The most recommended biographies

Jersey City hoops this time, but Wojnarowski’s book details the dedication of Bob Hurley (father of Duke star and NBA player Bobby Hurley) who is the head coach at a small Catholic school in Jersey City. Under his leadership, this tiny school wins championship after championship. For Hurley, the championships are a sidebar. His focus is on the players as human beings. He knows them--where they came from, where they are, where they could be headed--good and bad. Tough love at its best. A remarkable book about a remarkable man. The flip side of The Last Shot.

This is, again, a different kind of book than the previous two. Namely, this is a deeply researched, historical account of how some of America’s best skiers of the 1930s ended up in the famed 10th Mountain Division, fighting the Nazis in Italy during World War II. No history of skiing is complete without mention of the 10th Mountain Division—many of whose members came back to the US after the war as pioneers in the early days of the US ski industry. Charles Sanders gives a heartfelt and detailed account of some of the key men in this saga—great athletes and soldiers. 

I’ve always dreamed of being an archeologist who somehow talks a rich philanthropist into funding a life of exploring human origins in East Africa. But my back gets sore after picking strawberries for just 15 minutes and I’m not so good with flying insects either. So I’ve left this field to others. But if you want to get a worm’s eye view of what it’s like to explore the lives of our ancestors from millions of years ago, there’s no better guide than Meave Leakey and this wonderful book.

Maggie Doherty tells the story of five women artists—Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Barbara Swan, Tillie Olsen, and Marianna Pineda—who were among the first fellows at Radcliffe’s new Institute for Independent Study. The fellowship was originally designed for women who needed a room (and a paycheck) of their own to resume work interrupted by marriage and motherhood. Doherty weaves a history of Radcliffe’s pioneering venture with moving stories of the first fellows, whose friendships strengthened their resolve to pursue art in the face of male skepticism.

I was first attracted to the book because I recognized her name as the author of The Secret Garden, which my family had watched a movie of when our children were small. The second factor that attracted me to it was when I learned that the subject of the book had lived in my home state of Tennessee and my hometown of Knoxville for a while, during which she did much of her early writing.

The author gives a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like for Burnett as a writer, struggling first to get published and then to retain the confidence of publishers and the reading public.

The bottom line, however, is the moral lesson it subtly teaches about contentment. The author frequently notes Burnett was always striving to arrive at the party, the ultimate dream of success and fulfillment.

Only late in life did she realize… show more.

This book is like a rainbow. In this book of essays, one color of (nonfiction) prose builds upon another. Its layered literary colors, like a rainbow, form a spectrum of writing whose whole is far more than its parts. A rainbow can disappear in a blink., but not the written word. 

Inventing the Truth has 9 colors to its rainbow. They are the superb writings of Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, Alfred Kazin, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eileen Simpson. Each essay illuminates a lesson from and about life. Their compilation is an incomparable bounty for every nonfiction writer.

A thrilling personal account by the brilliant cryptographer, Leo Marks, who was only 22 when employed by the SOE. It was Marks who gave the special codes to famous SOE agents like Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Nancy Wake before they left for the field. An insight into how the code war between Germany and England played out, often with disastrous consequences.

This coming-of-age story is set in Depression-era South Carolina. My relatives in Oklahoma from that era also were driven out of the South by racism, segregation, and the threat of death. Adam, who was my mentor and colleague at Laney College in Oakland, California, was a young Black male facing lynching. He was too intelligent to survive in the South. He reminds me of my father, a Tuskegee airman who fought the good fight and left the South for good also. 

the intertwining of three amazing stories of collaborators in WW2 including Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc.

Leonard Maltin shot to prominence as a youth publishing the annual Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, with each new edition becoming an instant New York Times bestseller. Maltin also served a long stint as an on-air correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, where he earned backstage access to generations of movie stars.

His recently published memoir details his early obsession with the movies and then his slow but steady rise as one of Hollywood’s leading historians. I love this book most for its insights into the old stars that Maltin met—stars who knew him from his books and TV work and opened up about their own histories, making this book a valuable resource for film scholars.