New biography books 2014

This, as long-time Stevereads readers (and my long-suffering friends) may know, is the nerve center of my reading, my favorite of the genres in which I roam. More than historical fiction, which I&#;ve actually written (and whose self-published ranks I regularly patrol as the U.S.

&#;Indie&#; Editor for the redoubtable Historical Novel Review), and more than natural history, which brings me such joy, and more even than history itself. As I&#;ve mentioned, I read more new books in than in any previous year of my life, and a whopping percentage of those were biographies &#; in fact, it&#;s quite possible that I read nearly every major mainstream biography published in , and this despite an ominous trend that showed itself early and kept right on happening throughout the year: as even a glance at the list of winners will show, a great many of the subjects of these books were utterly dreadful people.

So in I had the surreal experience of reading thousa