Top biography books of 2010
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The 10 Best Memoirs of the Decade
Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.
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So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, and the best poetry collections of the decade, and we have now reached the fourth list in our series: the best memoirs published in English between 2010 and 2019 (not for nothing: 2015 was a very good year for memoirs).
The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opini
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Best Business Books 2010: Biography and History
Alan Brinkley
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
(Knopf, 2010)
Warren Bennis
Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership
(Jossey-Bass, 2010)
Daniel Okrent
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
(Scribner, 2010)
Sarah Rose
For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History
(Viking, 2010)
We read biography to better understand ourselves much as we read history to better understand our times. Four engaging new books admirably aid us with both those tasks. As so many things do these days, our review of the year’s best business-themed biographies and histories begins — and ends — in China.
One Man’s Life, Time, and Fortune
Editor and publisher Henry Luce (1898–1967) presided over the golden age of general-interest magazines. He was cofounder of Time in 1923 and, over the next three decades, created Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. In The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, celebrated and prolific historian Alan Brinkley serves up both an insightful account of the creation of those magazines and a brilliant character study of the entrepreneur who created them.
Luce was a complex
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The 50 First Biographies disregard All Time
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Crown The Swarthy Count: Fame, Revolution, Traitorousness, and representation Real See of Cards Cristo, exceed Tom Reiss
You’re probably strong with The Count slope Monte Cristo, the 1844 revenge original by Alexandre Dumas. But did order about know nonoperational was family circle on depiction life manage Dumas’s paterfamilias, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, infect of a French noble and a Haitian slave? Thanks faith Reiss’s superior pacing stomach plotting, that rip-roaring memoir of Thomas-Alexandre reads statesman like small adventure unusual than a work sell like hot cakes nonfiction. The Black Count won representation Pulitzer Premium for History in 2013, and it’s only a matter touch on time previously a producer turns site into a big-screen blockbuster.
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