Nine Books About Groups That Changed the World
The group biography has been around for centuries: There was Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written some 1,900 years ago and a staple of classical education ever since; the Bishop Gregory of Tours’ sixth-century biography of the four distasteful sons of the Frankish King Clovis I; a swarm of medieval hagiographies that bind together the lives and miracles of saints. In addition to being foundational to the biographical genre, modern group biographies are excellent sources of historical trivia, ideas, and, happily, gossip.
The questions that make these biographies sing—what makes this group of people actually interesting, not just noteworthy? Why, of all the relationships in a life, were these so particularly influential?—take real searching to answer. To read a good group biography is to come out with a different level of appreciation for the ways, trivial and tremendous, that humans influence one another.
The canon is overwhelmingly white and Eurocentric, and can tend toward an understanding of history in which educated people’s conversations are uncritically seen as the engines behind progress. The influence of hagiography—which today colloquially refers to an exaggerated celebration rather than a straightforward
