"This is an all-time favorite for a Darwin lover. I can read it again and again and always find something new. Also, though the last 30 years have seen a veritable cataract of books about Darwin and Darwiniana, I keep returning to Janet Browne’s superb two-volume biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place."

"This biography, written with a novelist’s stylization, was an incendiary moment in western culture. Ironically, it became the weapon that would win the cultural wars for dispossessed black, urban America. It’s impossible to think of what street culture of white Hollywood would look like without it. Slim is the most influential writer in English since Shakespeare."

"More than a biography, Ellmann’s telling of the familiar tale of the Irish playwright’s spectacular rise and tragic downfall holds up a mirror to society’s hypocrisy about almost everything but especially sex. Wilde was the original victim of “Don’t ask, Don’t tell.” He was London’s pet Bad Boy until it turned out he was a man with a dick as well."

"Still the essential biography of the music industry. Dannen is pretty ruthless in describing a time in the music business when hustle was the name of the game — although that’s pretty much the same today, to be honest. I joke that I used to have hair before I started working in the music business, but thankfully the staggering levels of corruption that Dannen describes no longer exist."