8 Biographies You Must Read Before You Die
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House:
This is a 2008 biography by Jon Meacham of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States and it won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Meacham chose to write the book because he felt "Jackson represents the best of us and the worst of us", citing Jackson's simultaneous capacity for both kindness and cruelty. He said he sought not to whitewash Jackson or "all his sins, which are enormous", such as his support of slavery and Indian removal.
American Lion usually received positive reviews. Douglas Brinkley in The Washington Post called it "the most readable single-volume biography ever written of our seventh president."
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:
The book is a non-fiction book by American author Rebecca Skloot. It talks about Henrietta Lacks and the immortal cell line, known as HeLa, which came from her cervical cancer cells in 1951. The book is prominent for its accessible science writing and dealing with moral issues of race and class in medical research. Henrietta was a poor black tobacco farmer whose body cell taken without her knowledge turned out to be essential for development of polio vaccine, cloning and more. It was Skloot's first book. In 2010 it was announced that Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball in union with HBO would create a film version.
