Word: books
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...some famous person's head. Two current bestsellers probably owe their success to this phenomenon: When Pride Still Mattered, the story of Hall of Fame Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, and John Glenn: A Memoir, the life of the former Mercury astronaut and former senator. Both of these books are about people who lived lives far removed from that of the average book-buyer, making the chance to relive their lives all the more thrilling. In the case of the current bestseller Galileo's Daughter, although readers might not be that interested in the daughter herself, they...
...pedestrian as book-buyers' motivations may seem, the recent proliferation of biographies shows that biographers today are indeed playing with the conception of biography as a genre. In Sarte's novel, Roquentin's struggles with this problem led him to abandon his biography. Those who persevere and finish a biography have made many choices along the way that are vital in determining what sort of biography will emerge. These questions can be divided into two categories: how the author obtains and interprets the sources concerning the subject, and exactly how the subject is defined...
...While Fox Weber initially worked with Balthus on the book, he writes that "to keep my freedom once I realized I was writing about someone as unscrupulous as he is brilliant, almost as talented at lying as he is at painting--I pretty much stopped meeting with Balthus." It is interesting that although the biography is technically Fox Weber's work, this seems somehow scandalous. Fox Weber is the artist here, right...
...exaggerations of Balthus could very well be his own fictions, but it could also be the case that the "real" Balthus was simply not living up to the thrilling figure that Weber had imagined him to be. Throughout the book, Weber relies on analysis of Balthus' paintings as practically his only source in constructing his life, which provides the reader with only a weak characterization and superficial understanding of Balthus. Unfortunately, Weber appears to take to heart the epigraph from Oscar Wilde that appears at the beginning of the first chapter: "I treated art as the supreme reality and life...
...this question. By including a fictional character in the midst of his otherwise serious biography, Morris caused an uproar over the standards of factual and historical accuracy in the literary world while asserting his belief in the artistic merit of biography. Although perhaps compromising the historical integrity of the book, Morris' use of fictional elements is a deft stroke used to illustrate the workings of his subject's mind...