If forced to recommend two, at this moment, I would say the Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy and The Showman by Simon Schuster, which is a good personal behind-the-scenes biography of the President focused on 2022. But there are many, many more. This is why I can comfortably say that he is a truly singular and remarkable human being.
So I'm not sure how I ended up on these books, but I was reading books, business books and about biographies of certain business people, and then somehow I stumble on these books of the saints. And in particular, stories about saints that have failed in some way or another in their lives, but then yet transitioned and turned their lives around,
on the subject. So he was-- I suppose there's lots of Mr Googles in the world, but Neil Armstrong was one of them. Biography, I'm trained as a historian of science and technology. And I didn't really write my first biography until this book, which I started writing in the early 2000s.
And it was originally published in 2005. Biography is not easy to write. I suppose that's why I like trying to do it so much.
And maybe that's for the best. Biography is even more challenging when it's not just biography, but it's also iconography, when it's a study of an iconic person onto whom various levels of myth and symbol and poetry and fiction have been projected by society and culture.
Yeah, exactly. Real world stuff like the Death Star. Biographies of mathematicians are often good.
So hello. Thanks for joining us today. Biographies are so weird because you feel like you're going to be vastly underwhelming now. But yeah, that's my sheen, but you know-- Absolutely.
the second is setting up your family office so even if you don't have the money today set aside a little bit of your savings biography so I talked about figuring out what you're good at what I did and what really moved the needle for me and I've
told me to go ahead and four years later I produced the rise of Theodore Roosevelt a massive 888 Page biography which ended with the prince of all Cliffhangers taken directly from my movie script of theod Roosevelt 42 years old Vice President of the United
the top and I wrote a letter to his wife Nancy proposing that I did do this biography if she would be agreeable and president would agree to me be able being able to come and go at the White House observe the presidency in action and write about him afterwards so that's how my book Dutch A Memoir of Ronald
came into her life. So, I, that's why I decided to set it before, so that, you know, thinking of what she, who, who the Louisa person was. Um, but in terms of research, I read all the biographies of her, a lot of biographies of her family. Her father, like I said was a philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson was their neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne was their neighbor, Thoreau was their neighbor.
And so this was another factor in the debate. Andrew biography of Burgess, Ronan Phillips' biography of Don Maclean, the last few years, describe the pressures on Burgess and Maclean as they--
I suppose that's why I like trying to do it so much. Writing biography is always challenging. Just how difficult it is to write a biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people,
This story here is about temp workers, and undocumented migrants, and legal migrants at the very bottom of the Silicon Valley world, the world that's often not discussed when we read those biographies of Steve Jobs, or the Woz, or all of these other so-called leaders of Silicon Valley. So today I'd like to tell you a different story of a place with which you're probably already familiar.
How many of you are familiar with the movement that she started? Because biographies, what I have found-- and this actually reinforced some of the literature that I've found-- it's important to tell family stories.
And secondly, it doesn't leave room for biographies. And biographies tell you, people are more complex-- that Bob Noyce is totally different from Steve Jobs. And yet, Noyce was a mentor to Jobs.
There's Bessie Smith in her unmarked grave. Let biographers flock to the clever and pretty, declare us old, drab, utterly last season. And when they're gone, chasing the next fabulous story, say again just one of those things I can't repeat here-- those gorgeous, scandalous, tender words you say to me
a high-school age Steve Jobs. The biographical sources we have today suggest that if you talk to a young Steve Jobs, you would not come away with the idea that he was passionate about building a technology company.
mutated into that of a professional writer in the mid 1970s I discovered Theodore Roosevelt as a biographical subject who attracted me for some mysterious reason and I began to write about him a screenplay which I thought I wrote
was to write one of these sort of popular books where it's just one little um biography after another of people we've already heard about and know about or here's an outrageous woman I mean these
of biography. So you look at the person through many different lenses. And you're very lucky to have her here to talk about her research. Gretchen is one of the smartest people I know
journalism biographies uh a novel uh you know since right around the uh
a biography, and to write five? It was very, very tough.
She wrote two biographies, one on Milton Friedman and the other on Ayn Rand, both of which I highly recommend.
You have written two biographies, one on Milton Friedman and one on Ayn Rand.
Tiberius has four biographical accounts that are written about him. Velleius Paterculus, Cassius Dio, Suetonius, and
It’s a fictionalized biography of the titular Facundo, who’s pretty much the platonic ideal of the corrupt caudillo.
is a biography of Gary Gygax and the history of the creation of D&D. And Jon Peterson is widely recognized as an authority on the history of games, especially
It's not a biography.
There is one good biography of him, but rather surprisingly little overall.
It's not a biography, you know.
His own biography is an incredible story, which Samba knows much about.
Starting a biography of their own.
Under the Biographies button, there's 200 oral histories I took down about 10 years ago.
Sonia is a biographer and journalist who's written for "The Guardian," "Daily Telegraph," and "The Sunday Times." Her book, "First Lady-- The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill"
Imagine uploading your biography only once but updating simultaneously across all services.
So I think there's always something almost inherently unfathomable about us as individuals. And a biographer does his or her best to try to find out those secrets. But there's always some part of the person, I think, that we just can't achieve a complete understanding.
And I think in the case of Armstrong that certainly is part of it. So it's a biography and an iconography. And for that reason, I think it makes it especially fascinating to study.
Yeah, exactly. Real world stuff like the Death Star. Siobhan Roberts as a biographer I really like.
Yeah, exactly. Real world stuff like the Death Star. She wrote a good biography of John Conway called, "Genius at Play." Martin Gardner is obviously a master of the discipline.
And her biographer, her official biographer went, oh, my god, the sex scene.
If you read biographies of Gates, he was an enfant terrible of the tech industry.
They're corporate biographies. But they were not unhelpful.
sort of extensive biographies.
And his biography is 800 pages long.
I read his biography.
For me as a biographer, I was able to get the sense that in fact, the birth story sort of figuratively
They have really impressive biographies, so forgive me for looking at my paper at the same time.
It was a biography of Thurgood Marshall.
"Moral Desperado," his biography of Thomas Carlyle, where he says, "Carlyle was about to embark on his first large-scale literary project-- a life of Schiller, was overwhelmed