The best historical biographies to help you make sense of your own life

This is one of the best survival guides ever, and one of the most compelling looks into how human beings do or don’t accept a disastrous situation and (literally) flow with it. It’s the story of the explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew, after their ship, the aptly named Endurance, got stuck in the Antarctic ice and then crushed by it. They were stranded, through the permanent darkness of the polar winter, on floating ice floes—with only blubber to eat, and no fiber at all (you work out the consequences). No shelter. No light. Water and waves underneath you. But they avoided going insane, and Shackleton figured out when to fight (the ice and the sea, in this case)—and when not to fight, in order to drift.

The life of Julius Caesar, as brought to life by Goldsworthy, remains one of the most fascinating tales of ups and downs, boldness and overreach, war, statecraft, and propaganda (yes, he mastered that too). And adventure. Even if you think you know him, you probably don’t. What, for example, did he do after he was kidnapped at age 25 by pirates? Let’s just say you don’t want to be the pirates. But ultimately you don’t want to be Caesar either. Not least, you want to be careful with wannabe Caesers today, because he was also the most effective populist in history.

This book wouldn’t normally count as historical biography, but to me it’s one of the most inspiring tales about grit. It’s the true story of a group of boys like Joe Rantz, who grew up poor in the woods of Washington State and was abandoned by his family. Still, he claws himself through life, picking up skills, courage, and stamina along the way, and finds a ramp to meaning and success in rowing. The book would be worth reading just for the worm’s-eye view of athletic discipline—the pain and perseverance inside the boat and outside. But then these boys, having learned to be a team, find themselves in Berlin during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Olympics: From the woods of Washington to center stage in world history.

Some of life’s greatest adventures, triumphs, and disasters are intellectual (which is why I compare Albert Einstein to Hannibal in my own book). As a young iconoclast, Einstein completely blew up the conventional wisdom in science. He found a new way of thinking about gravity, time, space, light, and the whole universe. Being eccentric, he came to embody our notions about the mad scientist. As a human being, he could be endearing but also cruel—it’s not clear whether he ever met, or cared about, his disabled daughter Lieserl. But the most intriguing lesson of his life to me is that even such a genius could get mentally stuck. It’s as if, in his later years, his imagination had been thrown into prison.

Most obviously, this is a riveting account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the American West all the way to the Pacific, and I would recommend the book just for that. But to my own surprise, it also becomes a disquieting psychological study of Lewis, the alpha to Clark’s beta. Their triumph turns Lewis into a national celebrity. But somehow this fame ruins the young man. Unlike Clark, he can’t maintain fulfilling relationships or find a new purpose in life. He drinks himself into oblivion, until he kills himself in his despair, in one of the messiest suicides in one of the seediest places. The lesson here is that success can ruin you, if you’re not careful.