Biographies

I found The Real Bluebeard pretty awesome, especially the chapters about Giles descent into madness and the battles with Jeanne.

>Alexander
Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman, haven't read that one yet but nothing else is coming to mind.
The same author wrote a Julius Caesar biography which is pretty good but maybe not quite as in depth as I hoped it would be.

goodreads.com/book/show/7841459-alexander-the-great

goodreads.com/book/show/1701815.Julius_Caesar

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Well, not OP, but you've definitely sold me on this one.

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How does he deal with Churchill's personal apologies in his memoirs?

Look up the Alexander Trilogy

>There's probably a great one on Alexander, right?

Arrian's Anabasis>Plutarch>>>>Diodorus>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.Quintus Curtius Rufus

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From what era of his life?

gallipoli and early war. i suppose also his "justified" backstabbing in the sudan

im gonna buy that one.
Goldsworthy's biographies are also recommended

Gold standard

>NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!!!

No thanks

Why anyone would want to read an 800 page book about Alexander "Just fuck my monetary system up" (((Hamilton))) is a mystery to me.
Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Franklin all lived exponentially more interesting lives.

Boswell's Johnson, Southey's Nelson, Holmes' Coleridge, Ellmann's Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde.

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Will this book on Napoleon inspire me?

Sugden's Nelson a very good modern treatment.

this one is pretty fascinating even if you aren't interested in the author

Richard Ellman's biographies of Joyce, Wilde and Yeats.

>Will this book on Napoleon inspire me?
...to dominate Europe? Yes it should do the trick.

Great recommendations. For the Founding Fathers I'd also recommend His Excellency (a shorter Washington biography than Chernow's), Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, James Madison: A Life Reconsidered, James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness, and The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin.

Also, some user recommended this book a month or two ago. I read it recently and enjoyed it as well.

Meme answer, have you even read these?

Plutarch is barely even in the same category as "history" as are the other 3. He offers a good story but it's not good history, nor is it intended to be. A nice recap for people already familiar with Alexander, or people not interested in the actual battles, travels, etc.

DS is a pretty terrible account of Alexander, given his aim of writing a universal history. Alexander literally gets one chapter and it's pretty lifeless. Would easily rank it last of the 4.

Rufus is fucking fine for just about everything, and is worth reading in conjunction with (if not quite in place of) Arrian because he doesn't suck Alexander's dick so much. Arrian fucking worships his subject.

I've actually been wondering about what THE essential bio on Napoleon is. there sure are a lot out there.

is this one generally considered the shit?

Yes. According to Veeky Forums posters it's the most recent one that has new access to a large amount of Napoleon's letters.

cool, I'll have to look into it then.

thanks.

Captain Scott by Ranulph Fiennes.

No it will just depress you.
If you measure yourself against the standards of Napoleon, you will always think yourself a failure because the man was superhuman.

He became a general by the time he was 22 or some shit, became a war hero at Toulon which turned him into a household name overnight, became consul when he was 30 and declared himself emperor when he was 35.

Just come to terms that you will never be on his level, and just be in awe that only a handful of men like him have existed in history.

That is the definitive one volume biography of Napoleon. But even at 900 pages, it still rushes through the man's life.
For example, it only devotes 5 pages to a battle that entire books have been written about. But it's as good an intro as you're going to get.

There isn't exactly a shortage of books on Napoleon though. There's hundreds of books written about his Russian campaign alone.

Then if you are still interested in the subject, read biographies on Talleyrand and Fouche, Napoleon's right hand men.
I would even go so far as to argue that Talleyrand was the true genius because Napoleon's empire started to collapse once Talleyrand switched allegiances.
It was like a Cheney/Bush type relationship.

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thanks, I am well aware that no one book could fully cover his life lol. but yeah, I just wondered if there was one out there that was generally considered a an authority and/or comprehensive work.

I'll look into what you recommended

As said it draws on a lot of new content which apparently changes a few things, but mostly adds color to existing information.

Also it is definitely about Napoleon qua man rather than Napoleon qua strategist. Battles are described only insofar as they are relevant to describing and illuminating the man, and while you're definitely not deprived of general strategies/tactics, battle scenes are (relatively) glossed over and peppered with snappy anecdotes and quotes rather than exacting detail. If you want that angle, check out Chandler's "campaigns of Napoleon" for basically hour-by-hour rundowns of every battle scene (at the cost of giving you basically no personal/biographical information about Napoleon, especially not regarding anything that he did domestically).

Get that book The Nixon Tapes

>Just come to terms that you will never be on his level, and just be in awe that only a handful of men like him have existed in history.

I mean yeah, some of his contemporaries literally ranked him in the "triumvirate of great men" alongside Alexander and Caesar. IIRC Shirer compared Hitler to Napoleon in the sense of being the last in the tradition of "adventure conquerors," but with Hitler's claim to that title obviously being overshadowed by everything else he did.

How does it deal with Churchill staging a military coup in Yugoslavia and then throwing the country under German Panzers?

thanks guys

Like I said, I only read the first two volumes.
WWII is in volume 3.

But considering he wanted the army to open fire on Irish citizens, wanted India to remain under British rule and a strong argument can be made that he got Britain into WWI needlessly, there's enough evidence in what I read so far that he was a truly evil human being.

This was surprisingly good.

Right on, that was me.

Oh shit I didn't realize which Burton that was until I saw the subtitle. I definitely saw that book at my local used bookstore last week. Worth the read? Might pick it up.

>download the 53MB(!) epub
>start reading...

>Napoleon’s love affair with Josephine has been presented all too often in plays, novels and movies as a Romeo and Juliet story: in fact, it was anything but. He had an overwhelming crush on her, but she didn’t love him, at least in the beginning, and was unfaithful from the very start of their marriage. When he learned of her infidelities two years later while on campaign in the middle of the Egyptian desert, he was devastated. He took a mistress in Cairo in part to protect himself from accusations of cuckoldry, which were far more dangerous for a French general of the era than those of adultery. Yet he forgave Josephine when he returned to France, and they started off on a decade of harmonious marital and sexual contentment, despite his taking a series of mistresses. Josephine remained faithful and even fell in love with him. When he decided to divorce for dynastic and geostrategic reasons, Josephine was desolate but they remained friendly. Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, would also be unfaithful to him, with an Austrian general Napoleon had defeated on the battlefield but clearly couldn’t match in bed.

C U C K E D

LITERALLY IN THE INTRODUCTION!!!!

Can Veeky Forums recommend biographies onto Charlemagne, Augustus, Aurelius, Ceasar?

What about city biographies or country biographies? Interested in France, Britain, Germany and Russia / Soviet Union.

Biography recs for Stalin and Churchill would be very neat.

Any and all recommendations for old American presidents are welcome too.

Just finished this and loved it (I'm Europoor).

Does it tell us why Churchill and England ignored 41 ally/peace treaty offers from NG?

Kershaw's not particularly good writer and he has very funny apologies of Soviet Union. Still, worth to read.

noice

for the reoman emperors, Goldsworthy's books are often recommended

No

This is a different biography for sure.
It's funny how he completely ignores that Hitler might've just been sociopathic and evil.

makes for a bizarre read
not sure what to make of it yet!

Irving looks fairly objective compared to Stolfi

Well Hitler is obviously not sociopathic and evil. So it's good that Stolfi takes a more objective view on things and doesn't let his emotions get to him like all other Hitler biographers. Irving is good, especially for WW2 revisionists like myself.

His War Path and Hitler's War were good, but left some of the uglier speeches away and the entire "Hitler really didn't know what Himmler was doing in Warthegau (Poland) until late) is preeeeeeeeetty shaky.

He is a good writer though. I was thoroughly gripped by the book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how Nazi high command worked.

Better writer than Kershaw and in some aspect, like the level of depth and detail in analysis, Irving has him beat.

Have you read much of Irving? That's my only read so far. What would you recommend?

by the way, have you read the Frederick the Great biography that Hitler liked? By Carlyle?

Nothing wrong with colonialism. We need leaders who would conquer and exploit sand niggers.

Yes I have read all of them. Plutarch functions as a religious moralist and is comparing Alexander morally to Caesar, he isnt a soldier and does not pretend to be. Diodorus is good history from his time and a better source than Rufus, who is writing a supermarket gossip page for upper class Romans.

Arrian puts a tremendous amount of work into his, cites sources (!), and manages some good deal of criticism regarding the incidents with Cleitus, proskynesis, drinking, etc etc at the end. At this point contrarianism for contrarianism's sake is far more meme than the correct ordering of biographies, you immense faggot.

Yes, I've read much of Irving, The War Path is indeed very good. I would recommend "No Simple Victory" by Norman Davies, "The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941" by James Holland and "Hitler's Warrior: The Life and Wars of Joachim Peiper" by Danny S. Parker if you're interested in the revisionist perspective.

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this.

Can someone recommend a good Anton Chekhov biography? Practicing doctor and philanthropist while world class writer, he seems like he had a cool life

DROPPED NAPOLEON

Napoleon wasn't a cuck. He just reached that higher plane of existence to not care about the hole between a woman's legs.
When you stop caring about pursuing sex all the time, you will be truly amazed at how much you can accomplish.

goodreads.com/book/show/3537605-jefferson-davis

A Life in Letters

Anton Chekhov: A Life by Donald Rayfield
goodreads.com/book/show/114616.Anton_Chekhov

Joseph Frank's 5 volume biography of Dostoevskiii is pretty cool.

I've only read the abridged version though, as the original volumes are expensive

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This.

I have done away with the notion of any sort of sexual relationship long ago, and you wouldn't believe how close I am to getting banished to Saint Helena right now

thanks for the rec.

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What's it like? I've only ever read letters he wrote.

I think the book is pretty damn fascinating, he really was a jack-of-all-trades kind of man.

Manlets, when will they learn?!

Brian Boyd's two parter on Nabokov

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not that one for a start

He was of above average height.

napoleon-series.org/research/napoleon/c_description.html
average man was short, he was below middle height
his posters are wrong, you want phillip dwyer

If you are a fan of SF these are definitely worth a read.

goodreads.com/book/show/9673433-robert-a-heinlein

goodreads.com/book/show/25659443-robert-a-heinlein

Just finished this t. .

Great book!