All-Time Favorite Non-Fiction Books

By way of introduction to the origin of what my future post content will be, I will start with my all time favorite non-fiction reads. This list is comprised of books that I have never forgotten and, in many cases, have read more than once. I have been reading biographies since under 10 years old. In grade school, they assigned me children's versions of biographies of famous people. By my tweens, I was reading full fledged gigantic biographies and histories. This passion was fostered by my parents who were both history buffs. Biography has always been my first love in the history genre but I do also read grand sweeping history for the bigger picture. I have to add that my grandmother was instrumental as well. You see, she worked for Doubleday and several times a year brought home cart loads of books from their book sales open only to employees. Anything about History or Art, she would make sure she brought them for me. So much of my reading started from the books she would bring home. Like number 4 and 5 below.

From my painting experiences in the last fifteen years, I have come to discover something about myself!  I think what drew me to portraiture really is my love of people, their stories. That ties into my love of biography and connecting to the individual and learning their stories. Even in person, I love nothing better than a one on one deep conversation about the story, the life's journey. That is why I became a historian myself and is the foundation of my portraiture in art. 

The history adventure has been with me from so young and really owes its longevity to my innate curiosity. You name it, I am fascinated and my interests have become global in scope and time-wise span the millennia. So many of these fascinations began very young and I put them aside as many people do for the sake of their careers and just plain old life. However, I never forgot my loves and am so blessed to have resumed my passions for certain people, places and time periods.

As you will see, the following list has no theme other than perhaps they are all biographical but they span so many different geographical areas and time periods. In general, my interest and reading until maybe twenty years ago was Europe, Middle East and Western Asia never penetrating China, Japan or the Pacific or the United States. In the last dozen years or so, I have read on Asia and the United States.

1) Elizabeth I by Anne Somerset, St. Martin's Griffin, 1991. I think I read this in the late 1990's or early 2000. I was shelf reading in a local bookstore as I have done since my college days: browsing until an item hits me. I immediately bought it, had a coffee and sat down to read it. I had read much on Elizabeth I going back to my tween years. This tome was so gripping and what I loved was and is that it has a no nonsense approach. It was just straight history, argued well and the references were spot on reliable, standard and up to date. It immediately became my favorite biography of Elizabeth who has always been a favorite reading topic. I have some more recent works on Elizabeth to get to and we will see if there are any usurpers to my first choice in a biography of Elizabeth I.

2) The Burgmeister's Daughter: Scandal in a Sixteenth-Century German Town by Steven Ozment. Harper,  1996. I read this about ten years ago. I found it at the Strand Bookstore in New York while shelf reading and browsing. It is the tale of one woman's legal battle to recover her inheritance rights in sixteenth- century small town. Having an illicit relationship when young, she endures social ostracization and banishment. Her family completely cuts her out of their lives both physically and financially often hunting her down to just be evil to her and discredit her. The book is a fascinating tale of her legal battles to recover her reputation and her inheritance. While it might sound like a soap opera at first, it is not. It is a delve into legal status of women, social mores, religious, economic, and political history of the area. Anna Buschler was certainly an uncommon woman for any time. She stood up for herself and fought back the rest of her life to reclaim what was taken from her by her father, brothers and the rest of her family out of what I can only say was malice and jealousy. This book is certainly memorable and surprisingly striking. I have since read other similar type historical legal mysteries and oddities.

3) Pontius Pilate by Ann Wroe. Random House, 2001. I believe I read this soon after it came out. I have been passionate about the historical development of early Christianity since I had to lecture about comparative religion back when I was teaching at the University of Calgary. My course angle was a historical view of the three western religions rather than thematic: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. One of my colleagues in the Department of Religion was a scholar on early Christianity and we got into so many conversations over coffee. I even participated in one of his summer intensive seminars on the topic as sit in colleague. I was hooked on Gnostic Gospels and all of the related genres. What fascinated me and what I wanted to understand for myself was how we got from Jesus, member of a Jewish family, to Lamb of God, Son of God etc. What happened in religious terms? How did this transformation happen? How did the early church fathers make that happen scripturally? I must be clear here: My interest is purely academic, purely historical and not religious at all. So this became a pet topic of research for me. Yes I have so many! Sigh! 

I came upon Ann Wroe's book on Pontius Pilate and what an absolutely fascinating read it was. There is very little we can know about the man himself. He left no memoirs; there are no stone busts or statues commemorating him . She uses the standard sources for the period around the period 50 BCE to 200 A.D. What emerges is a compelling "what  if" biography. She asks insightful questions sort of in the vein: well if this source is right, what if Pontius Pilate thought this, did this analyzed this is way for that reason and from that we learn x, y, and z about him as a man, as a governor, as a husband. She weaves it all together in convincing ways but never ever tells the audience what to believe. She proves some arguments convincingly and basically let's the audience decide. For me, that is honest. Provide the tools and let the audience make their own decision. I respect that. For many, the fact that she doesn't argue and push for one point is a negative. For me, I loved that open-endedness. The research upon which she based her arguments was solid. Having become a bit of a Early Christianity historian myself over time, I can say she went to the appropriate wells. I have re-read this and may do so again. 

4) Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. Athenum Books 1967. There have been many many reprints of this book but I read this older copy as a teenager and then re-read one of the repeats a bit later. This subject matter has been a passion of mine since then. I have read biographies of every person related to them and Russian history has been a passion. This book started it all and I found it because I am also a fan of Victorian history reading both hand in hand. So this book, like the Elizabeth I, really is memorable for me because it opened up so many avenues of curiosity and just my voracious reading on all of these inter-related more modern subjects. From here, I read about the middle German duchies, the Scandinavian monarchies and everything in between. I will not talk about Nicholas and Alexandra or Massie's contribution because all three are so well known but this book was pivotal for me.

5) Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions 1905-1917 by Harrison E. Salisbury, Doubleday 1967. I read this almost immediately after the above Massie book. All I can say is WOW! Upon reading this book, I immersed myself in Lenin, Trotsky and all the revolutionary works of their time. What was great about this book was that it broke all of it down in a very understandable way:  hundreds of movements and developments that brought about the Russian revolution. I had just finished reading it when I entered Barnard College in NYC. I remember moving into my dorm and participating in all of the orientation events with my Lenin in my hand reading him for the first time. I even remember being inspired to write some political poetry at the time. But then reality smacked me in the face, and I had to hit the books real time for my full loaded curriculum: Medieval history major. I returned to the Russians and the revolutions more recently. But these two books have stayed in my memory all this time.

6) An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick by Hannah Pakula. Simon and Schuster, 1995. Another by-product of reading the Nicholas and Alexandra book. I got into Victoria and all of her many genealogical lines including the current Royal family although my interest in the British monarchy stems from my upbringing, my family being U.K. citizens. I happened upon this one at the long-closed Borders Bookstore probably around 2000. This is the Story of Victoria and Albert's first child, Victoria or Vicky. It is primarily told based on a voluminous correspondence between Vicky and her mother. They wrote each other daily once Vicky married and moved to Prussia. What I will always remember about this book is how controlling Queen Victoria actually was to the point of inadvertently being a decisive factor in Vicky's son (Kaiser Wilhem of WWI) being disfigured with one arm shorter than the other. Queen Victoria had insisted that her daughter take anesthesia which was very new and hadn't been tested to get appropriate dosages. The drama of the childbearing disaster stemmed from Vicky taking the "advices" of her mother. What Vicky went through during her life with such a domineering, fickle and self centered mother is amazing. The detail of their letters, the sheer volume of it could probably generate a psychological doctoral thesis on it's own.

7) M: The Man who would become Caravaggio by Peter Robb, Henry Holt 2000. I found this one at a local book retailer that had both new and used books. They had a cafe in the store and this was in their clearance section. I sat with it along with a huge stack of other books with coffee and started to read it. From almost the first page, I was shocked. The author's language, (cursing, four letter words and expletives) was atrocious and I couldn't believe anyone could publish with that language. That language kept up for a good 50 pages or so. Despite the language it was really a gripping read. Well, not for nothing, Caravaggio had a life that no one else had. He led a life that one wouldn't expect for one of the greatest painters that ever lived (IMHO): he carried a dagger when it was illegal, bar brawler, led a life in the seedy and slimy part of town, he was a murderer, a flaunter of the Counter Reformation, and eventually ended life on a beach, stabbed and robbed... an all around guy that you bring home to meet mom, he was not. Once I got past the author's language, I loved his story telling the way he weaved in the art, the history, the political and the religious. He showed me how to look at a painting! His analyses of the paintings was incredible and I have yet to see anyone do it better. Reading this book gave me a passion for Caravaggio both in term of art history as well as my own portraiture art work.

Well, these are some of my all time favorites. The books that I will never forget and that influenced me for my lifetime always providing inspiration, curiosity and never ending thoughts on their respective subject matter.