Best books biography 2012
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2012 Rules & Eligibility
The 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards have three rounds of voting open to all registered Goodreads members. Winners will be announced December 05, 2012.
Opening Round: Oct 31 - Nov 11
Voting opens to 15 official nominees, and write-in votes can be placed for any eligible book (see eligibility below).
Semifinal Round: Nov 13 - 19
The top five write-in votes in each of the categories become official nominees. Additional write-ins no longer accepted.
Final Round: Nov 20 - 28
The field narrows to the top 10 books in each category, and members have one last chance to vote!
Books published in the United States in English, including works in translation and other significant rereleases, between November 29, 2011, and November 25, 2012, are eligible for the 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards. Books published between November 26, 2012, and November 25, 2013, will be eligible for the 2013 awards.
We analyze statistics from the millions of books added, rat
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Best Books of the Year – Biography!
As many of you know, I love the genre of biography just a bit more than I do any other genre – at its best, it carries the heft of history, the electric charge of fiction, and the propulsive fascination of mystery (not to mention the bizarre mating-rituals of memoirs). 2012 saw a wet many bad biographies, about two dozen really good ones – and these ten great ones:
10. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power by Robert Caro – 112-year-old Caro’s destined-to-be-unfinished multi-volume biography of that foul-minded malefactor Lyndon Johnson reaches its climax in this engrossing (and just grossing) book, the first to deal with Johnson’s unearned presidency, and Caro’s narrative powers remain as strong as ever, despite being misemployed in creating such an enduring monument to such an avaricious galoot.
9. Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame by Michael Hirst
8. John Keats by Nicholas
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Best Business Books 2012: Biography
Jean Edward Smith
Eisenhower in War and Peace
(Random House, 2012)
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs
(Simon & Schuster, 2011)
Mark Kurlansky
Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man
(Doubleday, 2012)
Great ideas often emerge from the collision of two disciplines. So, it seems, do great leaders. The subjects of this year’s best biographies — Dwight Eisenhower, who led two of the world’s largest organizations, the Allied forces in europe during World War II and the U.S. government; Steve Jobs, who built the world’s most valuable company; and Clarence Birdseye, a self-taught biologist who pioneered a technology that revolutionized food production — each illustrate how often individual success is rooted in a merging of disciplinary virtuosity.
Eisenhower combined political genius with superb executive skills. Jobs wed the sensibility of an aesthete to an innovator’s appreciation of technol