The best biographers understand exactly what David McCullough meant when he said: “People often ask me if I’m ‘working on a book’, and I say yes, because that’s what they asked, but in fact they’ve got the wrong preposition. I’m in the book, in the subject, in the time and the place.” In the second part of this series on the year’s most compelling non-fiction, here’s a look at the best biographies and memoirs.
Indian memoirs/biographies: Three memoirs broke the very Indian jinx of the memoir-as-dry and dreary curriculum vitae. Fali S Nariman’s Before Memory Fades (Hay House) brought to life the legendary legal maven’s wit and insight. This memoir sparkled, even when it dealt with his defence of his decision to defend Union Carbide; the Bhopal tragedy casts a long shadow across the book. Ashish Bose’s Headcount: Memoirs of a Demographer (Viking/ Penguin), written by the man who identified the BIMARU states, contains innumerable swift sketches of everyone from J R D Tata to Raj Narain — an essential read for those who want to understand India, and the state’s many failures.
B G Verghese’s First Draft: Witness to the Making of Modern India (Tranquebar) takes a long view of the nation, from the country’s first Republic Day to the dark years of the Emergency — his candour makes this a valuable addition to the history shelves. Though Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Penguin India) dominated the headlines, this is a courageous rather than a great book. Bhutto’s insider’s take on her family, the blood feuds and the assassinations, makes for some indelible moments — this one is long on drama, short on analysis.
An unusual and sadly overlooked book, Robert Hutchison’s The Raja of Harsil: The Legend of Frederick ‘Pahari’ Wilson (Lotus/Roli) is the riveting account of a complex man. Pahari Wilson, “so well-known in these hills”, played a role in the Great Game and witnessed both the Anglo-Sikh War and the Mutiny of 1857. Hutchison’s retelling brings back a lost world. Jerry Pinto’s Leela: A Patchwork Life (Penguin) was perhaps one of the most entertaining biographies of the year — the lovely, fragile actress provides the always acute Pinto with enough grist for his mill, from her two marriages to her films to the now-infamous story of a “naked count, a Russian assassination and camomile tea”. Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing (Viking/Penguin) is an intimate, intensely personal portrait of a very different Leela — a dancer in Bombay’s seedy and now almost defunct dance bars. Faleiro’s respect for and closeness to her subjects makes Beautiful Thing, with its tales of sex, greed and survival, one of the most compelling reads of the year.
Biography and memoir (general): Perhaps the best and most thorough look at the man in the White House, Jonathan Alter’s The Promise (Simon & Schuster) was an uncompromising look at Obama’s first year. It’s the kind of political biography that we could do with in India. If Andre Agassi’s Open (Knopf) was one of the most unusually honest sports biographies of recent times, with his revelations about his drug use and his hatred of tennis, Keith Richards’ Life (Little, Brown) rocked the music scene. Life captured the insanity and intensity of the Stones, and sparked off an endless Internet debate on the size of Sir Mick’s assets.
In Hitch-22 (Twelve), the other British bad boy, Christopher Hitchens pulled no punches and made no apologies as he scanned through his street-fighting years. Nothing seems to slow or soften Hitch, including his recent struggle with cancer. But if there was one book you had to read this year, it would be Sebastian Junger’s War (Twelve), the account of a platoon of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Junger brings the landscape and the political mess in Afghanistan alive, through intensely personal stories — among the best works of war journalism to be produced in recent years.
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Science: And some of the best reads of the year came out of operating theatres, cancer wards and neuroscience. Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing (Hachette/Twelve) blended cross-cultural insights with the Jam Experiment to explain the mysteries behind how we exercise choice, and how we could do it better. In The Mind’s Eye (Knopf), Oliver Sacks explores the limitations and frailty of the brain along with its immense ability to adapt by using the examples of patients with alexia and aphasia — and his own struggles. This is one of his most thoughtful and most touching explorations of consciousness.
One of the most pleasant, and poignant, surprises of the year was Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner). Using his experiences as a medical surgeon, Mukherjee comes up with a compelling, heart-wrenching and extraordinarily compassionate exploration of the killer disease, reaching back to Shakespeare and J B S Haldane for consolation. This was not just a great medical biography; it’s one of the great non-fiction books of the decade.