Awesome Biographies.....

Finest (most readable) autobiography by an actor that I've ever read is The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven.

I'll think of some others in a bit.

GRANDMERE
"Grandmere" (accents?) by one of Eleanor Roosevelt's grandsons. Well, his name is on it, but the ghostwriter is truly a fine author. Then, there's "The Origin" by Irving Stone (I think). It's the somewhat fictionalized story of Charles Darwin. Brimming with historical facts. Incredibly well-written! I'll be back if others come to mind.

That was good, and so was his other one, "Bring on the Empty Horses."

Since it is in my lifetime, I think I would like to help write a biography of the life of Bill Clinton. He has done a lot, and some of it is questionable, but that just makes a book more fun to read.
Of course I have to wait until he is through living it. (and I hope I out live him---cos accidents happen)

Most all I have read is because I HAD to. And then make a book report on it. Lincoln was good.

"Lincoln," by Gore Vidal, although it was very slightly fictionalized.

Maya Angelou's ongoing autobiography starting with "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Carl Sandburg's book on Lincoln is far superior to Gore Vidal's.

The biography of Oscar Wilde, it was a long time ago, but I think it was the one written by Richard Ellman.

Really enjoyed reading Doris Lessing's 2 (so far) biographies. It was interesting matching the facts of her life with her novels.

I am quite familiar with her work Msolga......
recently read a book which she wrote about
mid-life......can't remember its title though.

I recently read the biographies of two Canadian
artists....Harold Town and Doris McCarthy....
As you say, the facts of their lives and their
art were most interesting.....

Speaking of Irving Stone, I think his "Lust for Life," the biographical novel of Van Gogh, is his crown jewel.

I have a special place in my heart for "Lust for Life". My father was not a big reader until his later years, he had to leave school young to work the farm. The first book I remember him absolutely loving was "Lust for Life".

"Rembrandt's Jews"
Our book club is reading Steven Nadler's "Rembrandt's Jews" for the month of July. Some of us have finished reading it ("your's truly," included). The first half is principally about Rembrandt. Well done and full of some "surprising" historical facts. Especially about why the Dutch so enthusiastically welcomed to Holland the resettlement of the Spanish Jews. No, I won't give it away. Worth a read for those into art and art history. [/color]

_Travels_, the Autobiography of Michael Crichton

I haven't read it, but the biography of Khrushchev is supposed to be good. It was written several years ago, but it just received the Pulitzer Prize.

No fan of this genre should miss the Autobiography of Bienvenuto Cellini, the picaresque sculptor and silversmith of early 16th century Rome. He is a remarkable character and his, often boastful, story offers first hand descriptions of the sack of Rome by Charles V's army, descriptions of the French court under Francis I, and impressions of contemporaries, including Michaelangelo.

A sentimental favorite is the first of three volumes of Maxim Gorky's autobiography, titled "My Childhood". Priceless impressions of his boyhood in late 19th century Russia.

Finally for something more modern (or less ancient) how about the Journals Of John Maynard Keynes, the economist, who was also an advisor to Lloyd George during the Negotiations leading to the Treaty of Versailles.

Two books I took a long time to finish, since I'm not such an (auto)biography buff, but which impressed me greatly:

- Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm

Milosz, the Noble Prize winning Polish writer, meanders through his life - from his childhood in Vilnius and student days as aspiring writer and political radical, to his wartime travails in Warsaw, travels to France and America and post-war status as diplomat of the People's Republic, until he bolted into exile in 1951. All these scenes told, not with any particular sentimental interest in his own experience so it seems, almost disembodiedly void of it in fact, but instead in a way that uses every episode for versatile literary and intellectual reflections on the life and times of his country, the society and world around him, ever so often veering into moving portraits of people he met on his way.

Not a book that "reads like a train", but very informative, thought-provoking and enriched with many beautiful, witty turns of phrase and moving evocations.

- Sandor Marai, Memoir of Hungary

Kindof the same beast, except that the memoir specifically describes the years 1944-48, when Hungary went from Nazi terror to military liberation and then the creepingly increasing stranglehold of the communists and soviet power. Again, being a lazy reader, the parts I liked best and was moved most by were the moments in which he, briefly (as if his own life was the least important of things) notes the day-to-day experiences of his life: the brute but also hapless Soviet soldiers, the uncertainty, the nostalgia for bourgeois times and values (here's a writer who is proud of his - and his country's - bourgeois tradition). But they are interspersed with many an observation about contemporary politics and its many, increasingly sinister intrigues, about fellow writers and cultural figures (you're gonna need the notes), about moments in the daily life of the city. Again, a versatile work. Marai, like Milosz, eventually opted for exile in the States.

Finally, I read almost all of this book, except that I saved the last twenty or thirty pages for a trainride I was planning to make to the Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum in Heerenveen this summer (Nieuwenhuis being the legendary, fiercely loved and hated Dutch 19th century anarchist - it seemed like an appropriate trip to combine with finishing this book):

Hans Magnus Enzensberger - The Short Summer of Anarchy

It's the biography, of sorts, of Buenaventure Durutti, the charismatic anarchist leader who rallied the workers of Barcelona in the 30s. Confronted with the story of a man who wrote little and left few official traces - what, being a fighting man who went down in a civil war that yielded a dictatorship that was to bury any mention of him or his sort for decades - Enzensberger took a different approach. Durutti had followers, who lionized his every deed; he acted, first, in the underground, then, in a time of chaos and mayhem where any event would be reported in twenty different ways by twenty different witnesses; he was as hated and feared as he was loved. Forget about finding the data to base a linear biography on. So instead, the book is a patchwork, a mosaic, of recollections, stories, contemporary documents and newspaper reports, interviews - Enzensberger collected them all (interviewing many then still living exiles in France and elsewhere), then weaved individual paragraphs or two-three of each into what almost becomes a chronological story again, except that you get the same turn of events recounted in different, sometimes conflicting versions.

A moving story, this too, and more of a spellbinder than the intellectual if eventful lives of Marai and Milosz, even if their legacy arguably looms larger. You can't help being impressed by this larger-than-life figure, who seems simultaneously simpleton and genius, a good guy with all too big a heart and a reckless, near-megalomaniacal fool; just like you can't help being pulled along by the story of the Spanish revolution and its betrayal itself - though unlike so many other books, this one does not cloak or excuse its cruelties, dilettantism and arbitrariness.

All three books also have some stuff in common: they concern political times that threw the protaginists into a rollercoaster ride of extreme experiences, turns of events, fortunes and loyalties; three men who appear to have risen above those experiences even as they lived them, as if they saw themselves from above. Three men, finally, who despite their outspoken political views, are hard to pigeonhole or claim by any one party. And now I'm gonna stop with this "three men" stuff, because I'm sure Marai and Milosz would roll over in their graves to be mentioned in the same breath as that semi-literate proletarian rabble-rouser ;-)

I'm a Cellini Autobiography fan too. It was an important book to me, realigning my sense of myself and time, as I found it so.... modern. There are different translations...