Biographies

what will this teach me

I'm a big fan of biographies, especially when they're more about what the person stood for instead of the minutiae of life

Some favs:
- The Invention of Nature (Alexander von Humboldt and how his image of a connected nature was a major shift in how mankind saw nature)
- Endgame (Bobby Fisher, chess)
- The Price of Altruism (George Price, altruism/evo biology)
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Erdos, mathematics)
- The Duty of Genius (Wittgenstein and his philosophy)
- A Life Inside The Center (Oppenheimer, atomic bomb project, communist scare)

I've been looking for a while for Power Broker - Aaron Swartz wrote a long article about how it's the best book ever - but the only online version is a shitty converted OCR...

>>8262431
Reading Caro's bio of Lyndon Johnson. It's good, but for fuck sake it's long.

>>8262431
>best biography of all time
That's quite a statement. Read Edel on Henry James or Flexner on Washington, I think those stack up.

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>>8262524
Can you or someone else recommend me books that also go into what a person stood for, but for people like:
>Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
>Dom Pedro II