Yet More Books to Love

And then there are biographies. There are so many fascinating biographies about people from all different generations and countries and reasons to read them. A good writer will tell all, the bad-or controversial- along with the good and let us judge which is which. The writer will let the story unfold with a flowing movement revealing the life, holding our attention. Not easy to do but necessary.

The person need not have been famous to be interesting. I write in past tense because I prefer reading about people who have already passed away. Their lives are over. There is no need to protect or hide anything. The flaws and failures make the final successes even more worthy. No embarrassment is considered. And it is the misadventures that create the fascination.

After all, a person who experienced no challenges, who glides through life with no losses, no pain and no scars is a very boring person indeed.

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Also I love history. Not the dry, flaky history that used to be taught in high school although I loved history even then. But the history with real people showing particular strengths and weaknesses that I can identify with. Events that happened always had reasons. Like the mystery stories, who, what, where, when and why. Again I don’t need the play by play details of a battle fought and the individual result, i.e. bodies whacked to pieces, eyeballs hanging out, etc. Ugh.

But the inner workings of events, how they came about, the personalities of the key figures and their relationship to each other. Everyone has a story and the players in history had theirs. They are the ones who created the chronicle of their day. History wasn’t necessarily made by physical events but by individuals and their reactions to moments that happened to them. A slight? An embarrassment? An insult? A misunderstanding?

The personal is what brings history to life. The surface must be scratched to find the untold tales. After all it’s what our whole foundation is built on. Because it is a foundation we can learn from the mistakes of earlier leaders, rulers, and the average person who cared.