Best Biographies of 2023

"The story of the Astors is an extraordinary but true tale of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention -- and of cunning, determination, hard work, hubris, infighting, and greed. One of the wealthiest men to have ever lived, John Jacob Astor first arrived in New York in 1783 and built a fortune through a ruthless expansion of his beaver trapping business, which he grew into an empire through real estate that enriched him at the expense of...

"A brief and tender biography of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century and an elegant exploration of artistic endurance, as told by a life-long lover of Willa Cather's work"--

"The definitive biography of Chuck Berry, legendary performer and inventor of rock and roll and author of classics like 'Johnny B. Goode,' 'Maybellene,' 'You Never Can Tell,' and 'Roll Over Beethoven.' Chuck Berry long ago earned a reputation as a person who gave nothing away. Best known as the groundbreaking innovator of rock and roll and the artist behind classics ranging from 'Johnny B. Goode' and 'Maybellene' to 'You Never Can Tell' and 'Roll...

"What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent...

One of the first books to explore the emotional landscape of living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome from a patient's perspective; a playful story of falling down, getting back up again, and realizing you should have gone to the hospital sooner.--

"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...

"In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel. This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. But he also had another identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities...

"A radical reassessment of the famed Victorian author, revealing the true story behind the creator of some of literature's best-known novels. This dynamic new study of Charles Dickens will make readers re-examine his life and work in a completely different light. First, partly due to the massive digitalization of papers and letters in recent years, Helena Kelly has unearthed new material about Dickens that simply wasn't available to his earlier biographers....

"What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness. Living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets and working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred fifty miles from her...

"With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion--as great as that of Elvis or the Beatles--taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent. Within two years of her 1983 debut album, a flagship Macy's store in Manhattan held a Madonna lookalike contest featuring Andy Warhol as a judge, and opened a department called "Madonna-land." But Madonna was more than just...