Best Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs

paradoxosalpha: A stand-in for the full ten volumes in the excellent Trask translation.

paradoxosalpha: A paragon of intellectual biography, with a subject who remains in unjust obscurity.

paradoxosalpha: The most readable and entertaining of the various major biographies of Aleister Crowley.

paradoxosalpha: It's hard to estimate the relative proportions of narrative memoir and silvicultural science here, in part because one of Simard's themes is to challenge mechanistic-exploitative science divorced from vernacular stories recognizing the agency of trees and forests.

paradoxosalpha: Emphasizes Parsons' role as a pioneering rocket technologist, but gives sober consideration to his occult activities as well.

paradoxosalpha: Seeks a positive historical biography of the Bible figure, leavened with memoirist episodes from the author.

paradoxosalpha: A taproot of the autobiographical genre and a cornerstone of literature in the Christian West.

paradoxosalpha: A dual biography in an oral history format: pioneers of the US counterculture.

paradoxosalpha: An efficient, accessible biography of the leader who won the medieval war for the eastern Mediterranean

paradoxosalpha: Sprawling and exhaustive: Maitland is sometimes suspect as a narrator/editor, but the whole story is an invaluable window on 19th-century Anglophone occultism.