Robert B. Asprey. Frederick the Great: The Magnificent Enigma Ticknor and Fields, New York, 1986.
* A lively account of Frederick, focusing more on the soldier and politician than the philosopher and gadabout (for THAT Frederick, take a look at MacDonogh or Wilhelmina's memoirs).
Sarah Knowles Bolton. Famous English Statesmen of Queen Victoria's Reign Thomas Crowell, New York, 1891.
* The book that made the seventh Lord Shaftesbury and Henry Fawcett into like my favorite historical dudes ever. Takes Palmerston a LITTLE too much at his own word, but otherwise a nice selection of men working to benefit the ordinary folk of 19th century England.
J. Franck Bright. Joseph II. Kennikat Press, New York, 1897.
* They reissued this fellow in 1970 in limited supply. A rather cold and dull book, but one of the only ones around dealing specifically with Austrian Emperor Joseph II. For a warmer account, take a look at A.W. Thayer’s biography of Salieri. - DvL
Shelby Foote. The Civil War: A Narrative Vintage Books, New York, 1986.
* This series is so good that every second you spend reading this write-up and not reading the actual books is actually doing serious harm to the overall quality of your life. It's also about 3,000 pages, so you best get going.
James R. Gaines. Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. Harper Perennial, 2006.
* An interesting story pretty well ruined by Gaines’s endless moralizing and general cutesiness. If you just read for the story and don’t pay too much heed to his musico-religious theories, it’s worth a checkout from the library. - DvL
E.A. Brayley Hodgetts. The Life of Catherine the Great of Russia. Methuen & Co.,
London, 1914.
* Hodgetts attempted to resurrect Catherine’s reputation after the 19th century had exhausted its energies lodging her firmly under a horse. Not much about foreign policy in here, but a good deal about the person. - DvL
Charles W. Ingrao. The Habsburg Monarchy: 1618-1815. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.
* Cuts the Habsburgs some slack, but still goes into a fair amount of detail about the constant, unending missteps of these, the Steve Urkels, of the European scene. - DvL
Robert Lacey. Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More. Little, Brown, and Company, London, 2004.
* Want to read Boudica's story without fifty pages of analysis as to why it is actually nothing more than a Narrative of Phallocratic Otherhood? Lacey's your man. This is the first in a three volume set of incredibly engaging historical bon bons. Just good fun. - DvL
Alan Lloyd. The King Who Lost America: A Portrait of the Life and Times of George III: A Highly Entertaining Portrait of the Rather Endearing Prig Who Lost the Colonies Doubleday, New York, 1971.
* One of the few works of history that I could just NOT STOP READING. It has fun with its subject without trivializing it, points out tragedy without using it as rationalization, and is, at every turn, entirely HUMAN. And that's rare.
Giles MacDonogh. Frederick the Great: A Life in Deed and Letters. St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1999.
* A fine book for those seeking the philosopher and not so much the soldier. Not worshipful like Mitford, but also not the “He’s A Proto-Nazi!” hysteria of some scholars. - DvL
Felix Markham. Napoleon New American Library, New York, 1966.
* A brief (266 pages) and entirely good introduction to Napoleon, his campaigns, and domestic policies. No real extensive analysis of his character, which is probably why this book is still in print while other, more PSYCHOLOGICAL, biographies have come and gone. Tickles the Napoleon As Hero centers of your brain (and you know you have them).
Robert K. Massie. Peter the Great: His Life and World. Ballantine Books, New York, 1980.
* A titanic book with possibly the best description of the use of dwarves in eighteenth century court life yet written. Interspersed throughout are not only fantastic stories about Peter, but also nicely developed biographies of William of Orange, Charles XII, and the Duke of Marlborough. A one-stop shop for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. - DvL
W.W. Meissner. Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992.
* There is some good stuff in here, but for every page of it there are eight pages of repetitive, classification obsessed, and not particularly fruitful psychoanalysis. Unlike other biographies, though, it considers the possibility that Ignatius was just a regular dude with huge problems, and not a manifestation of God's will on Earth.
Jean Baptiste de la Mettrie. Man, a Machine. Open Court Publishing, Chicago, 1912.
* de La Mettrie was one of Frederick’s close friends who went on to die at the hands of paté. This is his big philosophical work proposing exactly what the title suggests. His science gets downright silly, but there are enough daring points in there to make it worth a gander. - DvL
Ellen Moers. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1960.
* What was Disraeli like as a Dandy? What set apart a Baudelaire from a Brummell? Is there anything at all redeeming about George IV? A wonderful sourcebook for all things Regency and in general sartorial.
John Morley. The Life of Gladstone (3 vols) The Macmillan Company, Norwood, 1903.
* Do you want to know about the repeal of the Corn Laws? No, REAAAAALLY want to know about them? Put together, Morley's Gladstone biography weighs in at 1800 pages, a good third of which is him quoting, extensively, for pages and pages at a time, from Gladstone's factual and proper diaries. Still, you get a very full sense of the turmoil and soul-searching Gladstone went through as he fought his way mentally from son of an unrepentant plantation lord to champion of intellectual and political freedom.
Carl Sandburg. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years Dell Publishing, New York, 1959. * Perhaps the best historical biography ever written for grandeur and sheer readability. It was originally published back in 1925, but I'm listing the 1959 reprint that came in three pocket-sized volumes pared down by Sandburg himself. It's highly portable and still highly awesome. Anyway, there are more historically rigorous biographies out there, but none written by somebody who actually seems to understand viscerally the world Lincoln came from, the tall tales and humorous yarns that were woven across often dire circumstance. Sandburg taps into that like nobody else, and so we'll always come back to him in the end.
Alan Schom. Napoleon Bonaparte HarperCollins, New York, 1997.
* A far less brief (787 pages) account of Napoleon, which has as its central thesis: "Napoleon Bonaparte was a fuck-up." Sometimes, as with the Invasion of Britain or Egypt, this thesis is entirely plausible. Other times, minor points seem to be stretched and major virtues overlooked in order to keep everything fitting in the Big Picture. Still, if you want to move from Hero Worship to Balanced Respect, this book will get you there.
Lytton Strachey. Eminent Victorians Harcourt, Brace, and Co., New York, 1918.
*Short accounts of the lives of Florence Nightingale, General Gordon, Cardinal Manning, Dr. Arnold. Strachey is always fun to read, and the account of Gordon is told in the best "Brit pulling a stiff upper lip as a tiger makes off with his leg" tradition.
Lytton Strachey. Queen Victoria Harcourt, Brace, and Co., New York, 1921.
* More accurately Some British Prime Ministers, Prince Albert, and Incidentally Queen Victoria but still, a classic read in the realm of historical biography glittering with life and wry observations on the foibles of the Victorians.
Victor Thaddeus. Voltaire: Genius of Mockery. Brentano’s, New York, 1928.
* To tell the truth, I haven’t read this fellow in well-nigh-on ten years. I remember loving it at the time, though. – DvL
E. T. Bell. Men of Mathematics: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1937.
* For my money, still the best book of mathematical biography out there. – DvL
Richard Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character. Bantam Books, New York, 1985
* There is a direct path from me reading this book in seventh grade to me sitting here typing these words. The latter is inconceivable without the former. – DvL
James Gleick. Isaac Newton. Vintage Books, New York, 2003.
* On the brief side, but gives you a good, vibrant sense of the men who founded the Royal Society and as such the modern scientific community. - DvL
A. Rupert Hall. From Galileo to Newton. Harper and Row, New York, 1963.
* Another classic in the history of science. No huge surprises, but no ludicrous attempts to portray Newton as a closet puppy strangler either. - DvL
Pietro Redondi. Galileo: Heretic. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987.
* Does a great job not only with bringing Galileo to life, but the highly unique intellectual atmosphere of his day. - DvL
