Best Biographies

An Olympic runner's bomber goes down in the Pacific, he survives forty-seven days on a raft, and then the Japanese prison camps begin. Hillenbrand writes it as narrative rather than as record, and it is the book that converts readers who think the genre means dates and parliaments.

One caveat: The camp chapters describe sustained torture, and the late-life religious turn is handled quickly after four hundred pages of detail.

Five women killed in Whitechapel in 1888 have been described for a century as prostitutes and little else. Rubenhold went to census records, workhouse registers and inquest testimony and wrote their actual lives — lodging houses, failed marriages, drink, children — and found that most of them were not selling sex at all.

One caveat: Some Ripper historians dispute her reading of the evidence on two of the five. The book is an argument, and it is explicit about being one.

The streetcar accident that broke Kahlo's spine at eighteen, the marriage to Diego Rivera that she called the second accident, and the paintings she made out of both. Herrera is an art historian and reads the canvases as evidence, which is what separates this from the poster version of Kahlo.

One caveat: Written in the early 1980s, before Kahlo's diaries were published. Later scholarship has corrected parts of it, and the prose is of its decade.

Jobs asked Isaacson to write it and then gave up control of it, which is the unusual bargain this book rests on: more than forty interviews with the subject and a hundred with people around him, published weeks after he died. The cruelty is in there with the vision.

One caveat: Written too close to the events to have perspective, and several Apple insiders have published rebuttals. Read it as a first draft with extraordinary access, not as the verdict.

An orphan from the Caribbean talks his way into the American founding, builds its financial system, and is shot by the sitting vice president. Chernow writes narrative history at a pace most novelists would envy, which is why a musical came out of it rather than out of any of the other founders' biographies.

One caveat: Warmly on Hamilton's side. On slavery and on his opponents, a less admiring biographer would have pressed harder.

Twenty-five years of research into J. Robert Oppenheimer: the physics, the directorship at Los Alamos, the communist associations, and the 1954 security hearing that destroyed him. It is as much about what a government does to an inconvenient person as it is about the bomb.

One caveat: The middle third assumes more patience with 1930s left politics than most readers arrive with. The physics is kept light, which will frustrate some.

The first full-scale life of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, written with access to FBI surveillance files and recordings released since the last one. Eig's King is younger, angrier and more radical than the one quoted every January, and the book is about how that man got sanded down.

One caveat: The FBI material includes allegations about King's private life that the book handles carefully and does not resolve. Some readers find that section unbearable; others find it the most honest part.

Robert Moses never held elected office and spent forty-four years deciding where New York's bridges, parks, beaches and expressways went — and whose neighborhoods came down to make room. Caro did seven years of research and 522 interviews, and the result is the book every other biography on this list is measured against.

One caveat: 1,263 pages, and the published edition is already cut by roughly a third. Historians have since pushed back on parts of the case against Moses, particularly the claim that he acted alone.