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I recently read an interesting review by J. Parini in the May 11, 2007 Chronicle of Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet by John Armstrong. According to Parini, Armstong's approach is non-chronological, instead focusing on different thematic "nodes" in Goethe's life. This style of biography is remarkably similar to that of Jürgen Neffe in his recently translated Einstein: An Autobiography. Unlike Isaacson's best-seller Einstein: His Life and Universe, Neffe presents Einsteins's life prismatically in chapters that go over the same events, but with different emphases. (See my review of Isaacson and Neffe)
Here's Panini writing about Armstrong's Goethe:
In the case of Goethe, there were many observers, and the factual record is not much in doubt. Hardly anyone crossed his path who did not feel compelled to record an impression. And so biographers have a wealth of material, some of it quite marvelous. Armstrong plucks the choicest bits from that vast record, but refuses to narrate the life in conventional terms. Instead, he picks 10 key words and gathers his work around those nodes: Luck, Love, Power, Art, War, Friendship, Nature, Peace, Happiness, Death. There is an underpinning of chronology here, as one might expect; but the timeline is folded back upon itself, even discarded for long stretches as Armstrong lunges into meditations on the meaning of the life itself in the context of those seminal words.
The image of "timeline folding back upon itself" is a wonderful way of describing this biography of connected "nodes." Panini goes on to describe the effect of reading such a biography...
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