Biographies I read in 2025

I spend more time reading^[1] historical biographies than any other genre. Speculative fiction is a close second.

Here's a list of all the biographies I read in 2025. (Summaries are generated from content on Amazon/Goodreads by Claude) My favorites were Putin, Eleanor, and Feynman, because they stretched my perspective the most.

1. Einstein: His Life and Universe — Walter Isaacson
   Drawing on newly released personal letters, Isaacson traces Einstein from an impertinent patent clerk to the physicist who reshaped our understanding of the cosmos. The book argues that Einstein's rebellious, nonconformist personality was inseparable from his scientific imagination and creativity.

2. Leonardo da Vinci — Walter Isaacson
   Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo's notebooks, Isaacson reconstructs the life of the ultimate Renaissance polymath — painter, engineer, anatomist, and inventor. The biography reveals how Leonardo's insatiable curiosity and ability to connect art with science made him history's most creative genius.

3. Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson
   Written with Jobs's full cooperation before his death, this biography captures the Apple cofounder's intense, often abrasive personality alongside his revolutionary vision for personal computing, animated film, music, and smartphones. Isaacson portrays a man whose obsessive perfectionism and reality-distorting charisma drove both groundbreaking innovation and turbulent personal relationships.

4. Putin — Philip Short (Vladimir Putin)
   The product of eight years of research and hundreds of interviews, Short's biography traces Putin from a shabby Leningrad apartment through his KGB career to his consolidation of autocratic power. It attempts to crack open the inscrutable Russian leader's persona, revealing the contradictions between his calculated public image and the ruthlessness underneath.

5. Huey Long — T. Harry Williams
   Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this massive biography chronicles the Louisiana populist who rose from rural poverty to become a serious rival to FDR for the presidency before his assassination. Williams portrays Long as a brilliant, ruthless political operator who wielded near-total control over his state while championing redistributive economics for the poor.

6. Eleanor — David Michaelis (Eleanor Roosevelt)
   The first comprehensive single-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt in over six decades, drawing on previously untapped archival sources. Michaelis traces her transformation from an orphaned Gilded Age girl in a difficult marriage to FDR into the world's foremost champion of human rights, activism, and diplomacy.

7. Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life — Robert Dallek
   Dallek focuses on FDR's unparalleled political instincts — his ability to build consensus, read public opinion, and unite a fractured nation through the Great Depression and World War II. The biography argues that Roosevelt's genius lay not in intellect but in making the presidency the central institution of American life and maintaining durable popular support.

8. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era — William Taubman (Nikita Khrushchev)
   This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, nearly 20 years in the making, is the first comprehensive American account of the Soviet leader, drawing on newly opened archives and extensive interviews with Khrushchev's family. Taubman portrays a deeply contradictory figure — complicit in Stalinist crimes yet humane enough to denounce them, triggering the Cold War's most dangerous crises while also laying the groundwork for communism's eventual collapse.

9. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman — James Gleick (Richard Feynman)
   Gleick traces Feynman from his Depression-era childhood tinkering with radios through his work on the Manhattan Project to his Nobel Prize-winning contributions to quantum electrodynamics. Beyond the famous showman and bongo-playing eccentric, the biography reveals a deeper Feynman — his ambition, periods of despair, and a mind that transformed twentieth-century physics.

10. Source Code: My Beginnings — Bill Gates (autobiography)
    The first of three planned memoirs, this candid and self-deprecating account covers Gates's childhood, his discovery of computers at age 13, and the founding of Microsoft — ending before the company became a giant. Gates reflects on formative friendships (including the tragic death of his best friend Kent Evans), his struggles to fit in, and the fortunate collision of privilege, obsession, and timing that launched the personal computing revolution.

11. The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant — Tae Kim (Jensen Huang)
    Drawing on over 100 interviews including with Jensen Huang himself, Kim chronicles Nvidia's journey from its 1993 founding in a Denny's to becoming one of the world's most valuable companies powering the AI revolution. The book reveals how Huang's flat organizational structure, obsessive long-term thinking, and willingness to bet the company on technologies not yet arrived allowed Nvidia to outmaneuver giants like Intel.

12. Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie — Barbara Goldsmith (Marie Curie)
    Using long-sealed Curie family archives, diaries, and letters, Goldsmith reveals the woman behind the myth — a depressive, fiercely driven scientist who overcame pervasive sexism to become the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. The biography portrays Curie's struggles to balance her groundbreaking research on radioactivity with family life, public scandal, and the physical toll her own discoveries took on her health.

History rhymes, doomed to repeat, etc.

I've always loved well-researched, well-written biographies, because I get to know people in the context of eras in history: different cultural assumptions, waves of change, specific pivotal moments.

• I think it's important to humanize history---to understand that monumental decisions that shape society are always made by people not that different from us.
• I also like to see what makes certain people exceptional: habits of mind, specific knowledge and proficiency, work ethic, relationships, access to specific resources or networks, being in the right place at the right time, etc.
• It's also important to understand how the moment we live in is different from other times and places. It's easy to overindex on what looks normal right now, and underestimate the long tail of disruptive events. Reading Putin helped me viscerally understand how Game-of-Thrones brutal Russia was through WWII and the Stalin era.

Reading biographies of contemporaries---including enemies---is especially interesting. Biographers have a tendency to sympathize with (or occasionally, demonize) their subjects^[2], which distorts the story even when they're trying to be objective. Seeing the same events from multiple insider perspectives opens up questions that often end up being too tidy when you only get one side of the story.

• For example, reading Eleanor brought FDR's manipulative side out into the open, and raised questions about how much of his famed ability to read public opinion actually depended on Eleanor and Louis Howe.
• FDR also got lucky that Huey Long was assassinated when he was. His presidency would have looked very different if a hypercompetent operator like Long had continued to mobilize the radical left.