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Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I don't read them for entertainment, so the author's style and presentation are irrelevant.
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Good research and writing aren't entirely reducible to entertainment. Not to trivialize amusement, but there's more nourishment involved in a great biography than that.
Quote:
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This I don't get. To me, biographies are history; and as such, I only need to be presented with facts.
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Then I don't expect you to understand people's interest in Boswell's
Life of Johnson, Ellman's books on Beckett and Joyce, Aldous Huxley's
Grey Eminence and
Devils of Loudin or Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians. The point isn't that such books are about famous people, but that the level of the research and writing makes the books worth reading.
Besides which, great history books can be read for style as well, e.g.,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon,
Cromwell by Carlyle and, for that matter, the
Annals of Tacitus and
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E. DuBois.
One of the high points for me in Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde is in the appendix: A phonetic transcription of one of Wilde's speeches in which all of the pauses and dynamics are written out. Ellman meticulously captures Wilde's voice throughout the bio, and the transcription affords the opportunity to hear the entire performance in one's head. It's the equivalent of musical notation and the effect is aesthetic even as the information it conveys is historical.