The Best Books of 2019: Biography!

My own favorite genre, biography, had a fantastic year - this was another one of those categories where whittling down a list to10 items felt downright cruel. Whether it was authors exploiting newly-available archives or sifting through known records in order to produce new assessments, the year’s biographies were by-and-large excellent. These were the best:

10 Mr. Straight Arrow by Jeremy Treglown (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - One of four biographies of writers this year, Jeremy Treglown’s bracing new evaluation of John Hersey, forever to be known as “the author of Hiroshima,” brings a whole career - and by extension a whole era in American letters - brilliantly to life.

9 Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser (Ecco) - It couldn’t be more fitting that Benjamin Moser’s thoroughly-researched life of Susan Sontag turned out to be as argument-starting - and irresistible - as its subject always was. 

8 Grinnell by John Taliaferro (Liveright) - John Taliaferro, the author of the terrific John Hay biography All the Great Prizes, here tells the story of flinty and fearless pioneering environmentalist George Grinnell in unprecedented detail and with an absolutely winning empathy, with any luck restoring this figure to the prominence he deserves.

7 The Sakura Obsession by Naoko Abe (Knopf) - The genre’s surprise delight of the year was certainly Naoko Abe’s charming biography of “Cherry” Ingram, the benign obsessive who saved dozens of varieties of Japan’s cherry blossoms and lived a life every bit as colorful as his prized flowers.

6 The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando by William Mann (Harper) - The only actor biography on the list is this hefty biography of Marlon Brando by the reliably-wonderful William Mann, who delves deeply into period research and creates what will surely stand as the definitive life of its enigmatic subject.

5 Margaret Thatcher, Volume 3: Herself Alone by Charles Moore (Knopf) - This stunning, incredibly moving conclusion to Charles Moore’s three-volume official life of Margaret Thatcher reads like a particularly somber Schubert song cycle; it has only increasingly tragic things to convey, and it conveys them beautifully. 

4 Boss of the Grips by Eric Washington (Liveright) - The subject of this tremendously involving book, James Williams, the chief porter for the “Red Caps” of Grand Central Station, is less well-known than virtually any figure on this list, but Eric Washington does a masterful job of showing how important - and fascinating - his life and times were.

3 Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely by Andrew Curran (Other Press) - Andrew Curran’s look at one of the Enlightenment’s most attractive - and baffling - figures is by turns titillating and deeply thought-provoking, the best examination of Diderot’s place in the thought of his time that’s appeared in English in many years.

2 Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner (Princeton) - Marion Turner’s big, intensely satisfying life of Chaucer does what all biographers of this “Father of English Poetry” should do: take him out of England and remind readers that he was as innovative and cosmopolitan in his literary work as he was in his government work. 

1 Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer (Knopf) - Most of the terms that people used to describe the late American diplomat and State Department fixture Richard Holbrooke - “abrasive,” “boastful,” “occasionally semi-delusional,” “undeniably brilliant” - can be applied equally to this, the best biography of 2019. The book puts the man squarely before us again - for good and ill.