Postimees - Estonia | Friday, April 3, 2009
Biography boom on the book market
The daily Postimees notes a boom in the non-fiction book genre, particularly in biographies, and examines the reasons for this surge in popularity: "The writing of memoirs and life stories is always bound up with the moral standards prevalent in a society. Once he has made the decision to tell his story the author is faced with the question of exactly what and how much of the story he wants to put in words. With the memoirs of politicians this is relatively simple: you describe your views on the story and the events related to it. But how far can one go on a purely human level? In a society there are always things people talk about and things that aren't mentioned, and one's private life traditionally belongs to the latter. … But in the last century many things changed in this respect; private life as such has disappeared, and the boundaries of the permissible have become blurred - and this has stimulated the literary genres that operate in this area."
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