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The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
T. J. Stiles
Thoroughly deserving of its National Book Award for Nonfiction, Stiles’s biography captures a huge life and pivotal epoch. Of humble origins, Cornelius Vanderbilt grew into a six-foot, 200 pound, rock-fisted dynamo, a ruthless competitor who transformed this nation through technological and business inventiveness. Fast-paced and filled with arresting personal and historical detail, the biography is an absolute triumph.
Hilary Mantel
Winner of the Man Booker Prize and (nonetheless) a joy, a wonder, and a truly engrossing read, this elegantly constructed novel brilliantly conjures up of one of history’s dark horses. Thomas Cromwell, watchful, shrewd, and in this telling, compassionate, rises to power in the turmoil surrounding Henry VIII’s obsessions with the Tudor succession and Anne Boleyn. The book is a peerless mixture of biography, history, and fiction.
Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
Larry Tye
Egocentric, high-living, outspoken, and flamboyant, Satchel Paige was exactly the sort of player prudish, tight-fisted Branch Rickey did not have in mind to break major-league baseball’s color bar. Jackie Robinson got the nod, but Paige, the all-round showman, was a powerful force in moving toward integration: popularizing black baseball and playing off season with white major leaguers. That story gets the treatment it demands in this fine biography.
Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life
Michael Greenberg
These 44 short, impeccably wrought pieces portray the life and times of the son of a Brooklyn scrap merchant hell-bent on being a writer. Greenberg’s trials are grueling, sometimes very odd, often mordantly funny. His prose is direct and precise; his observation of others ruthless; and his sensibility stark and ironic. These are darkly glinting gems of the examined life.
Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House
Miranda Seymour
A decaying Jacobean pile obsessively venerated by the author’s father is the setting for this bizarre anatomy of a driven man and four generations of three unhappily merged families. Cool and wry, ghoulish and poignant, it is an ingeniously assembled memoir of misplaced passion and eccentricity; and teems with upper-class monsters, working-class upstarts, and loyal retainers.
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
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