Biographies

 For a person like me who reads a lot, it’s not that easy to find a book that impresses me so much I want to write about it. There might not be so many titles, but there is a genre (if we could call it that) of books that I love to read, and that rarely disappoints me. I am talking about biographies. On average, yearly I read about 4 or 5 biographies. Some of them are biographies of famous people like Nelson Mandela, Queen Victoria, or Johnny Cash, and some are just incredible stories of “common people.” There are many reasons why I love to read biographies.

Life is writing the most interesting stories. Just like many other book lovers, I love a book with a good plot, interesting turns, and many ups and downs. And, people’s lives can sometimes be more interesting and more suspenseful than any novel. Stories of some ordinary people like Holocaust survivors, defectors from North Korea, or missionaries in a faraway country are sometimes full of incredible events, and experiences. Some of them are sad and hard, but there are also beautiful ones. It is incredible to read what people can do to others, but it is equally incredible to see what people can survive, overcome, and forgive. Stories about the lives of famous people, especially those from the distant past, are also full of unbelievable details that we know little about.

Furthermore, biographies are not just books about one person. They tell a story about a certain time and society in which they lived. Through them, we can learn so much about the history of a certain place in a specific time of history. For example, the story of a girl who fled North Korea has taught me so much about that closed country, its history, and society about which we don’t know much. The biography of a young woman from Nepal opened my eyes to the horrors of sexual slavery. In the biography of Queen Victoria, I learned so much about the era that was named after her.

Finally, the history we learn through biographies does not consist only of facts, numbers, and years. We gain a far better picture of a society, circumstances, human reasoning, mentality, and relationships between people.

Biographies also give us a remarkable insight into someone’s life. It is especially fascinating in the case of famous people we mostly see in their public roles or at least in the light that media or history want to portray them. Sometimes the famous people themselves are the ones that created the public image that differs from who they really are. Of course, some biographies are well written, and some are not. The good ones are the ones that have more than just facts. They also give us testimonies and insights from a person’s friends, colleagues, and family members. In that way, they portray a much more vivid, colorful, and in-depth picture of that person. I love to see who are these people that ruled the world, won many hearts, who are admired by many, or feared by the masses.

These are just some of the reasons why I love biographies. I recently had a conversation with my husband, and he shared that e person can only read so many books on a certain topic. After a while, things start to become repetitive. However, biographies are always new. Regardless of the similarities, there are no two equal lives lived at the same time in history under the same circumstances and with the same experiences.