CityReads│Bright Stars: Summer Reading List of (Auto)biographies

241

Bright Stars: Summer Reading List of (Auto)biographies

Human stars appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the humanmind, the force and the range of the faculties.

How many people have ever lived on earth? More than 108 billion members of ourspecies have ever been born, according to estimates by Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Given the current global population of about 7.5 billion (based on our most recent estimate as of mid-2017), that means those of us currently alive represent about 7 percent of the total number of humans who have everlived.

Among 108 billion people, how many of them can be considered light of human being? Zweig wrote in his book, Shooting Stars, “Millions of people in a nation arenecessary for a single genius to arise, millions of tedious hours must passbefore a truly historic shooting star of humanity appears in the sky”.

HereI compile a list of biographies, auto biographies and interviews in CityReads and what I am currently reading. I consider them all human stars. Human stars appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, theforce and the range of the faculties.

1 Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell. 2014. Shooting stars: ten historical miniatures, Steerforth Press.

The title of today’s post comes from this book. Shooting stars by Zweig is aclassic in the genre of biography. “Millions of people in a nation arenecessary for a single genius to arise, millions of tedious hours must passbefore a truly historic shooting star of humanity appears in the sky…But ifartistic geniuses do arise, they will outlast their own time; if such asignificant hour in the history of the world occurs, it will decide matters fordecades and centuries yet to come…In this book I amaiming to remember the hours of such shooting stars—I call them that becausethey outshine the past as brilliantly and steadfastly as stars outshine thenight”.

2 Stefan Zweig, 2011. The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, Plunkett Lake Press.

The World of Yesterday, Zweig’s memoir, was completed shortly before his suicide. It charts the history of Europe from nineteenth-century splendour, decadence and complacency, through the devastation of the First World War, to the resultant brutality and depravity of the Nazi regime. The World of Yesterday is aheartfelt tribute to an age of humanity and enlightenment that Zweig feared was lost for ever. An incomparable record of a lost era, this is also essential reading for those who have already fallen in love with Zweig’s fiction.

“The time provides the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation – our unique generation, carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history.”

3 King, S. 2000. On Writing: A memoir of the craft. New York: Scribner.

In his memoir, "On Writing," Stephen King talks about how he becomes a writer and shares valuable insights into how to be a better writer. To learn more, please refer to CityReads | Writing Lessons from Stephen King

4 Jonathan Cott, 2013. Susan Sontag: the complete Rolling Stone interview, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Jonathan Cott, an editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Sontag first in Paris and later in New York in 1978. The munificence and fluency of her conversation manifests what the French refer to as an ivresse du discours—an inebriation with the spoken word. To learn more, please refer to CityReads | Sontag: What Makes Me Feel Strong?

5 János Kornai, 2008. By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey, Cambridge, Massachusetts-London, England: MIT Press.

János Kornai, a distinguished Hungarian economist, traces his lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research. JánosKornai began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then becamea critic of the communist political and economic system. He contributed to the ideological preparation for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and became an influential theorist of the post-Soviet economic transition. He has been a journalist, a researcher prohibited from teaching in his home country, and atenured professor at Harvard. By Force of Thought traces Kornai's lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research. To learn more, please refer to CityReads | By Force of Thought: Kornai’s Intellectual Journey

6 Nien Cheng,1987. Life and death inShanghai, New York: Grove Press.

I first learned about Nien Cheng fromJames Fallows’s piece at Atlantic. Nien Cheng died Nov. 2, 2009 at her home in Washington. Life and Death in Shanghai, her memoir of her life in China in thepre-Communist era, and then her daughter's murder and her own imprisonment and torture by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, was one of the first notable accounts of those years and remains a powerful work of modernnon-fiction. Please reply 43 to get the CityReads post.

7 Andrea Wulf, 2015. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World, Knopf.

September 14, 2016 is the 247th birthday of Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt was the preeminent scientist of his time. Contemporaries spoke of him as second in fame only to Napoleon. All over the Americas and the English-speaking world, townsand rivers are still named after him, along with mountain ranges, bays,waterfalls, 300 plants and more than 100 animals. There is a Humboldt glacier,a Humboldt asteroid, a Humboldt hog-nosed skunk. Off the coast of Peru andChile, the giant Humboldt squid swims in the Humboldt Current, and even on themoon there is an area called Mare Humboldtianum. More places are named afterHumboldt than anyone else. Darwin called him the “greatest scientific traveler who ever lived.”

Yet today, outside Latin America and Humboldt’s native Germany, his name has receded into near oblivion. His insights have become so ingested by modern science that they may no longer seem astonishing. As Andrea Wulf remarks in her arresting “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World,” “it is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.”He is perhaps the most important forgotten man of science.

The Invention of Nature is a quest to rediscover Humboldt, and to restore him to his rightful place in the pantheon of nature and science. It’s also a quest to understand why we think as we do today about the natural world. To learn more, please refer to  CityReads | Alexandervon Humboldt: the man who invents the nature.

8 Haruki Murakami, 2015. Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka (Novelist byprofession), Switch library.

HarukiMurakami, translated by Philip Gabriel, 2008. What I talk about when I talkabout running: a memoir, Alfred A. Knopf.

Murakami published a running memoir in 2008, What I talk about when I talk about running, which is more like running/writing autobiography. This book, Novelistby Profession, is more like writing/running autobiography. There is some overlapping between the two books, but the central theme differs. The former talks about running techniques; while the latter talks about the techniques of writing a novel. I feel interested at the parts on running, writing and translating. The three are all important and are mutually beneficial for Murakami as a life-long professional novelist.

To learn more, please refer to  CityReads | Haruki Murakami: A Running Novelist & Translator

9 Willis Barnstone, ed. 2013. Borges at Eighty: Conversations. New Directions.

The works of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges almost defy classification. His stories often read like thoughtful essays, his essays like poems, and his poems like brief narrations. Borges in conversation similarly transcends and transmutes our expectations of the ordinary colloquy.

In the wide-ranging dialogues presented in this volume, Borges at Eighty: Conversations, the author's thoughts are evoked through the perceptive questioning of Willis Barnstone, John Coleman, AlastairReid, Dick Cavett, and others. The resulting interplay between Borges and his interviewers makes fascinating reading, revealing him as perhaps the premier conversationalist of our time. “The voice of the blind man is the essential Borges. Those who have heard him or read him remain affected for life”. To learn more, please refer to CityReads | Borges in Conversation.

10 Jeffrey Meyers, 2000.Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, New York:Norton.

George Orwell was born with the name, Eric Blair, in 1903, the same year when Evelyn Waugh was born. Orwell was born in Motihari, Bihar, in northern India, where his father worked for the opium department of the British empire government of India. it was a kind of disgraceful job in many ways. He supervised the gathering and export of opium to China. Orwell felt a lot of guilt about notonly things that were appropriate to feel guilty about, like his father's job, but also felt guilty about things that other people wouldn't feel guilty about: for example, having a superior education at Eton or even coming from amiddle-class family. To learn more, please refer to CityReads | Such, Such Was George Orwell

11 Walter Isaacson, 2017.Leonardo da Vinci, Simon and Schuster.

Walter Isaacson, author of multiple biographies of innovative genius, including Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, published a new biography of Leonardoda Vinci in 2017. Walter’s starting point for this book was not Leonardo’s art masterpieces but his notebooks. His mind is best revealed in the more than7,200 pages of his notes and scribbles that, miraculously, survive to this day.

Fortunately, Leonardo could not afford to waste paper, so he crammed every inch of his pages with miscellaneous drawings and looking-glass jottings that seem random but provide intimations of his mental leaps.

Scribbled alongside each other, with rhyme if not reason, are math calculations, sketchesof his devilish young boyfriend, birds, flying machines, theater props, eddies of water, blood valves, grotesque heads, angels, siphons, plant stems,sawed-apart skulls, tips for painters, notes on the eye and optics, weapons ofwar, fables, riddles, and studies for paintings. The cross-disciplinary brilliance whirls across every page, providing a delightful display of a minddancing with nature. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity evercreated, a wondrous guide to the person whom the eminent art historian Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history. To learn more,please refer to CityReads | Becoming Leonardo da Vinci

12 Agatha Christie: An autobiography, 1977. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.

Ten years ago, I read Agatha Christie’s autobiography. She began to write this book when she was 60 years old. It took her ten years to finish. In this book, she detailed about her life and career as a writer. It contains her thoughts aboutmarriage, divorce, loss and grievance. “Once you think of time and infinity, personal things will cease to affect you in the same way. Sorrow, suffering; all the finite things of life, show in an entirely different perspective”.

13 Ray Huang, 2015. Yellow River and Blue Mountains (A Memoir of Ray Huang)(Chinese Edition), SDX Joint Publishing Company.

Huang Renyu or Ray Huang is a historian. He was not a typical scholar.  He has a long history serving the military during the Second World War before joining the University.

Yellow River and Blue Mountains (A Memoir of Ray Huang) is actually a memoir of largescale. The content of the book covers the author's experiences from hismilitary life in early stage and his working and studying in America in youth.It is also a "great history" with extraordinary vision, since it discusses Chinese revolutions in modern times and the thousands of years of Chinese history. Though plenty of criticism from Ray Huang, he shares with readers his great view of history grown out of the magnificent Chinese culture.

14 John King Fairbank, 1983. Chinabound: A Fifty Year Memoir, Harper Collins

John King Fairbank was a prominent American historian of China. This book is acombination of autobiography, a love letter to China, a scan of the study ofChinese history from the 1920s to 1970s, and his friendships with many important Chinese intellectuals, all in a single volume.

15 Isaac Asimov, Janet Asimov, 2002. It's Been a Good Life (The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov #1-3 ), Prometheus Books.

Isaac Asimov wrote three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and InJoy Still Felt (1980) were a two-volume work, covering his life up to 1978. The third volume, I Asimov: A Memoir (1994)， was published after his death. Just like all of his books, it is a joy to read.

His wife, Janet Asimov, edited his autobiographies into  one-volume autobiography spans Asimov's life, It’s been a good life. Although Janet Asimov concludes this work with a shocking revelation about her husband's death, the volume is clearly intended as acelebration - as the title suggests - of a wonderful, creative life.

16 Mark Blake, 2011. Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen, Aurum Press.

I have become a big fan of Queen especially Freddie Mercury after I watched the film, Bohemia Rhapsody. Since then, I have searched books, and documentaries to learn more about them. I want to borrow from Neil deGrasse Tyson to describe how Freddie Mercury makes me feel,“Stars in the universe that burn thebrightest, live shorter lives than others. And with their high-energy light, they transform all that basks in their luminosity”. To me, Freddie Mercury is one of the brightest stars in the universe.

Related CityReads

（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"