Job's bio, best seller of the year

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

(And who know that it took a year and a lot of consultations to design a 1.4 meg floppy drive in 1982?)

Oh, it was much more impressive than that. It was a 400 kB floppy drive.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

This I don't get. To me, biographies are history; and as such, I only need to be presented with facts. I don't read them for entertainment, so the author's style and presentation are irrelevant.

I understand what you're saying, but I see Prestidigitweeze's point. Think of History class...you have the teacher who lectures on and on, spouting dates, and names vs the history teacher who presents the facts, has you read a historical work about that time and/or watch a really cool movie, then lets the class participate in a reenactment or create a project of some kind. Both teach you the facts but one brings it alive while the other just plops it at your feet.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

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.

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.

This would all be lost on me. My only requirement for a bio is accurate facts. Presentation is irrelevant.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

This would all be lost on me. My only requirement for a bio is accurate facts. Presentation is irrelevant.

We read for different reasons, then. No worries; everyone does.

Still, "presentation" implies that writing a bio is a matter of draping style and narrative skill over preexisting events like a decoration, whereas conjuring an actual person and their voice takes a lot more than that.

In the late 90s, I corresponded with true crime writer, Jack Olsen, and told him I thought he was better at capturing voices than other such writers I'd read -- not only those of the killers, but also the people around them. Jack wrote back with exuberance and exclamation points. He said he was grateful someone had noticed, because he made his subjects tell their stories three times at a minimum, which he recorded into a tape recorder and listened to until their voices were in his head. He not only used his recorder for exact transcriptions but to learn people's thought processes and the language they might use to say something that hadn't been recorded.

That's one of the reasons Olsen's killers are disturbing people with disturbing voices and those of most other true crime writers are gruesome collections of facts.

It's also the reason that the telling isn't something you can simply strip away from a book like Charmer. The telling isn't a presentation decoratively laid over the facts, it shapes their interpretation by virtue of the tellers' flaws and level of apparent reliability being reproduced in relation to the facts. Read that book and you'll never want to visit a bar in George Russell's section of Mercer Island -- not because of some air of malevolence, but because the sterility of the culture that begat the killer's alienation and narcissism is horrifying in itself.

[rdfry]

I thoroughly enjoyed Walter Issacson's writing style, if it didn't keep me interested I wouldn't have finished it. I think history is important but if it isn't presented in an interesting manner than I will be ignorant about it, because I won't have read it.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

This I don't get. To me, biographies are history; and as such, I only need to be presented with facts. I don't read them for entertainment, so the author's style and presentation are irrelevant.

Have you ever actually read any history. It's not just facts.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Don't know what the clinical definition of a psychopath is, but I'm fairly sure that Steve Jobs is able to find himself within those parameters.

You make the Jobs bio sound far more interesting than it seemed when I read a few snippets.

And if you're sincerely interested in knowing, then I suggest you read the introduction to The Psychopathic Mind, by J. Reid Meloy. My nephew's a psychological evaluator who specializes in violent criminals and even he would think that book is on the mark.

[ScotiaBurrell]

The authors Einstein book was interesting. I will get this one from my library later in the year.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

The authors Einstein book was interesting. I will get this one from my library later in the year.

From what little I've read (which I realize is unfair to his work), I find the author's own bio more surprising than either of his books about others. From Wikipedia:

Walter Isaacson . . . is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute . . . has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing Editor of TIME . . . was appointed by President Obama to be the Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the other international broadcasts of the U.S. government.