberg was more than a possible spy. Through her prison correspondence and other primary sources, she comes to life as a wife, a mother, an idealist, and a tragic personal story.
Sylvia Plath
Red Comet
By Heather Clark
Red Comet
The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art….
Red Comet was a revelation to me, the first biography of Sylvia Plath that centered the story on her artistic development, not her mental illness. It was a joy to get to know the poet as the beloved daughter of an immigrant family, an earnest aspiring artist, and—to paraphrase Virginia Woolf—“a mind that consumed all impediments” in her art.
James Baldwin
Begin Again
By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Begin Again
James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race….
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. wrote so much more than a mere biography of James Baldwin. His appreciation for Baldwin’s crucible in the “after-times” of post-civil rights America taught me a lot about Baldwin’s life, and even more about how Baldwin’s lived experience can inform my own path as an ordinary citizen striving for a just society.
Charles Manson
Chaos
By Tom O’Neill, Dan Piepenbring
Chaos
Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O’Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up….
Helter Skelter was a great story, but it’s not the end of the story, or even the whole story! Chaos puts Manson in context against the backdrop of a drug-soaked youth culture, the Hollywood power structure, and CIA investigations. 20 years in the making and worth the wait!
Jimmy Carter
His Very Best
By Jonathan Alter
His Very Best
Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure….
Jonathan Alter collected thousands of hours of interviews with the Carter family and colleagues to assemble a rich, evenhanded, groundbreaking look at the life of a complex president. Amazingly, there’s no other comprehensive bio that covers Carter’s early life, his Navy career, his presidency, and his post-presidential humanitarian contributions. This one sounds like a novel.
AIDS
And the Band Played On
By Randy Shilts
And the Band Played On
And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly….
Victor Bevine’s narration brings to life the widespread grief and hard-won triumphs of the era when AIDS burst upon the world scene. Randy Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science, politics, public health, and the gay community who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced.
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
By Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
From the author of the best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive biography of Steve Jobs….
Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson explores the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
Summitting Mount Everest
Into Thin Air
By Jon Krakauer
Into Thin Air
Snowscape
The best-selling personal account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of Into the Wild. Written with emotional clarity and supported by his unimpeachable reporting, Krakauer’s frank eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.
Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author who was there (and luckily safe), Jon Krakauer. It’s the comprehensive “biography” of a tragedy, start to finish.
Columbine
Columbine
By Dave Cullen
Columbine
“The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror…” So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of “spectacle murders”. It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers….
What really happened on April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we “know” is wrong. It wasn’t about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on the scene and spent 10 years on this book, which is widely recognized as the definitive account of the Columbine High School massacre.