Smart people read biographies, Ryan Holiday says, because they’re some of most actionable and educational reading you can do, so he recommends his favorites:
- Plutarch’s Lives, Plutarch – Aside from being the basis of much of Shakespeare, he was one of Montaigne’s favorite writers.
- The Power Broker, Robert Caro – Like Huey Long and Willie Stark, Robert Moses was a man who got power, loved power and was transformed by power.
- Socrates: A Man for Our Times, Napoleon: A Life, Churchill, Paul Johnson – Paul Johnson is the kind of author whose sweeping judgements you can trust, so you leave this book with what feels like a very solid understanding of who his subjects are a people.
He recommends many more.
And I recommend the Men of Yore posts by AAB:
“A series about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it’s their nature: to grow and push outwards.”
Almost a hundred are featured already, such as…
Men of Yore Adrian Carton de Wiart
Men of Yore John Blashford-Snell
Men of Yore Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard
Those three should be especially interesting or already familiar to regular Isegoria readers!