New Biography
Last updated: December 11, 2024
The best new biographies. We scrutinized the bookshelves to bring you the best of the recent biographies. "There’s no rubric for what makes a great biography—they just provide a sense of what it means to be human"—Elizabeth Taylor, author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics' Circle biography committee.
“It’s about one of the most important painters of his age, a man who helped to steer art towards post-Impressionism and was a huge influence on a whole generation. It’s also rather an extraordinary life…Sue Prideaux is a master storyteller and a wonderful biographer, and the book really argued its way onto the shortlist without much resistance.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Isabel Hilton, Journalist
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
by Nicholas Shakespeare
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by biographer and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare, is now out in the US. It's the first authorized biography of Fleming since 1966, lengthy (800+ pages) but very readable. If you're curious about the man who created James Bond, this is the biography to read about him. Fleming served in naval intelligence during World War II, lived life to the full on all fronts, and died at age 56 of a heart attack.
Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
by Natalie Dykstra
Anyone who has visited Boston and is at all interested in art and museums will be aware of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, with its Venetian palace inner courtyard and extraordinary art collection, including works by Titian, Mantegna, Rembrandt, Vermeer (some, sadly, stolen in an art heist in 1990), Matisse, Whistler and Sargent. Fewer will have reflected on the life of the woman who created it. Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra is not the first biography of Mrs. Jack (as she was mainly known in her lifetime) but it's one that tries to give a sense of her inner life and how that played out vis-à-vis her art collecting. It's an excellent book because you learn a lot: about art and how it was collected, but also what life was like in the 19th and early 20th centuries for a very wealthy American woman/family. The book will also have you in tears at times, at the sheer scale of tragedy people had to live with before the advent of vaccines and antibiotics.
Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
by Jennifer Burns
Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns is a really interesting biography of the brilliant economist who, more than anyone, is credited with turning the idea that markets are good and governments are bad into a reigning ideology in many countries for the last half-century. (For its specific effects in Chile, The Chile Project, also published in 2023, is well worth reading). Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is, apparently, the first full-length biography of Friedman based on archival research. It's very readable and a great way into the debates which remain with us, even though Friedman himself died in 2006, at the age of 94.
Books by Milton Friedman, recommended on Five Books
“Gulbadan was the daughter of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, and the aunt of Akbar, sometimes called ‘the Great.’ Gulbadan was born in Kabul, ended up in Akbar’s harem in Agra, and eventually went on a trip to Saudi Arabia, to visit the holy places of Islam. Lal manages to recreate all this beautifully.” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“One very readable book from Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series is a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, the man at the centre of the Dreyfus Affair. It was a cause célèbre that rocked 19th-century France, but as historian Maurice Samuels points out in the introduction, not much attention has been paid to the life of the man most affected by it. If all you knew about Dreyfus was that he was a Jewish army officer who was wrongfully convicted of treason and imprisoned on Devil’s Island, this is a nice way to find out more (and if you’ve never heard of him at all, start with The Man on Devil’s Island or the historical thriller An Officer and a Spy).” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell, Journalist
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
by Lyndsey Stonebridge
We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge is an excellent, well-written book that shows why Hannah Arendt is still an important and sometimes controversial thinker today.
“As I read it, at first Monet is not an attractive character. You think, ‘This is absolutely why, as a woman, you should not live with an artist.’ It’s full of scrounging letters, and the suffering of these women who are, of course, immortalised in beautiful portraits by him, but following him around or being abandoned by him…She explains quite how it is that he comes to revolutionise art and to create these ravishing works that are just luminous. She writes very beautifully about it. As life goes on, instead of being improvident, he becomes very wealthy. Finally, you see him at Giverny employing six gardeners, one of whom has to dust off the water lilies! There’s great pathos. You’re won over to him, as his life goes on, and see how he, too, has suffered for his art. It’s a rich and moving account.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize
Susan Brigden, Historian
“In another Yale series, Ancient Lives, there’s a new biography of the 2nd-century Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, whose book, Meditations, is often recommended for those interested in the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. It’s by Donald Robertson, a cognitive behavioural psychotherapist and a firm believer that Stoicism has much to teach us in our daily lives.” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Orwell biographer D.J. Taylor has a new book out…Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell. You’ll learn a lot about Orwell’s life and how it made its way into his books.” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmshirst is about an ordinary couple from Derby who set out to sail around the world in the early 1970s. The reason we know about them is that theirs turned into a survival story: their boat was sunk by a sperm whale and they were left adrift on a raft in the Pacific Ocean for 118 days. It’s an easy and engaging read: I started it one evening after dinner and stayed up to finish it just after midnight.” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“King: A Life is a new biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.—billed as the ‘definitive’ biography—by the author of a bestselling 2018 biography of Muhammed Ali. King grew of that previous work, as many of his sources knew both men, says Eig; this new book was written with an intention of creating a true intimacy with his subject. Despite extensive previous coverage and several previous biographies, Eig uncovered unseen archive material and revelations that Alex Haley, co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, had fabricated quotes in a high profile interview.” Read more...
Award-Winning Biographies of 2024
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Also hailing from central Asia are the main protagonists of The Genius of Their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni and the Lost Enlightenment by S. Frederick Starr. It’s a dual biography of Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna) and Biruni, key figures in the flowering of science and philosophy that took place in the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. Both men were born in the 10th century in modern-day Uzbekistan. This is an important period for anyone interested in the history of science, a missing gap in Western curricula (at least in my day).” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Isaacson sat at the feet of Musk – literally, in the same room as Musk – for two or three years, I think. The whole second half of the book is about the last three years, so it’s very detailed. It’s very much reporting. He doesn’t step back except right at the end, and then to make a rather general point about how you need the good and the bad in order to have a genius…Isaacson doesn’t say, ‘I’m now going to make a judgment on what’s happened.’ It’s very much an account of being with this extraordinary, tempestuous entrepreneur…It’s a long book with very short chapters. It’s quite punchy, in that sense of ‘OK now we’re moving on’ which gives you a bit of an impression of what it must be like to live with or work with Elon Musk. But it doesn’t then step back and say how significant it is.” Read more...
The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
Andrew Hill, Journalist
“One interesting book for fans of the great epic poem of the Augustus years, the Aeneid, is a literary biography of its author, Vergil. Vergil: The Poet’s Life is by American scholar and translator Sarah Ruden. Other than his poem, we don’t know much about the author, so Ruden has to do a lot of heavy lifting, but why not? Ruden recently translated the Aeneid, and you can also read her Five Books interview about Vergil.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“Other biographies published recently include one about the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828). It’s called Schubert: A Musical Wayfarer by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, a professor of musicology at Maynooth University. Schubert famously died aged just 31, but striking early in the book is how old that was compared to some of his siblings. This book is written so it’s accessible to non-musicians, but this is a serious work of scholarship.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
Spinoza: Life and Legacy
by Jonathan Israel
Spinoza: Life and Legacy is a new biography of the 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, by historian Jonathan Israel. Israel is a leading historian of early modern Europe, and an expert on the Dutch Republic, the tolerant—by 17th-century standards—world in which Spinoza grew up. His parents had fled Portugal because of the Inquisition and, as Israel points out, that "dark Iberian context was a crucial factor in Spinoza's background, early life, and formation and likewise an essential dimension for understanding his thought generally." The book builds on Steven Nadler's biography of Spinoza, and at more than 1,200 pages is absolutely not for beginners. Rather, it's for those seeking to think deeply—and disagree with Israel at times, no doubt—about Spinoza and his life and thought.
(If you're looking for a more introductory approach to Spinoza, our interview about him is with Steven Nadler)
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
by Beverly Gage
🏆 Winner of the 2023 NBCC Biography Award
“Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents, of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: ‘We cannot know our own story without understanding his.'” Read more...
The Best Biographies of 2023: The National Book Critics Circle Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“Other biographies out these past three months include Ramesses the Great by Toby Wilkinson, the Cambridge Egyptologist…Both rulers spent a lot of time and energy building their reputations, which may be why we’re reading about them three millennia…later” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“A biography about writing biography! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis. Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times.” Read more...
The Best Biographies of 2023: The National Book Critics Circle Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
“It’s a biography of a man who almost walks with the 20th century, so you get all that history. Balanchine was of Georgian heritage and grew up in Tsarist Russia. Early on, he was selected to go into the Imperial Ballet School, so he’s on that track. Then, the Russian Revolution happens and everything falls into turmoil on all fronts. There’s a lot of hunger, violence, and chaos…Balanchine eventually winds up in America, where he meets well-connected benefactors and cultural managers. They feel that American ballet hadn’t yet achieved the same level of institutional high standing as Europe. They have the ambition to rectify that and are keen to use people like Balanchine and others who had come over to the US. Eventually, Balanchine sets up the New York City Ballet Company, which, in effect, becomes the country’s national ballet.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Frederick Studemann, Journalist
Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan
by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan is historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's takedown of the Portuguese explorer whose disastrous expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe.
Rebels Against the Raj
by Ramachandra Guha
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography
The foreigners who fought against Franco in Spain are much feted in literature and the popular imagination, those who helped India fight for its independence from the British Empire not so much. In this book, Indian historian Ramachandra Guha tells the story of seven of them (five Brits and two Americans), rescuing them from obscurity.
“This book is extraordinary because Rudolf Vrba and a fellow inmate, Alfred Wetzler, were the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. Jonathan Freedland is a fiction writer too—he writes thrillers under the name Sam Bourne—so there is an element of thriller in the way that he describes this escape and the build-up to it. It is incredibly heart-in-your-mouth compelling. But it’s a bigger story than just one man’s breakout. Vrba goes on to try and put the word out about what’s going on in Auschwitz and saves many lives in the process. The book is memorializing one man’s heroism.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Caroline Sanderson, Journalist
The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
by John Tresch
✩ Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography
✩ Nominated for the Edgar Award for best work of criticism or biography
John Tresch, a professor of history of art and science at the Warburg Institute, situates the iconic American author in an era "when the lines separating entertainment, speculation and scientific inquiry were blurred." The troubled horror writer embraced contradiction, exposing the hoaxes of contemporary scientific fraudsters even as he perpetuated his own.
Peerless among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman
by Kaya Şahin
A new biography of Süleyman (often called 'the Magnificent' in the West, but not in this book), the Ottoman sultan who ruled from 1520 to 1566. He was one of the most powerful men in the world but to the modern reader, his life seems utterly tragic. The book is by Kaya Şahin, a historian at Indiana University, who is able to bring his knowledge of Turkish sources to the story. Another aim of the book is "to restore Süleyman's place among the major figures of the sixteenth century"—which also included Henry VIII, Charles V and Francis I (Europe), Ivan IV (Russia), Babur and Akbar (India), Shah Ismail and Shah Tahmasb (Iran).
Kennan: A Life between Worlds
by Frank Costigliola
Kennan: A Life between Worlds is an excellent biography of George Kennan, the American diplomat and Russophile who first raised alarm bells about Stalin after World War II, authoring an anonymous article in Foreign Affairs and "The Long Telegram". His biographer Frank Costigliola brings to life a man who loved Tolstoy and Chekhov, was devastated at never knowing his mother, and spent most of his life opposing the policy of containment towards the Soviet Union that he's best known for.
The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
by Olivier Zunz
🏆 Winner of the Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique 2022
An excellent biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French politician and author of Democracy in America and The Ancien Regime and the Revolution.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
by Rebecca Donner
🏆 Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for biography
🏆 Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for biography
The highly acclaimed biography of Mildred Harnack, an American doctoral student living in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, who became an important anti-Nazi activist and later a spy for Allied forces during the Second World War. Arrested by the Gestapo in Sweden, she was tried by a Nazi military court and finally executed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. In All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, Harnack's great-great-niece reconstructs her story in an astonishing work of nonfiction that draws together letters, intelligence documents and the testimony of survivors to create this remarkable story of moral courage.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
by Katherine Rundell
🏆 Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
🏆 Winner of the 2023 British Book Award for Non-Fiction: Narrative
“Rundell is a children’s author who also specializes in Renaissance literature and makes the case that Donne should be as widely feted as William Shakespeare, his contemporary. She writes, ‘Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite. The word most used across his poetry, part from ‘and’ and ‘the’, is ‘love”.” Read more...
Award Winning Biographies of 2022
Sophie Roell, Journalist
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
by Janice P. Nimura
✩ Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for biography
A dual biography of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, the United States' first female physicians and the founders of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, a hospital staffed entirely by women in antebellum America. Through the story of their lives, says the Wall Street Journal, we encounter "a rough-hewn, gaudy, carnival-barking America, with only the thinnest veneer of gentility overlaying cruelty and a simmering violence."
Pessoa: A Biography
by Richard Zenith
✩ Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for biography
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote prolifically throughout his life, but often under a series of assumed names and identities, which he called 'heteronyms.' Relatively unknown during his lifetime, he left a cache of more than 25,000 papers which are still being studied, translated and published almost a century after his death. Here, the renowned translator and Pessoa scholar offers an insight into Pessoa's teeming imagination and polyphonous genius by tracing the back stories of his alter egos, recasting them as projections of Pessoa's inner tensions—social, sexual, and political.
Mike Nichols: A Life
by Mark Harris
✩ Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography
✩ Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography
A New York Times-bestselling biography of the Hollywood director Mike Nichols, one of America's most prolific and versatile creative figures, by the author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back. Born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish family in 1930s Berlin, Nichols immigrated to the United States as a child, where his incredible drive saw him rise through the social ranks; by 35 he lived in a New York City penthouse overlooking Central Park, with a Rolls Royce, a string of Arabian horses, and a circle of friends that included Richard Burton and Jackie Kennedy. Mark Harris draws on interviews with more than 250 of Nichols' contemporaries to tells this story of a complicated man and his tumultuous career.
Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
by Keisha N. Blain
✩ Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography
✩ Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for an outstanding biography or autobiography
The historian and best-selling author Keisha N. Blain examines the life and work of the Black activist Fannie Lou Hamer, positioning her as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks.
Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser
by Susan Bernofsky
✩ Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award for biography
The first English-language biography of Robert Walser, one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century. In Clairvoyant of the Small, Susan Bernofsky—his award-winning translator—offers a diligently researched and delicately written account of his life and work, setting him in the context of 20th century European history and modernist literature.
Queen of Our Times: The Life of Elizabeth II
by Robert Hardman
The Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, has been on the throne for 70 years, making her the world's longest-reigning monarch other than Louis XIV of France (1643-1715: he came to the throne aged 4). Lots of events are taking place in the UK to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, including a number of new books about her life. We have an interview with royal biographer Robert Lacey on the best books about the Queen but it dates from a few years ago. Robert Hardman's Queen of Our Times came out this year and offers a detailed look at her life from birth. The book is readable, chatty almost, and a good corrective to anyone who has watched the Netflix drama The Crown, whose "questionable accuracy" Hardman points out.
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi tells the story of the great Russian novelist's life by brilliantly intertwining it with his own words, taken from where Dostoevsky's fiction is drawn from his own lived experience. And it was quite some life: amongst other ups and downs, Dostoevsky was nearly executed and spent four years in a Siberian labour camp. You can read more in our interview with Alex Christofi on the best Dostoevsky books.
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
by Timothy Brennan
Places of Mind is a biography of Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual who shot to prominence with his damning critique of how Westerners write about the East, Orientalism, in 1978. The biography is written by his student and friend Timothy Brennan.
The Van Gogh Sisters
by Willem-Jan Verlinden
We've heard much about the crucial role that Theo van Gogh played in the life of his brother, Vincent. But Vincent also had three sisters who were a big influence on him. In fact, it was an argument with his eldest sister, Anna, that was the reason he left the Netherlands. This is their story.
“This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included. As a result, we don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life but rather get to understand what really mattered.” Read more...
The Best Philosophy Books of 2021
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
