Biographies & Auto-Biographies I Like
Explore a curated list of compelling biographies & autobiographies, from Robert K. Massie’s *Nicholas and Alexandra* to Ian Kershaw’s definitive Hitler volumes and Thomas Merton’s spiritual classic—must-read true stories.
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Hitler, 1889-1936
by Ian Kershaw
Traces Hitler's rise from a shelter for needy children in Austria to dictatorship over Germany and the beginning of his persecution of the Jews.
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Hitler, 1936-45
by Ian Kershaw
"In this volume, Ian Kershaw introduces Adolf Hitler at the apex of his power, idolized by millions of Germans for bringing the nation out of economic catastrophe. The Nazi party, the armed forces, the industrial cartels, and the civil servants are all "working towards the Fuhrer." Meanwhile, Hitler is poised to realize his Mephistophelean vision : the subjugation of Europe under the Thousand Year Reich and, in the process, the annihilation of the Jews. For three years, Hitler and his relentless armies pluge the European continent into a bloodbath, as German soldiers, accompanied by fanatical SS units, slaughter conquered troops and civilians alike. Then, as Allied might prevails, Kershaw reveals a Hitler transformed from invincible warlord to desperate gambler, ultimately bring destruction to his country and ending his life in a bunker under the ruines of Berlin. Based on immense research, including the use of many previously untapped sources, Hitler, 1936-1945"--Page 4 of cover.
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The Seven Storey Mountain
by Thomas Merton
A celebration of Merton's spiritual autobiography is accompanied by an introduction from the editor and a note from Merton's biographer.
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Nicholas and Alexandra
by Robert K. Massie
A “magnificent and intimate” (Harper’s) modern classic of Russian history, the spellbinding story of the love that ended an empire—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great “A moving, rich book . . . [This] revealing, densely documented account of the last Romanovs focuses not on the great events . . . but on the royal family and their evil nemesis. . . . The tale is so bizarre, no melodrama is equal to it.”—Newsweek In this commanding book, New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of the Russian empire to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble.
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Nathan Bedford Forrest
by Jack Hurst
Amid the aristocratic ranks of the Confederate cavalry, Nathan Bedford Forrest was untutored, all but unlettered, and regarded as no more than a guerrilla. His tactic was the headlong charge, mounted with such swiftness and ferocity that General Sherman called him a "devil" who should "be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury." And in a war in which officers prided themselves on their decorum, Forrest habitually issued surrender-or-die ultimatums to the enemy and often intimidated his own superiors. After being in command at the notorious Fort Pillow Massacre, he went on to haunt the South as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Now this epic figure is restored to human dimensions in an exemplary biography that puts both Forrest's genius and his savagery into the context of his time, chronicling his rise from frontiersman to slave trader, private to lieutenant general, Klansman to—eventually—New South businessman and racial moderate. Unflinching in its analysis and with extensive new research, Nathan Bedford Forrest is an invaluable and immensely readable addition to the literature of the Civil War.
