A wikipedia-style short biography of a person will tell you what they did and accomplished.
A good, critical, book-length biography can help you see, in something more like real-time, what decisions the person made along the way, what constraints they were operating under, how the effects of those decisions looked as they happened (without the benefit of hindsight), and what atmospheric effects contributed to the arc of the person’s life. This is much more personally applicable to you as the reader who has to live your life in real-time.
I enjoy reading biographies of people who made unusual commitments so I can imagine what that sort of pioneer work might have felt like. An extremely weird example (both in the writing style and the subject matter) that has stuck with me is Gabriella Fiori’s biography of Simone Weil (Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography). Another good one is Fiona Joseph’s biography of Beatrice Cadbury (Beatrice: the Cadbury Heiress Who Gave Away Her Fortune). Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche was everything I wanted in a Nietzsche bio.
A wikipedia-style short biography of a person will tell you what they did and accomplished.
A good, critical, book-length biography can help you see, in something more like real-time, what decisions the person made along the way, what constraints they were operating under, how the effects of those decisions looked as they happened (without the benefit of hindsight), and what atmospheric effects contributed to the arc of the person’s life. This is much more personally applicable to you as the reader who has to live your life in real-time.
I enjoy reading biographies of people who made unusual commitments so I can imagine what that sort of pioneer work might have felt like. An extremely weird example (both in the writing style and the subject matter) that has stuck with me is Gabriella Fiori’s biography of Simone Weil (Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography). Another good one is Fiona Joseph’s biography of Beatrice Cadbury (Beatrice: the Cadbury Heiress Who Gave Away Her Fortune). Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche was everything I wanted in a Nietzsche bio.