Travel & Adventure

The history and biography list is built around strongly interpreted lives. Liddell Hart reads Sherman through the strategic problems of the twentieth century. William Bolitho turns twelve biographies into a theory of the adventurer. Axel Munthe turns his own life into a literary world centered on Capri and Villa San Michele.

These books are valuable partly because their authors do more than record events. They select, arrange, argue, mythologize, and sometimes distort. The accompanying research notes make those interpretive choices part of the reading.