A fascinating story of the first known, Western transsexual, Tibetan Buddhist novice monk: Laurence Michael Dillon (born Laura Maude Dillon, May 1, 1915 - May 15, 1962) was a British physician and the first female-to-male transsexual to undergo phalloplasty. His brother, Sir Robert Dillon, was the eighth Baronet of Lismullen in Ireland. The editor of Debrett's told Time Magazine that Dillon was unquestionably next in line for the baronetcy: The unwanted press attention led Dillon to flee to India, and then to a Tibetan monastery. Girls Will Be Boys, a review of The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution, by Pagan Kennedy. Photograph of Michael Dillon as a monk.
posted on Sep 8, 2008 - View this thread

Who is Alexander Grothendieck? [PDF] This lecture is concerned not with Grothendieck's mathematics but with his very unusual life on the fringes of human society. In particular, there is, on the one hand, the question of why at the age of forty-two Grothendieck first of all resigned his professorship at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES); then withdrew from mathematics completely; and finally broke off all connections to his colleagues, students, acquaintances, friends, as well as his own family, to live as a hermit in an unknown place. On the other hand, one would like to know what has occupied this restless and creative spirit since his withdrawal from mathematics.
posted on Aug 17, 2008 - View this thread

Trying To Get Good: The Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon Who is Jack Sheldon? You may remember him as Merv Griffin's comedic trumpet-wielding sidekick, or the indelible voice on School House Rock (etc.), but musicians know him as a jazz giant. Unlike his close friend and collaborator, Chet Baker, Jack Sheldon survived the demons of drugs, alcohol and unspeakable personal tragedy...
A documentary film by Penny Peyser and Doug McIntyre. (multiple YT clips in description; official site contains Flash audio)
posted on Jun 25, 2008 - View this thread

New Books In History. Historian Marshall Poe talks with other historians about their newly published books.
posted on Apr 18, 2008 - View this thread

Paul Theroux reviews Patrick French's frank, full, authorized (!) biography of Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul. Sir Vidiadhar is not, in Theroux's estimation, a very nice man. He tortures his wife emotionally, his mistress physically, and he treats people of all races with narcissistic condescension. But can he write?
posted on Apr 8, 2008 - View this thread

Biographicon : crowd-sourcing non-notables.
posted on Apr 1, 2008 - View this thread

The Scots voice of the Spanish revolution [Embedded DivX video 1hr15m; also downloadable] Ethel MacDonald was a young working class Scots woman who hitch-hiked to Barcelona to do her part in the war. There she became the English-language voice of the anarchist movement as a radio station announcer. Newspapers at home dubbed her the "Scottish Scarlet Pimpernel" for her role in helping comrades escape the crackdown that followed the May Days. Her remarkable story is told in this recent drama-documentary.
posted on Feb 1, 2008 - View this thread

Over 30 years ago, Robert Burnham Jr. struggled to get his astronomical (in more ways than one) three volume work published. Burnham's Celestial Handbook: An Observer's Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System "remains a sort of real-life hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, a compendium with something to say about nearly every cosmic destination worth visiting. . . It is rarely compared to other books because there simply is none other like it." It remains a beloved and relevant book among star-gazers today. Yet few know much about the life of the author, or of his sad and lonely demise: Sky Writer.
posted on Jan 28, 2008 - View this thread

GROUCHO a funny sad documentary Google video
posted on Jan 3, 2008 - View this thread

Miomi (beta) is taking all the world’s information—including the personal history of as many people as possible—and putting it all in a big fat timeline.
posted on Dec 9, 2007 - View this thread

IDP Voices is a site that lets people who are refugess within their own countries tell their life stories – in their own words. "The narratives in these pages are valuable complements to the official information on conflicts which governments and international organisations offer. These stories deal with the real lives of real people. The narrators share their personal experiences, their sensations, hopes and dreams, and the impact for them of being forced from their homes. The first IDP Voices oral testimonies project took place in Colombia. IDP Voices from further countries will be added as the projects progress." The life stories are in English and Spanish and can either be read or listened to. You can download the whole book of life stories here.
posted on Nov 8, 2007 - View this thread

Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography From the writers of Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography. [via]
posted on Sep 8, 2007 - View this thread

Arthur Miller's Missing Act :: For all the public drama of Arthur Miller's career ... one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life
posted on Aug 20, 2007 - View this thread

"How I Became A Programmer" veers between linear biography and brain dump. The piece meanders through its theme, stopping along the way to flirt with word origins, family politics, the senior prom, Japan, airlines and military recruitment. Reading it, I felt trapped inside inside an extremely quirky -- yet recognizable (in a too-close-for-comfort way) -- mind. About half the time I yearned to tell him that he needs an editor; the other half, I was grateful that he didn't have one. Mostly, I'm amazed he HAD a date to the senior prom!
posted on Aug 18, 2007 - View this thread

onBeing: Videographies That Capture People. The Washington Post is running a fascinating series of videos, each of which is a little snapshot into someone's life, personality, and quirks. Here's one about Sunun Assavarunsrikul, a Thai waitress who feels she gives but just can't seem to get. Here's one about an "unconventional lawyer."
posted on Jun 6, 2007 - View this thread

Jesus of Nazareth - a theological biography by Pope Benedict
posted on May 13, 2007 - View this thread

The mystery of John Doe No. 24 outlived him. But this 1993 obituary in the New York Times, briefly covering what was known of a deaf, dumb, blind teenager found wandering the streets of Jacksonville in 1945, inspired a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter, which in turn inspired Illinois journalist Dave Bakke to "meticulously reconstruct nearly fifty years of John Doe's life...using police reports, mental health records, oral interviews, newspapers" and write God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24.
posted on Feb 22, 2006 - View this thread

He complained to [Kingsley] Amis in 1943...that "all women are stupid beings" and remarked in 1983 that he'd recently accompanied Monica [Jones] to a hospital "staffed ENTIRELY by wogs, cheerful and incompetent." ...His views on politics and class seemed to be pithily captured in a ditty he shared again with Amis. "I want to see them starving,/The so-called working class,/Their wages yearly halving,/Their women stewing grass..." For recreation he apparently found time for pornography, preferably with a hint of sado-masochism".
John Banville on Philip Larkin.
posted on Feb 6, 2006 - View this thread

Olaf Stapledon was a man ahead of his time. His epic 'novel' Star Maker (1937) considered the emergence of genetic engineering, the outcome of the many worlds interpretation and delved deeper than any book before or since into the consequences of evolution on the cosmos. His fans have included the likes of Arthur C Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf. Even his greatest detractor, C.S.Lewis, wrote an entire Cosmic Trilogy in response to his imaginings. Yet despite Stapledon's magnetic prose and extraordinary influence on speculative fiction his name remains largely forgotten by the world. Yet his words still resonate with insight: "Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?"
posted on Nov 27, 2005 - View this thread

The Emperor's Bunker. "The Japanese, with sadness and irony, stressed that Hirohito couldn't even speak properly. This was partly to do with the fact that he didn't have to speak - people spoke in his name and he was isolated from real life". "The Sun", the third part in Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power' tetralogy after the gloom of Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing tones of "Taurus" (2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, "The Sun" seems almost upbeat. This, after all, is a film about reconciliation. More inside.
posted on Sep 13, 2005 - View this thread

Wagner, the repulsive giant If, on one hand, you ever wanted to know what a swine Richard Wagner was, this is the book to tell you. It does so at length, in reliable detail, calmly, without prurience, perfectly backed with documentation, and in a translation whose only fault is in giving no Translator’s Notes for in-house German references. Joachim Köhler sustains his story with new ideas, revises other interpretations and modestly deconstructs Cosima née Liszt’s creation of “Richard Wagner Enterprises Inc”. (This she developed so far as to keep Parsifal exclusive to Bayreuth, prompting George Bernard Shaw to remark in 1889 that it “would almost reconcile me to the custom of suttee”!).
posted on Sep 3, 2005 - View this thread

Don't teach braille in my town again, McFadden - Martin Amis was an early fan of Jeff Lint's "The Caterer", a Pearl Comic of the mid-seventies. Steve Aylett talks about his biography of the man here, and Justin Taylor says how much he enjoyed it.
posted on Jul 3, 2005 - View this thread

Who is the real Bob Saget? • "In comedy circles, there’s a famous Saget story about the night his first daughter was born. After a very difficult birth, during which Sherri Saget and her baby almost died, a friend showed up to find Mr. Saget looking utterly destroyed, unshaven, unrecognizable, but holding his newborn. Oh my God, Bob, she’s beautiful, the friend said. For a dollar, you can finger her, Mr. Saget replied." Saget guests in the upcoming Aristocrats documentary discussed here.
posted on May 6, 2005 - View this thread

“Gödel put logic on the mathematical map.”
An excellent interview with Rebecca Goldstein, biographer of Kurt Godel
posted on Mar 19, 2005 - View this thread

Peridromophile William James Sidis was so fascinated with with streetcar transfers that he wrote a 300 page book about them.
posted on Feb 10, 2005 - View this thread

Poems from the precipice. Sylvia Plath's late poems were published posthumously in a collection edited by her husband, Ted Hughes. As a new facsimile edition of the original manuscript is published, their daughter Frieda defends Hughes against criticism that he interfered with Plath's legacy. (more inside)
posted on Nov 16, 2004 - View this thread

The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney from the CBC.
posted on Oct 6, 2004 - View this thread

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is published today, in print and online: a biographical record of everyone who's ever been anyone in British history (50,000 individuals) and an astonishing feat of scholarly collaboration (10,000 contributors from all over the world). Access to the full database is fearfully expensive, but the official site gives you a good selection of sample entries, with a new one added every day; and a feature in today's Times gives you some more, beginning with Mary Toft, the woman who gave birth to rabbits.
posted on Sep 23, 2004 - View this thread

Two Years Before the Mast. "In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor,before the mast, in the American merchant service. It is written out from a journal which I kept at the time, and from notes which I made of most of the events as they happened." At the beginning of his third year of Harvard a severe attack of measles interrupted Henry Dana's studies, and so affected his eyes as to preclude, for a time at least, all idea of study. The state of the family finances was not such as to permit of foreign travel in search of health. Accordingly, prompted by necessity and by a youthful love of adventure, he shipped as a common sailor in the brig, bound for the California coast.
posted on Sep 14, 2004 - View this thread

The Condensed Bill Clinton: Slate reads My Life so you don't have to.
posted on Jun 23, 2004 - View this thread

What's a Ponzi Scheme? Enron was described as a Ponzi scheme. Social security has also been described as a Ponzi scheme. The originator of this scheme was Carlo Ponzi who led an interesting life and bought a nice pink house with his ill-gotten gains. There's even a website where you can read about him in more detail, including the intro to his autobiography.
posted on Jun 16, 2004 - View this thread

Philip Larkin: Great Poet, Shame About The Man? When is an excess of biography, i.e. high-minded, clumsily-disguised gossip, an impediment to literary appreciation? Nowadays, it seems always. [More inside.]
posted on Mar 19, 2004 - View this thread

Louise Brooks: With a new biopic in the works, the spotlight will soon return to this silent-movie legend. The beautiful and enchanting Brooks set the mold for the stereotypical bobbed-hair flapper of the 1920s, though her Hollywood work is largely forgettable. Her most famous film, Pandora’s Box [script, mirror] (directed by G.W. Pabst) was filmed in Germany. She didn't make a successful transition to talkies, and after a long reclusive period, she had a second career writing essays. -- For further reading, Ken Tynan's 1979 essay "The Girl in the Black Helmet" [mirror] in the New Yorker gives an excellent overview of her life.
posted on Dec 16, 2003 - View this thread

The On-Line Picasso Project offers 6,893 works for your ogling pleasure, plus an obsessively documented chronological bio. I'm stunned. (please read the user's manual, inside.)
posted on Oct 2, 2003 - View this thread

Know Your NeoCons. Already the name "NeoCon" is used as an invective from the Left. But who are they? Here are some of their faces, brief biographies, and information about what a NeoCon is, at least as how they define it.
posted on Sep 4, 2003 - View this thread

A million lives. Links to thousands of biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, narratives, oral histories and more.
posted on Aug 25, 2003 - View this thread

More or Less is an interesting mini-encyclopedia of several of the great heroes & great villains of the 20th Century, with background information on each individual, the situation they were in, the scope of their impact on humanity, etc. It makes an interesting contrast, as well as a good thinking point on what one human life can achieve, for better or worse.
posted on Aug 24, 2003 - View this thread

"Uri Geller [warning: pop ups] became well known for a few scientifically unexplained phenomena. They are Telepathy... Dowsing... Bending, breaking and softening metal and other solids with the power of the mind, e.g. spoons, keys etc, more rarely plastic and glass; Fixing broken watches and appliances, and using collective power, influencing the Big Ben to stop; Moving compasses with the power of thought; Erasing computer tapes and disks; and Sprouting, causing tiny seeds (mainly red radish) to grow a few centimeters in seconds." Why not thrill to a biography of this favorite pseudo psychic of the 70s? To be frank, until just now, I wasn't even aware that he was back!
posted on Mar 24, 2003 - View this thread

"Saddam the paranoid tyrant can be traced back to Saddam the persecuted village boy" He went from an illegitimate birth, to living with a harsh step-father, to leader of a nation about to be on the other side of war with the United States for a second time. Take a look back at Saddam Hussein.
posted on Mar 18, 2003 - View this thread

Gary Westfahl's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Film is an attempt to do for SF film what David Thomson's brilliant "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" does for film in general - to provide a well informed and wholly subjective survey of the most important people who contributed to the field. The BESFF is very much a work in progress, and half the fun is seeing who author Gary Westfahl has chosen to include this month. His entries so far range from the obvious to the surprising to the deeply obscure. Always though, his witty and often compassionate pocket reviews of these carreers show how seriously he feels SF cinema should be taken, and by extension how betrayed he feels by those within the field who don't.
posted on Dec 2, 2002 - View this thread

Our Bastard(s) Somoza Speaking of brutal Nicaraguan dicatator Somoza, Harry Truman is supposed to have said "He's a bastard, but he's our bastard." Looking for a source for this quote, I discovered it's attributed to Truman, FDR, and Nixon. This is such a broad chronological range that I figured I could narrow it down by finding out when Somza lived. No such luck: according to two biography^*/histories, there were actuall three Somozas: Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who fathered Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and the Somoza dynasty that ruled Nicaragua from the mid 1930s through the late 1970s. All three of those presidents could well have made the comment. But I'm still stuck for a source...

* This link (the first history/bio) requires anyone clicking from an outside page to go through an extra "Welcome Mat" page on the first time through. Annoying, but no registration required.
posted on Nov 11, 2002 - View this thread

An astonishingly thorough and well-researched biography of Robert Heinlein. A giant of the SF genre; revered and repudiated in nearly equal proportions, his long shadow falls over most SF writing since the 1950's. This site, where the bio is hosted, is a even-handed and thorough repository for all things Heinlein.
posted on Jul 25, 2002 - View this thread

Shakey: Neil Young's Biography. . . Any big Neil Young fan, and I have to admit to being one, also spends a lot of time hating a lot of his artistic output (i. e. the cringe-enducing Let's Roll, as well as his all-over-the-map politics. In the LATimes book review Hal Epsen mentions that the reliably perverse Young has been a staunch Reagan supporter and proponent of the death penalty, as well as a devoted husband and a stalwart parent to three kids, two of whom were born with cerebral palsy. He also asserts that Young appeals almost wholly to male listeners. Young has been discussed here before but not, I believe his biography, which, as has been Neil Young's M. O. from the get-go, is a dictionary-perfect example of a "mixed bag."
posted on May 16, 2002 - View this thread

It's strange to think Harmony Cousins is part my generation when she's lived ten times the life I have. But the fact that even after all this she can pull herself back to together proves that she's ten times the person most of us are. How many of us have her strength?
posted on Apr 1, 2002 - View this thread

Isaac Asimov died of AIDS. His widow, Janet Jeppson Asimov, reveals that Asimov acquired AIDS from a blood transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983 in a condensed version of his biography just published this month ("It's Been a Good Life"). Apparently his doctor advised that they not disclose his AIDS infection.
posted on Mar 10, 2002 - View this thread

The Wayback machine shows some biographical reconstructive surgery for the Secretary of the U.S. Army. Post-Enron collapse bio versus pre-Enron Collapse bio. 1984 style revisionism meet digital storage technology! [story from NTK].
posted on Feb 24, 2002 - View this thread

Muhammad O' Ali. Geneologists have uncovered his Irish roots. His great grandfather was an Irish emigree who married an African American woman in Kentucky.
posted on Feb 8, 2002 - View this thread

Who is Osama Bin Laden? ...The Afghan jihad was backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He received security training from the CIA itself, according to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian.
Is OBL the United State's Golem?
posted on Sep 12, 2001 - View this thread

The Filth and The Fury. I went to see this film last night and it has to be one of the best music documentary (or, if you will, rockumentary) films I've seen. It charts the Sex Pistols rise and fall and is surprisingly funny and touching. It even manages to capture Seventies Britain in all its revolting glory. I think I shall now go and put a safety pin through my website.
posted on Jun 23, 2000 - View this thread