best biographies for a book club

50 Must-Read Biographies

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

The best biographies give us a satisfying glimpse into a great person’s life, while also teaching us about the context in which that person lived. Through biography, we can also learn history, psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy, and more. Reading a great biography is both fun and educational. What’s not to love?

Below I’ve listed 50 of the best biographies out there. You will find a mix of subjects, including important figures in literature, science, politics, history, art, and more. I’ve tried to keep this list focused on biography only, so there is little in the way of memoir or autobiography. In a couple cases, authors have written about their family members, but for the most part, these are books where the focus is on the biographical subject, not the author.

The first handful are group biographies, and after that, I’ve arranged them alphabetically by subject. Book descriptions come from Goodreads.

Take a look and let me know about your favorite biography in the comments!

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

“In  All We Know , Lisa Cohen describes their [Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland’s] glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. At once a series of intimate portraits and a startling investigation into style, celebrity, sexuality, and the genre of biography itself,  All We Know  explores a hidden history of modernism and pays tribute to three compelling lives.”

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

“Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers,’ calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women.”

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

“In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them – in works that readers of all kinds could admire.  The Life You Save May Be Your Own  is their story – a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.”

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

“As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.”

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

“In a sweeping narrative, Fraser traces the cultural, familial and political roots of each of Henry’s queens, pushes aside the stereotypes that have long defined them, and illuminates the complex character of each.”

John Adams by David McCullough

“In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot — ‘the colossus of independence,’ as Thomas Jefferson called him.”

A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee’s Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival by Melissa Fleming

“Emotionally riveting and eye-opening,  A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea  is the incredible story of a young woman, an international crisis, and the triumph of the human spirit. Melissa Fleming shares the harrowing journey of Doaa Al Zamel, a young Syrian refugee in search of a better life.”

At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England by Walter Dean Myers

“One terrifying night in 1848, a young African princess’s village is raided by warriors. The invaders kill her mother and father, the King and Queen, and take her captive. Two years later, a British naval captain rescues her and takes her to England where she is presented to Queen Victoria, and becomes a loved and respected member of the royal court.”

John Brown by W.E.B. Du Bois

“ John Brown is W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking political biography that paved the way for his transition from academia to a lifelong career in social activism. This biography is unlike Du Bois’s earlier work; it is intended as a work of consciousness-raising on the politics of race.”

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen L. Carter

“[Eunice Hunton Carter] was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s ― and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted.”

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

“An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members.”

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

“Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.”

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

“Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.”

Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother by Sonia Nazario

“In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.”

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

“After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve ‘the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century’: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett & his quest for the Lost City of Z?”

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

“Amanda Foreman draws on a wealth of fresh research and writes colorfully and penetratingly about the fascinating Georgiana, whose struggle against her own weaknesses, whose great beauty and flamboyance, and whose determination to play a part in the affairs of the world make her a vibrant, astonishingly contemporary figure.”

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik Ping Zhu

“Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg never asked for fame she was just trying to make the world a little better and a little freer. But along the way, the feminist pioneer’s searing dissents and steely strength have inspired millions. [This book], created by the young lawyer who began the Internet sensation and an award-winning journalist, takes you behind the myth for an intimate, irreverent look at the justice’s life and work.”

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd

“A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother.”

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

“ Shirley Jackson  reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as ‘The Lottery’ and  The Haunting of Hill House .”

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro

“This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart.”

The Life of Samuel Johnson   by James Boswell

“Poet, lexicographer, critic, moralist and Great Cham, Dr. Johnson had in his friend Boswell the ideal biographer. Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail.”

Barbara Jordan: American Hero by Mary Beth Rogers

“Barbara Jordan was the first African American to serve in the Texas Senate since Reconstruction, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, and the first to deliver the keynote address at a national party convention. Yet Jordan herself remained a mystery.”

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

“This engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children.”

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical by Sherie M. Randolph

“Often photographed in a cowboy hat with her middle finger held defiantly in the air, Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy (1916–2000) left a vibrant legacy as a leader of the Black Power and feminist movements. In the first biography of Kennedy, Sherie M. Randolph traces the life and political influence of this strikingly bold and controversial radical activist.”

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

“In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food.”

The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma by Peter Popham

“Peter Popham … draws upon previously untapped testimony and fresh revelations to tell the story of a woman whose bravery and determination have captivated people around the globe. Celebrated today as one of the world’s greatest exponents of non-violent political defiance since Mahatma Gandhi, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize only four years after her first experience of politics.”

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”   by Zora Neale Hurston

“In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

“Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine.”

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

“Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.”

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

“A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro — the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.”

Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux

“Drawing from the private archives of the poet’s estate and numerous interviews, Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde’s iconic status, charting her conservative childhood in Harlem; her early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian; and her canonization as a seminal poet of American literature.”

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams

“Thurgood Marshall stands today as the great architect of American race relations, having expanded the foundation of individual rights for all Americans. His victory in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the landmark Supreme Court case outlawing school segregation, would have him a historic figure even if he had not gone on to become the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

“In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself.”

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts

“ The Mayor of Castro Street  is Shilts’s acclaimed story of Harvey Milk, the man whose personal life, public career, and tragic assassination mirrored the dramatic and unprecedented emergence of the gay community in America during the 1970s.”

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

“The most famous poet of the Jazz Age, Millay captivated the nation: She smoked in public, took many lovers (men and women, single and married), flouted convention sensationally, and became the embodiment of the New Woman.”

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell

This book is “a vivid portrait of Montaigne, showing how his ideas gave birth to our modern sense of our inner selves, from Shakespeare’s plays to the dilemmas we face today.”

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

“From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies.”

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley   by Peter Guralnick

“Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, [this book] traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world.

Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale

“Kate Summerscale brilliantly recreates the Victorian world, chronicling in exquisite and compelling detail the life of Isabella Robinson, wherein the longings of a frustrated wife collided with a society clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of marriage, and female sexuality.”

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

“A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained?”

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan by Claire Tomalin

“When Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857, she was 18: a professional actress performing in his production of  The Frozen Deep . He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure, married with ten children. This meeting sparked a love affair that lasted over a decade, destroying Dickens’s marriage and ending with Nelly’s near-disappearance from the public record.”

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter

“Slowly, but surely, Sojourner climbed from beneath the weight of slavery, secured respect for herself, and utilized the distinction of her race to become not only a symbol for black women, but for the feminist movement as a whole.”

The Black Rose by Tananarive Due

“Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America’s first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful beauty company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes.”

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

“With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life, [Chernow] carries the reader through Washington’s troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian Wars, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention and his magnificent performance as America’s first president.”

Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

“ Ida: A Sword Among Lions  is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching: a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.”

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

“But the true saga of [Wilder’s] life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser—the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series—masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography.”

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

“Although mother and daughter, these two brilliant women never knew one another – Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other.”

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

“Subscribing to Virginia Woolf’s own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact.”

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

“Of the great figures in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins’ bullets at age thirty-nine.”

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

“On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.”

Want to read more about great biographies? Check out this post on presidential biographies , this list of biographies and memoirs about remarkable women , and this list of 100 must-read musician biographies and memoirs .

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10 Awe-Inspiring Memoirs for Book Club

Looking for your next fall book club pick? Look no further than this list of ten thought-provoking, tear-jerking, and original memoirs. Most memoirs are perfect for any book club because of the raw and intimate insights they provide into some of today’s most pressing topics, but each of these titles in particular has a master storyteller at its helm to guide you through perspectives and experiences that are sure to stimulate hour-long discussions. After you choose one of these unforgettable true stories, all that’s left is picking out the wine and cheese.

In this charming and uplifting memoir, Italian book publicist turned bookstore owner Alba Donati describes how her small hillside bookstore became a beloved community center and literary destination. Donati’s plan to open a bookstore in her hometown of Lucignana, a Tuscan village of fewer than two hundred people, seemed like a long shot. But soon the cottage inspired family members, community volunteers, and booklovers worldwide to flock to Donati’s store for one of her fail-safe book recommendations. Perfect for fans of UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN, this memoir is a love letter to books and their readers.

National Bestseller

Under the Tuscan Sun meets Diary of a Bookseller in this charming memoir by an Italian poet recounting her experience opening a bookshop in a village in Tuscany.

Alba Donati was used to her hectic life working as a book publicist in Italy—a life that made her happy and allowed her to meet prominent international authors—but she was ready to make a change. One day she decided to return to Lucignana, the small village in the Tuscan hills where she was born. There she opened a tiny but enchanting bookshop in a lovely little cottage on a hill, surrounded by gardens filled with roses and peonies.

With fewer than 200 year-round residents, Alba’s shop seemed unlikely to succeed, but it soon sparked the enthusiasm of book lovers both nearby and across Italy. After surviving a fire and pandemic restrictions, the “Bookshop on the Hill” soon became a refuge and destination for an ever-growing community. The locals took pride in the bookshop—from Alba’s centenarian mother to her childhood friends and the many volunteers who help in the day-to-day running of the shop. And in short time it has become a literary destination, with many devoted readers coming from afar to browse, enjoy a cup of tea, and find comfort in the knowledge that Alba will find the perfect read for them.

Alba’s lifelong love of literature shines on every page of this unique and uplifting book. Formatted as diary entries with delightful lists of the books sold at the shop each day, this inspirational story celebrates reading as well as book lovers and booksellers, the unsung heroes of the literary world.

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Jeannie Vanasco loved her father, a man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage who died. And when he—the man she always viewed as her hero—dies, Vanasco vows to keep her promise to him of writing a book by investigating the mysterious circumstances around the other Jeannie’s death. As Vanasco falls deeper into a manic obsession with the puzzle-like mystery before her, THE GLASS EYE asks, in its own mesmerizing and engrossing way: What kind of answer can ever be enough to recover from such grief?

When award-winning author Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she, her father, sister, grandmother, and uncles all escaped Saigon for America. Her mother did not. Years later, when Beth was nineteen, they finally met again. Now, unfolding through a collection of brief, fragmented visits over the course of years, OWNER OF A LONELY HEART crafts a refugee coming-of-age story that grapples with motherhood, absence, and conditions of estrangement, all through the lens of Beth’s complex relationship with her mother. Aching, joyful, and compassionate, Nguyen’s memoir is a heartrending must-read.

From the award-winning author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner , a powerful memoir of a mother-daughter relationship fragmented by war and resettlement.

At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her father, sister, grandmother, and uncles fled Saigon for America. Beth’s mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was nineteen. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together.

Owner of a Lonely Heart is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth’s relationship with her mother. Framed by a handful of visits over the course of many years—sometimes brief, sometimes interrupted, sometimes with her mother alone and sometimes with her sister—Beth tells a coming-of-age story that spans her own Midwestern childhood, her first meeting with her mother, and becoming a parent herself. Vivid and illuminating, Owner of a Lonely Heart is a deeply personal story of family, connection, and belonging: as a daughter, a mother, and as a Vietnamese refugee in America.

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By Sarah Walsh | July 26, 2023

In this unflinching portrait of single, working motherhood, Stephanie Land describes the years she spent scraping by while cleaning the houses of America’s upper-middle class. At twenty-eight, Land’s life was forever altered by an unplanned pregnancy. To build a life for her child, Land began working as a housekeeper by day and completing online courses by night. In MAID , she shares the experience of existing—often invisibly—beside her clients’ biggest triumphs while also being witness to their most vulnerable selves. Catch up on this can’t-miss book before Land’s second memoir, CLASS , comes out this November 7.

Poet Safiya Sinclair was raised by her volatile father, a reggae musician and militant observer of a strict Rastafari sect, who crafted everything around protecting her purity from Babylon, the sect’s term for the corrupting influences of the Western world. But as Sinclair embraced the books her mother gave her and the education she received, she found herself on a rebellious and violent collision course with her father’s beliefs. HOW TO SAY BABYLON is a nuanced and lyrical look at one woman’s grappling with the interlocked legacies of patriarchy and colonization.

With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime , How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.

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All her life, Chloé Cooper Jones has depended on her existence as an academic to provide a cloistered solace from the judgements of the outside world, a world made even crueler because of her rare congenital condition, sacral agenesis. But when Jones unexpectedly becomes a mother, she is forced to look beyond the confines of her academic success to reclaim a life that others—and perhaps even herself—have denied her for years. In EASY BEAUTY, Pulitzer Prize finalist and philosophy professor Jones explores taboo questions of disability and motherhood.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography

A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 * Vulture ’s #1 Memoir of 2022 * A Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , USA TODAY , Time , BuzzFeed , Publishers Weekly , Booklist , and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year

From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient—an “exquisite” ( Oprah Daily ) and groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen.

“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.”

So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself.

From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths.

“Bold, honest, and superbly well-written” (Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name ) Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world, and your place in it, with new eyes.

Critically acclaimed novelist Martha McPhee grew up on Omega Farm, a ramshackle New Jersey property that, to her, always seemed filled with art, people, and chaos that were by turns compassionate and sinister. Suddenly, McPhee must travel back to the now-neglected home she once knew with her husband and children to help care for a mother who no longer recognizes her as she slips into dementia. As McPhee tries to mend family ties and surrounding forests alike, her past will not let her go in this complex story of family legacy and environmental repair.

A long-awaited memoir from an award-winning novelist—a candid, riveting account of her complicated, bohemian childhood and her return home to care for her ailing mother.

In March 2020, Martha McPhee, her husband, and their two almost-grown children set out for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she finds herself grappling simultaneously with a mother slipping into severe dementia and a house that’s been neglected of late. As Martha works to manage her mother’s care and the sprawling, ramshackle property—a broken septic system, invasive bamboo, dying ash trees—she is pulled back into her childhood, almost against her will.

Martha grew up at Omega Farm with her four sisters, five stepsiblings, mother, and stepfather, in a house filled with art, people, and the kind of chaos that was sometimes benevolent, sometimes more sinister. Caring for her mother and her children, struggling to mend the forest, the past relentlessly asserts itself—even as Martha’s mother, the person she might share her memories with or even try to hold to account, no longer knows who Martha is.

A masterful exploration of a complicated family legacy and a powerful story of environmental and personal repair, Omega Farm is a testament to hope in the face of suffering, and a courageous tale about how returning home can offer a new way to understand the past.

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In this clear-eyed exploration of race, class, and identity, writer and lawyer Omer Aziz describes his experience of growing up as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy outside Toronto. Despite fearing the violence and discrimination he sees in the world around him, Aziz embraces his education. But as he moves from college in Ontario to prestigious institutions in Paris and Cambridge, and finally to law school at Yale, Aziz is constantly in conflict with himself: Is it possible to escape his feelings of shame and powerlessness in a Western world seemingly dedicated to reminding him of those feelings?

Brown Boy is an uncompromising interrogation of identity, family, religion, race, and class, told through Omer Aziz’s incisive and luminous prose.

In a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead, succumbing to aimlessness, apathy, and rage.

In his senior year of high school, Omer quickly begins to realize that education can open up the wider world. But as he falls in love with books, and makes his way to Queen’s University in Ontario, Sciences Po in Paris, Cambridge University in England, and finally Yale Law School, he continually confronts his own feelings of doubt and insecurity at being an outsider, a brown-skinned boy in an elite white world. He is searching for community and identity, asking questions of himself and those he encounters, and soon finds himself in difficult situations—whether in the suburbs of Paris or at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet the more books Omer reads and the more he moves through elite worlds, his feelings of shame and powerlessness only grow stronger, and clear answers recede further away.

Weaving together his powerful personal narrative with the books and friendships that move him, Aziz wrestles with the contradiction of feeling like an Other and his desire to belong to a Western world that never quite accepts him. He poses the questions he couldn’t have asked in his youth: Was assimilation ever really an option? Could one transcend the perils of race and class? And could we—the collective West—ever honestly confront the darker secrets that, as Aziz discovers, still linger from the past?

In Brown Boy, Omer Aziz has written a book that eloquently describes the complex process of creating an identity that fuses where he’s from, what people see in him, and who he knows himself to be.

Editors Recommend: 12 Brilliant and Surprising Spring Reads

By Off the Shelf Staff | January 16, 2023

Christie Tate thought her problems with commitment were over when she finally settled down with the right guy. But when her friend Meredith—twenty years older and both brutally and somehow gently honest—challenges her to dig into her many past failed female friendships, Tate realizes the hard work is still to come. Together, the two explore the shame, jealousy, and fears that led to Meredith’s many broken relations with other women and begin to consider what a “healthy relationship” really means. Funny and emotionally generous, BFF is a love letter to female friendship.

From the author of Group , a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club Pick, comes a moving, heartwarming, and powerful memoir about Christie Tate’s lifelong struggle to sustain female friendship, and the friend who helps her find the human connection she seeks.

After more than a decade of dead-end dates and dysfunctional relationships, Christie Tate has reclaimed her voice and settled down. Her days of agonizing in group therapy over guys who won’t commit are over, the grueling emotional work required to attach to another person tucked neatly into the past.

Or so she thought. Weeks after giddily sharing stories of her new boyfriend at Saturday morning recovery meetings, Christie receives a gift from a friend. Meredith, twenty years older and always impeccably accessorized, gives Christie a box of holiday-themed scarves as well as a gentle suggestion: maybe now is the perfect time to examine why friendships give her trouble. “The work never ends, right?” she says with a wink.

Christie isn’t so sure, but she soon realizes that the feeling of “apartness” that has plagued her since childhood isn’t magically going away now that she’s in a healthy romantic relationship. With Meredith by her side, she embarks on a brutally honest exploration of her friendships past and present, sorting through the ways that debilitating shame and jealousy have kept the lasting bonds she craves out of reach—and how she can overcome a history of letting go too soon. But when Meredith becomes ill and Christie’s baggage threatens to muddy their final days, she’s forced to face her deepest fears in honor of the woman who finally showed her how to be a friend.

Poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, and emotionally satisfying, B.F.F. explores what happens when we finally break the habits that impair our ability to connect with others, and the ways that one life—however messy and imperfect—can change another.

6 Emotionally Impactful Found Family Tales

By Katya Buresh | November 22, 2023

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Our Most Anticipated New Books of 2023

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CREEP is a collection of essays by writer and critic Myriam Gurba that unearths the disturbing manifestations of toxic traditions. In essays that are half cultural criticism and half personal essay, Gurba explores everything from the carceral system to Mexican stereotypes to inmate abuse. Wide-ranging and adventurous, razor-smart and provocative, these pieces explore the ecosystems that both sustain and result from oppression, systems that creep into every facet of life, from school to work and government institutions to family homes.

A ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection that tackles the pervasive, creeping oppression and toxicity that has wormed its way into society—in our books, schools, and homes, as well as the systems that perpetuate them—from the acclaimed author of Mean , and one of our fiercest, foremost explorers of intersectional Latinx identity.

A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does—it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it.

Creep is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes. Through cultural criticism disguised as personal essay, Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. Yet identifying individual creeps, creepy social groups, and creepy cultures is only half of this book’s project—the other half is examining how we as individuals, communities, and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.

With her ruthless mind, wry humor, and adventurous style, Gurba implicates everyone from Joan Didion to her former abuser, everything from Mexican stereotypes to the carceral state. Braiding her own history and identity throughout, she argues for a new way of conceptualizing oppression, and she does it with her signature blend of bravado and humility.

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Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 21

The 30 best biographies of all time.

Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that his work was “a kind of pursuit… writing about the pursuit of that fleeting figure, in such a way as to bring them alive in the present.”

At the risk of sounding cliché, the best biographies do exactly this: bring their subjects to life. A great biography isn’t just a laundry list of events that happened to someone. Rather, it should weave a narrative and tell a story in almost the same way a novel does. In this way, biography differs from the rest of nonfiction .

All the biographies on this list are just as captivating as excellent novels , if not more so. With that, please enjoy the 30 best biographies of all time — some historical, some recent, but all remarkable, life-giving tributes to their subjects.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great biographies out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized biography recommendation  😉

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1. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

This biography of esteemed mathematician John Nash was both a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and the basis for the award-winning film of the same name. Nasar thoroughly explores Nash’s prestigious career, from his beginnings at MIT to his work at the RAND Corporation — as well the internal battle he waged against schizophrenia, a disorder that nearly derailed his life.

2. Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game - Updated Edition by Andrew Hodges

Hodges’ 1983 biography of Alan Turing sheds light on the inner workings of this brilliant mathematician, cryptologist, and computer pioneer. Indeed, despite the title ( a nod to his work during WWII ), a great deal of the “enigmatic” Turing is laid out in this book. It covers his heroic code-breaking efforts during the war, his computer designs and contributions to mathematical biology in the years following, and of course, the vicious persecution that befell him in the 1950s — when homosexual acts were still a crime punishable by English law.

3. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is not only the inspiration for a hit Broadway musical, but also a work of creative genius itself. This massive undertaking of over 800 pages details every knowable moment of the youngest Founding Father’s life: from his role in the Revolutionary War and early American government to his sordid (and ultimately career-destroying) affair with Maria Reynolds. He may never have been president, but he was a fascinating and unique figure in American history — plus it’s fun to get the truth behind the songs.

Prefer to read about fascinating First Ladies rather than almost-presidents? Check out this awesome list of books about First Ladies over on The Archive.

4. Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

A prolific essayist, short story writer, and novelist, Hurston turned her hand to biographical writing in 1927 with this incredible work, kept under lock and key until it was published 2018. It’s based on Hurston’s interviews with the last remaining survivor of the Middle Passage slave trade, a man named Cudjo Lewis. Rendered in searing detail and Lewis’ highly affecting African-American vernacular, this biography of the “last black cargo” will transport you back in time to an era that, chillingly, is not nearly as far away from us as it feels.

5. Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert

Though many a biography of him has been attempted, Gilbert’s is the final authority on Winston Churchill — considered by many to be Britain’s greatest prime minister ever. A dexterous balance of in-depth research and intimately drawn details makes this biography a perfect tribute to the mercurial man who led Britain through World War II.

Just what those circumstances are occupies much of Bodanis's book, which pays homage to Einstein and, just as important, to predecessors such as Maxwell, Faraday, and Lavoisier, who are not as well known as Einstein today. Balancing writerly energy and scholarly weight, Bodanis offers a primer in modern physics and cosmology, explaining that the universe today is an expression of mass that will, in some vastly distant future, one day slide back to the energy side of the equation, replacing the \'dominion of matter\' with \'a great stillness\'--a vision that is at once lovely and profoundly frightening.

Without sliding into easy psychobiography, Bodanis explores other circumstances as well; namely, Einstein's background and character, which combined with a sterling intelligence to afford him an idiosyncratic view of the way things work--a view that would change the world. --Gregory McNamee

6. E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

This “biography of the world’s most famous equation” is a one-of-a-kind take on the genre: rather than being the story of Einstein, it really does follow the history of the equation itself. From the origins and development of its individual elements (energy, mass, and light) to their ramifications in the twentieth century, Bodanis turns what could be an extremely dry subject into engaging fare for readers of all stripes.

7. Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

When Enrique was only five years old, his mother left Honduras for the United States, promising a quick return. Eleven years later, Enrique finally decided to take matters into his own hands in order to see her again: he would traverse Central and South America via railway, risking his life atop the “train of death” and at the hands of the immigration authorities, to reunite with his mother. This tale of Enrique’s perilous journey is not for the faint of heart, but it is an account of incredible devotion and sharp commentary on the pain of separation among immigrant families.

8. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

Herrera’s 1983 biography of renowned painter Frida Kahlo, one of the most recognizable names in modern art, has since become the definitive account on her life. And while Kahlo no doubt endured a great deal of suffering (a horrific accident when she was eighteen, a husband who had constant affairs), the focal point of the book is not her pain. Instead, it’s her artistic brilliance and immense resolve to leave her mark on the world — a mark that will not soon be forgotten, in part thanks to Herrera’s dedicated work.

9. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Perhaps the most impressive biographical feat of the twenty-first century, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about a woman whose cells completely changed the trajectory of modern medicine. Rebecca Skloot skillfully commemorates the previously unknown life of a poor black woman whose cancer cells were taken, without her knowledge, for medical testing — and without whom we wouldn’t have many of the critical cures we depend upon today.

10. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the Denali wilderness in April 1992. Five months later, McCandless was found emaciated and deceased in his shelter — but of what cause? Krakauer’s biography of McCandless retraces his steps back to the beginning of the trek, attempting to suss out what the young man was looking for on his journey, and whether he fully understood what dangers lay before him.

11. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families by James Agee

"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” From this line derives the central issue of Agee and Evans’ work: who truly deserves our praise and recognition? According to this 1941 biography, it’s the barely-surviving sharecropper families who were severely impacted by the American “Dust Bowl” — hundreds of people entrenched in poverty, whose humanity Evans and Agee desperately implore their audience to see in their book.

12. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

Another mysterious explorer takes center stage in this gripping 2009 biography. Grann tells the story of Percy Fawcett, the archaeologist who vanished in the Amazon along with his son in 1925, supposedly in search of an ancient lost city. Parallel to this narrative, Grann describes his own travels in the Amazon 80 years later: discovering firsthand what threats Fawcett may have encountered, and coming to realize what the “Lost City of Z” really was.

13. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang

Though many of us will be familiar with the name Mao Zedong, this prodigious biography sheds unprecedented light upon the power-hungry “Red Emperor.” Chang and Halliday begin with the shocking statistic that Mao was responsible for 70 million deaths during peacetime — more than any other twentieth-century world leader. From there, they unravel Mao’s complex ideologies, motivations, and missions, breaking down his long-propagated “hero” persona and thrusting forth a new, grislier image of one of China’s biggest revolutionaries.

14. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson by Andrew Wilson

Titled after one of her most evocative poems, this shimmering bio of Sylvia Plath takes an unusual approach. Instead of focusing on her years of depression and tempestuous marriage to poet Ted Hughes, it chronicles her life before she ever came to Cambridge. Wilson closely examines her early family and relationships, feelings and experiences, with information taken from her meticulous diaries — setting a strong precedent for other Plath biographers to follow.

15. The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes

What if you had twenty-four different people living inside you, and you never knew which one was going to come out? Such was the life of Billy Milligan, the subject of this haunting biography by the author of Flowers for Algernon . Keyes recounts, in a refreshingly straightforward style, the events of Billy’s life and how his psyche came to be “split”... as well as how, with Keyes’ help, he attempted to put the fragments of himself back together.

16. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

This gorgeously constructed biography follows Paul Farmer, a doctor who’s worked for decades to eradicate infectious diseases around the globe, particularly in underprivileged areas. Though Farmer’s humanitarian accomplishments are extraordinary in and of themselves, the true charm of this book comes from Kidder’s personal relationship with him — and the sense of fulfillment the reader sustains from reading about someone genuinely heroic, written by someone else who truly understands and admires what they do.

17. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

Here’s another bio that will reshape your views of a famed historical tyrant, though this time in a surprisingly favorable light. Decorated scholar Andrew Roberts delves into the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, from his near-flawless military instincts to his complex and confusing relationship with his wife. But Roberts’ attitude toward his subject is what really makes this work shine: rather than ridiculing him ( as it would undoubtedly be easy to do ), he approaches the “petty tyrant” with a healthy amount of deference.

18. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV by Robert A. Caro

Lyndon Johnson might not seem as intriguing or scandalous as figures like Kennedy, Nixon, or W. Bush. But in this expertly woven biography, Robert Caro lays out the long, winding road of his political career, and it’s full of twists you wouldn’t expect. Johnson himself was a surprisingly cunning figure, gradually maneuvering his way closer and closer to power. Finally, in 1963, he got his greatest wish — but at what cost? Fans of Adam McKay’s Vice , this is the book for you.

19. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Anyone who grew up reading Little House on the Prairie will surely be fascinated by this tell-all biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Caroline Fraser draws upon never-before-published historical resources to create a lush study of the author’s life — not in the gently narrated manner of the Little House series, but in raw and startling truths about her upbringing, marriage, and volatile relationship with her daughter (and alleged ghostwriter) Rose Wilder Lane.

20. Prince: A Private View by Afshin Shahidi

Compiled just after the superstar’s untimely death in 2016, this intimate snapshot of Prince’s life is actually a largely visual work — Shahidi served as his private photographer from the early 2000s until his passing. And whatever they say about pictures being worth a thousand words, Shahidi’s are worth more still: Prince’s incredible vibrance, contagious excitement, and altogether singular personality come through in every shot.

21. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss

Could there be a more fitting title for a book about the husband-wife team who discovered radioactivity? What you may not know is that these nuclear pioneers also had a fascinating personal history. Marie Sklodowska met Pierre Curie when she came to work in his lab in 1891, and just a few years later they were married. Their passion for each other bled into their passion for their work, and vice-versa — and in almost no time at all, they were on their way to their first of their Nobel Prizes.

22. Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

She may not have been assassinated or killed in a mysterious plane crash, but Rosemary Kennedy’s fate is in many ways the worst of “the Kennedy Curse.” As if a botched lobotomy that left her almost completely incapacitated weren’t enough, her parents then hid her away from society, almost never to be seen again. Yet in this new biography, penned by devoted Kennedy scholar Kate Larson, the full truth of Rosemary’s post-lobotomy life is at last revealed.

23. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

This appropriately lyrical biography of brilliant Jazz Age poet and renowned feminist, Edna St. Vincent Millay, is indeed a perfect balance of savage and beautiful. While Millay’s poetic work was delicate and subtle, the woman herself was feisty and unpredictable, harboring unusual and occasionally destructive habits that Milford fervently explores.

24. Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes

Holmes’ famous philosophy of “biography as pursuit” is thoroughly proven here in his first full-length biographical work. Shelley: The Pursuit details an almost feverish tracking of Percy Shelley as a dark and cutting figure in the Romantic period — reforming many previous historical conceptions about him through Holmes’ compelling and resolute writing.

25. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

Another Gothic figure has been made newly known through this work, detailing the life of prolific horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson. Author Ruth Franklin digs deep into the existence of the reclusive and mysterious Jackson, drawing penetrating comparisons between the true events of her life and the dark nature of her fiction.

26. The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

Fans of Into the Wild and The Lost City of Z will find their next adventure fix in this 2017 book about Christopher Knight, a man who lived by himself in the Maine woods for almost thirty years. The tale of this so-called “last true hermit” will captivate readers who have always fantasized about escaping society, with vivid descriptions of Knight’s rural setup, his carefully calculated moves and how he managed to survive the deadly cold of the Maine winters.

27. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The man, the myth, the legend: Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, is properly immortalized in Isaacson’s masterful biography. It divulges the details of Jobs’ little-known childhood and tracks his fateful path from garage engineer to leader of one of the largest tech companies in the world — not to mention his formative role in other legendary companies like Pixar, and indeed within the Silicon Valley ecosystem as a whole.

28. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

Olympic runner Louis Zamperini was just twenty-six when his US Army bomber crashed and burned in the Pacific, leaving him and two other men afloat on a raft for forty-seven days — only to be captured by the Japanese Navy and tortured as a POW for the next two and a half years. In this gripping biography, Laura Hillenbrand tracks Zamperini’s story from beginning to end… including how he embraced Christian evangelism as a means of recovery, and even came to forgive his tormentors in his later years.

29. Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff

Everyone knows of Vladimir Nabokov — but what about his wife, Vera, whom he called “the best-humored woman I have ever known”? According to Schiff, she was a genius in her own right, supporting Vladimir not only as his partner, but also as his all-around editor and translator. And she kept up that trademark humor throughout it all, inspiring her husband’s work and injecting some of her own creative flair into it along the way.

30. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

William Shakespeare is a notoriously slippery historical figure — no one really knows when he was born, what he looked like, or how many plays he wrote. But that didn’t stop Stephen Greenblatt, who in 2004 turned out this magnificently detailed biography of the Bard: a series of imaginative reenactments of his writing process, and insights on how the social and political ideals of the time would have influenced him. Indeed, no one exists in a vacuum, not even Shakespeare — hence the conscious depiction of him in this book as a “will in the world,” rather than an isolated writer shut up in his own musty study.

If you're looking for more inspiring nonfiction, check out this list of 30 engaging self-help books , or this list of the last century's best memoirs !

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Best Book Club Books: Memoirs

Memoirs offer an incredible opportunity to immerse yourself in another life with the author as your guide. The true story of how someone overcomes incredible obstacles also allows you to wonder, What would I do?

For a good book club memoir discussion, choose a book that’s a bit outside of your group’s comfort zone. And if discussion questions aren’t provided with the book, ask each member to come with one or two of their own. These memoirs — stories of survival and even triumph — would all make excellent book club books.

Finding Freedom

By erin french.

Celebrated chef Erin French shares her moving story of overcoming obstacles and finding community in her bestselling memoir , Finding Freedom . From her formative years working the line at her dad’s diner to opening her own critically acclaimed restaurant The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine, French’s journey to the head of the table was anything but easy. Indeed, she endured addiction, hit multiple rock bottoms, and faced the challenges of single motherhood along the way. Told with candor and warmth — and enriched by French’s delectable food writing — Finding Freedom celebrates the life-affirming joys of family and finding your voice and the delicious connection between good food and great company.

While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

By meg kissinger.

In While You Were Out, award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger movingly chronicles her relationship with her family and the mental health crises that they endured. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative journalism , Kissinger’s narrative guides us through moments of personal tragedy, love, resilience, and unexpected humor with an eye toward the future and changing the way we talk about mental health care in America. 

Being Henry: The Fonz...and Beyond

By henry winkler.

With self-deprecating humor and a healthy dose of Hollywood charm, Happy Days star Henry Winkler opens up about his life in this entertaining celebrity memoir. The Emmy Award–winning actor touches on everything from his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the daily grind of showbiz to dazzling anecdotes from the sets of Barry and Arrested Development, and, of course, his career-defining turn as the Fonz on Happy Days . Radiating sincerity and warmth, Being Henry teaches lessons on being truthful to yourself no matter the odds — something every reader can appreciate.

Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

By paul holes.

For true crime aficionados, Paul Holes needs no introduction. The seasoned cold case investigator has dedicated his life to the pursuit of evil and he has helped crack some of the most notorious cases in modern American history, from the kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard to the 20-year manhunt for the Golden State Killer. He’s proud of his work, putting away criminals and providing closure to survivors. But he’s also haunted by a troubling question about his career: What was the cost to his well-being and his family? In this bestselling true crime memoir , Holes looks back on the cases he’s investigated and opens up about the many sacrifices he’s made in pursuit of justice, from frayed personal relationships to missing out on the joys of fatherhood. Delivered with unflinching honesty, Unmasked is a powerful account that “grabs its reader in a stranglehold and proves more fascinating than fiction and darker than any noir narrative” ( Los Angeles Magazine ). 

Hollywood Park

By mikel jollett.

From being born into an infamous cult – to a childhood filled with poverty and addiction, Mikel Jollett struggled to find love and a sense of normalcy in world where nothing made sense. His incredible story is at once heartbreaking and inspiring, and it shows you that family loyalty and fierce determination can take you to places you only dreamed about.

Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares

By aarti namdev shahani.

In a way, NPR correspondent Aarti Shahani has lived the American dream. She and her family immigrated to New York City, she received a scholarship to a top Manhattan private school, and eventually she landed a successful career. But the Shahani family’s struggles equally define these years, especially when her old-world shopkeeper father inadvertently launders money for the Cali drug cartel. This immigrant story presents a look at a controversial topic that is not as black-and-white as some might think, which makes for a thought-provoking dialogue. Discussion questions are  here .

Birdgirl: Looking to the Skies in Search of a Better Future

By mya-rose craig.

From Mya-Rose Craig, the renowned birder and environmentalist who stands at the forefront of a new generation of environmental activists, Birdgirl combines science writing with advocacy and a touching tale of family love. Craig’s nature memoir interweaves her passion for bird-watching with the story of her mother’s mental health crisis, beautifully capturing the planet’s fragile grandeur while championing her mother’s journey and highlighting the restorative power of the natural world. Both thought-provoking and inspiring, Birdgirl is a deeply felt narrative about finding your calling and all the help you need along the way.

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

By jennifer finney boylan.

From  New York Times  bestseller and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan comes her newest memoir  Good Boy,  showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. Boylan contemplates her past in ways that prompt you to consider your own transformative times. An ode to dogs, identity, and finding love, the perfect thought-provoking read to share with friends or family.

When Harry Met Minnie

By martha teichner.

Calling all animal lovers: Grab your furry friend and plenty of tissues, and settle in for this touching memoir about love, loss, and soul-warming companionship. When Emmy Award–winning news correspondent Martha Teichner is asked if she’d consider adopting a dog in need, she happily agrees — after all, Harry, the dog in question, is a bull terrier, just like her dog, Minnie. The two canines quickly hit it off; they’re natural companions. And yet, a friendship also blossoms between Martha and Harry’s owner, Carole, a woman who’s dying of cancer caused by exposure to toxins from 9/11. When Harry Met Minnie is a modern-day fairy tale rich with chance encounters, fated friendships, and a bustling New York City backdrop. It’s also a stirring memoir about camaraderie, and how the souls that we meet, both human and canine, leave a lasting impression on our lives.

By LaDoris Hazzard Cordell

What do you do when the system you believe in is flawed? According to Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, you get in there and you fix it. In this eye-opening new memoir , Judge Cordell, the first African American woman to sit on the Superior Court of Northern California, offers an insider’s look at America’s criminal justice system , celebrating its strengths, highlighting its weaknesses, and tracing paths to more equitable judicial methods. Judge Cordell is well aware of the legal system’s shortcomings: shaky plea bargains, unchecked racial biases in law enforcement, and the troubling shift from rehabilitation to punishment are but a few of the weighty issues she tackles here. Nevertheless, Cordell is prepared to put in the work for positive change. In Her Honor, Cordell invites us into her chambers and shares her remarkable journey through the halls of justice, all while maintaining her conviction that the system can work — if we work on it.

Between the World and Me

By ta-nehisi coates.

In a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates seeks to teach one important lesson: how to be a black man in America. He recounts his rough childhood, the importance of black history, and the moment he learns that education and wealth can’t protect you from racism if you’re black. Coates doesn’t put much faith in the American Dream; instead he urges his son to build strong community ties and surround himself with the love he finds there. Discussion questions are  here .

Heavy: An American Memoir

By kiese laymon.

Laymon pulls no punches when describing the abuse he suffered as a child. He places blame squarely in two places: his mother, and America’s institutional racism and sexism. His mother’s strict insistence on good grades, his obesity, and his career struggles are the stressors that lead to him writing. In doing so, he uncovers generations of family abuse and condemns those who did nothing to stop it. It’s a harrowing but important read. Discussion questions are here .

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

By j.d. vance.

Growing up in a family of rust-belt have-nots has left Vance with some clear opinions on why some people make it in America and others don’t — specifically within the white working class. He shines a harsh light on the psychology of a region that champions the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” maxim, while simultaneously dishing out plenty of blame for their inability to do so. Discussion questions are  here .

Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

By heather harpham.

Harpham is thrilled by her new relationship with Brian until she gets pregnant … and Brian balks, leaving her alone and disillusioned. New-mom joy turns into a nightmare when baby Gracie grows suddenly, gravely ill. Brian returns, commits to helping Harpham and Gracie, and their relationship slowly resuscitates. How this fragile family grows strong is almost unbelievable, yet it’s true … and it has a happy ending. Discussion questions are  here .

The Light Years

By chris rush.

In the late 60s, at age 12, Rush is introduced to psychedelic drugs. From that moment, the counterculture of hippies and nomads becomes his family. Once a colorful decade of peace and love, the years soon dissolve into the 70s’ raw and violent hedonism. Rush survives his quest for meaning —– but just barely. Discussion questions are  here .

By Elie Wiesel

Wiesel’s Nobel-prize-winning memoir is more than just the story of his years as a prisoner at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. It’s also a study of faith, and how it gets redefined in the face of one of the worst crimes against humanity in modern history. Even if you’re among the millions who have read  Night , this story is worth a re-read at different points in your life. Discussion questions are  here .

By Michelle Obama

Obama is the first to admit that she would never have predicted her journey from Chicago’s working-class South Side to the White House. Her memoir is a fascinating peek behind a heavily-guarded curtain—from her concerns about how the Presidency affected her marriage and family, to the closing moments of her tenure as First Lady. These stories are riveting, and her honesty has made  Becoming  a book club favorite. Discussion questions are  here .

By Tara Westover

Education — the 13 or so years most Americans receive — was never a given for Westover. Raised in a remote survivalist camp in Idaho, her parents considered the public school system to be a waste of time. So when Westover ran away and started school at age 17, she had a lot to learn. And she did, eventually working her way into Harvard and Cambridge universities. After her incredible escape and global adventures, can she ever go home again? Discussion questions are  here .

The Year of Magical Thinking

By joan didion.

Magical thinking is how Didion describes the mental gymnastics required of her during the most challenging year of her life. Her daughter falls ill and is placed in a medically induced coma, and shortly thereafter her husband suddenly dies of a heart attack. Both of these events send her spiraling into a world of medical journals and existential crises, all beautifully and miraculously captured in this memoir.  Discussion questions are  here .

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider

By ishmael beah.

When he was 13 years old, Beah was recruited as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s government army. As he’s asked to perform increasingly violent acts, he shuts down emotionally. Childhood is reduced to a past dream; the war an inescapable nightmare … until one day, he’s shown the way out. Written at age 25, Beah’s story is shocking but so important to witness. Discussion questions are  here .

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

By stephanie land.

Being single and pregnant, Land learns, has an immediate impact on your ability to make a living. Working as a maid keeps her small family fed and clothed, and along the way she discovers surprising lessons about the upper class and what it means to be their servant. Discussion questions are  here .

Before Night Falls: A Memoir

By reinaldo arenas.

Arenas escapes poverty in rural Cuba to become one of the country’s most popular writers in exile. His rise to fame is treacherous, though. Once outed as a gay man, his writing is banned, he’s sent to prison, and he eventually flees his homeland. In New York, he faces the ultimate fight for his life: AIDS.  Before Night Falls  is considered his deathbed memoir.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

By loung ung.

In 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge ended five-year-old Ung’s childhood as she knew it. Her father worked in government, which put them all in immediate danger. Indeed, as the family attempted to escape Phnom Penh, they were separated. Two years later, Ung is a child soldier and her siblings are struggling to survive in various labor camps. Their sudden uprooting and slow, uncertain reunion makes for an intense read. Discussion questions are  here .

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Recommended Memoirs for Book Clubs

There are times I’m suddenly aware that I’m not as well-rounded a reader as I’d wish. The curation of this list was one of those moments. I read the way I do most things––intuitively and deeply. I’m a poet, so my memoir preferences lean toward beautiful writing as much as to dramatic storytelling. I’m a student and teacher of depth psychology, so a memoirist’s ability to reflect upon the inner journey is just as important to me as funny anecdotes about crazy relatives. I’m a feminist, which leads me more often, though not exclusively, to women’s stories.

As a writer, I also adore craft books, which is why I’ve included one by Mary Karr. I promise, it’s as much fun as her first memoir. And, if you aren’t yet a writer, by the time you finish The Art of Memoir , you’ll be ready to pick up a pen.

Composed: A Memoir by Rosanne Cash

Not your typical celebrity tell-all. Sure, there’s enough industry-insider intrigue to keep fans of Rosanne Cash and Johnny Cash turning pages. But Rosanne is a sage, often lyrical, writer. Hers is a story of the ties that bind her to her family, her music, and her soul. 

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Didion became famous for pioneering a form of writing that seamlessly marries journalism and personal essay. She is a keen observer of the tense relationship between the outer world and inner experience, nowhere more so than in this acclaimed account of the aftermath of her husband’s sudden death. 

Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly

Delightful, and delightfully short, this genre-defying collection of personal reflections marries the best things about poetry (intensity of compression) and memoir (radical, sometimes raw truth-telling). Plus, Fennelly’s observations about marriage, children, and the writing life can be uproariously funny. Fennelly currently serves as Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald

I fell in love with Casey Gerald when I heard him speak at last year’s library fundraiser, Verse & Vino. His wasn’t the only book I bought that night (no surprise there), but it’s the one that keeps me thinking. He writes in breathtaking detail and with lots of good humor about his dramatic and impoverished upbringing, the searing pain of surviving adolescence as both black and gay, and becoming a man within a duplicitous society that both promotes and limits him in his journey into adulthood.  

I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory by Patricia Hampl

This memoir is a beautifully written exercise in the art of discovery. Though it’s not a craft book, Hampl consciously demonstrates the means through which she reflects on her inner and outer life experience, explores the misty landscapes of memory, and explains what most memoirists are only vaguely aware of—the reason for writing one at all.

Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo

Harjo was named U.S. Poet Laureate this past June. Yes, this memoir is written in prose—gorgeous, lyrical, mythic prose. After you’ve read it, you’ll likely want to read her poems, too. And, afterwards, you’ll want to find recordings of her music. And, after that, you’ll want to meet her, which you can do next April when Harjo visits Charlotte to headline CPCC’s Sensoria festival and (lucky us!) teach at Charlotte Lit.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung

As I admitted in the introduction, I’m a Jungian, so there’s no way I could leave this classic off my list. Yes, it’s one of the more difficult books (and perhaps the strangest) on the list. But readers will be rewarded for their efforts with fresh understanding about the roots of modern psychology and an experience of its founder’s rich imagination. MDR , as it’s known, is a classic—deservedly so.

The Liar’s Club and The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Yes, these are two separate books. I’m fighting against the limits of the list. Besides, my hunch is that avid readers have already come across Karr’s famous first memoir, The Liar’s Club . If not, read it before any of these others. Then sometime in the middle of your reading year, take up Karr’s equally compelling craft book, The Art of Memoir . Even if it doesn’t make you want to take up your pen, it will make you a better reader.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter : A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine by Sue Monk Kidd

Kidd is known for her best-selling novel, The Secret Life of Bees . This is an altogether different kind of book—part memoir, part study of feminist spirituality. Kidd weaves the two threads seamlessly, not only finding her voice in the process but helping readers do the same. As she writes, “The hardest thing about writing is telling the truth. Maybe it’s the hardest thing about being a woman, too.”

Ordinary Light: A Memoir by Tracy K. Smith

This memoir is also written by a U.S. Poet Laureate. Smith served in the role from 2017-2019. By now, you might be wondering about the relationship between poetry and memoir. All I can say is that the best memoir writers have a style of consciousness, a tendency for and pattern of reflection, that is poetic in essence. And no one does this more lyrically or powerfully than Smith.

Since many book groups meet every month of the year, I’m throwing in a few more titles to choose from. These books are no kind of runners up; I just ran out of room!

• Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott
• Bluets by Maggie Nelson (another slender micro-memoir volume)
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed

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The 50 Best Biographies of All Time

Think you know the full and complete story about George Washington, Steve Jobs, or Joan of Arc? Think again.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

Biographies have always been controversial. On his deathbed, the novelist Henry James told his nephew that his “sole wish” was to “frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter” by destroying his personal letters and journals. And one of our greatest living writers, Hermione Lee, once compared biographies to autopsies that add “a new terror to death”—the potential muddying of someone’s legacy when their life is held up to the scrutiny of investigation.

Why do we read so many books about the lives and deaths of strangers, as told by second-hand and third-hand sources? Is it merely our love for gossip, or are we trying to understand ourselves through the triumphs and failures of others?

To keep this list from blossoming into hundreds of titles, we only included books currently in print and translated into English. We also limited it to one book per author, and one book per subject. In ranked order, here are the best biographies of all time.

Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss

You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo , the 1844 revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013, and it’s only a matter of time before a filmmaker turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown

Few biographies are as genuinely fun to read as this barnburner from the irreverent English critic Craig Brown. Princess Margaret may have been everyone’s favorite character from Netflix’s The Crown , but Brown’s eye for ostentatious details and revelatory insights will help you see why everyone in the 1950s—from Pablo Picasso and Gore Vidal to Peter Sellers and Andy Warhol—was obsessed with her. When book critic Parul Sehgal says that she “ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice,” you know you’re in for a treat.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, by Alec Nevala-Lee

If you want to feel optimistic about the future again, look no further than this brilliant biography of Buckminster Fuller, the “modern Leonardo da Vinci” of the 1960s and 1970s who came up with the idea of a “Spaceship Earth” and inspired Silicon Valley’s belief that technology could be a global force for good (while earning plenty of critics who found his ideas impractical). Alec Nevala-Lee’s writing is as serene and precise as one of Fuller’s geodesic domes, and his research into never-before-seen documents makes this a genuinely groundbreaking book full of surprises.

Free Press Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D.G. Kelley

The late American jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk has been so heavily mythologized that it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. But Robin D. G. Kelley’s biography is an essential book for jazz fans looking to understand the man behind the myths. Monk’s family provided Kelley with full access to their archives, resulting in chapter after chapter of fascinating details, from his birth in small-town North Carolina to his death across the Hudson from Manhattan.

University of Chicago Press Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest

There are dozens of books about America’s most celebrated architect, but Secrest’s 1998 biography is still the most fun to read. For one, she doesn’t shy away from the fact that Wright could be an absolute monster, even to his own friends and family. Secondly, her research into more than 100,000 letters, as well as interviews with nearly every surviving person who knew Wright, makes this book a one-of-a-kind look at how Wright’s personal life influenced his architecture.

Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad

Ralph Ellison’s landmark novel, Invisible Man , is about a Black man who faced systemic racism in the Deep South during his youth, then migrated to New York, only to find oppression of a slightly different kind. What makes Arnold Rampersand’s honest and insightful biography of Ellison so compelling is how he connects the dots between Invisible Man and Ellison’s own journey from small-town Oklahoma to New York’s literary scene during the Harlem Renaissance.

Oscar Wilde: A Life, by Matthew Sturgis

Now remembered for his 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde was one of the most fascinating men of the fin-de-siècle thanks to his poems, plays, and some of the earliest reported “celebrity trials.” Sturgis’s scintillating biography is the most encyclopedic chronicle of Wilde’s life to date, thanks to new research into his personal notebooks and a full transcript of his libel trial.

Beacon Press A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, by Angela Jackson

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1950, but because she spent most of her life in Chicago instead of New York, she hasn’t been studied or celebrated as often as her peers in the Harlem Renaissance. Luckily, Angela Jackson’s biography is full of new details about Brooks’s personal life, and how it influenced her poetry across five decades.

Atria Books Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, by Dana Stevens

Was Buster Keaton the most influential filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century? Dana Stevens makes a compelling case in this dazzling mix of biography, essays, and cultural history. Much like Keaton’s filmography, Stevens playfully jumps from genre to genre in an endlessly entertaining way, while illuminating how Keaton’s influence on film and television continues to this day.

Algonquin Books Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation, by Dean Jobb

Dean Jobb is a master of narrative nonfiction on par with Erik Larsen, author of The Devil in the White City . Jobb’s biography of Leo Koretz, the Bernie Madoff of the Jazz Age, is among the few great biographies that read like a thriller. Set in Chicago during the 1880s through the 1920s, it’s also filled with sumptuous period details, from lakeside mansions to streets choked with Model Ts.

Vintage Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee’s biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton could easily have made this list. But her book about a less famous person—Penelope Fitzgerald, the English novelist who wrote The Bookshop, The Blue Flower , and The Beginning of Spring —might be her best yet. At just over 500 pages, it’s considerably shorter than those other biographies, partially because Fitzgerald’s life wasn’t nearly as well documented. But Lee’s conciseness is exactly what makes this book a more enjoyable read, along with the thrilling feeling that she’s uncovering a new story literary historians haven’t already explored.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark

Many biographers have written about Sylvia Plath, often drawing parallels between her poetry and her death by suicide at the age of thirty. But in this startling book, Plath isn’t wholly defined by her tragedy, and Heather Clark’s craftsmanship as a writer makes it a joy to read. It’s also the most comprehensive account of Plath’s final year yet put to paper, with new information that will change the way you think of her life, poetry, and death.

Pontius Pilate, by Ann Wroe

Compared to most biography subjects, there isn’t much surviving documentation about the life of Pontius Pilate, the Judaean governor who ordered the execution of the historical Jesus in the first century AD. But Ann Wroe leans into all that uncertainty in her groundbreaking book, making for a fascinating mix of research and informed speculation that often feels like reading a really good historical novel.

Brand: History Book Club Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana

In the early nineteenth century, Simón Bolívar led six modern countries—Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela—to independence from the Spanish Empire. In this rousing work of biography and geopolitical history, Marie Arana deftly chronicles his epic life with propulsive prose, including a killer first sentence: “They heard him before they saw him: the sound of hooves striking the earth, steady as a heartbeat, urgent as a revolution.”

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, by Yunte Huang

Ever read a biography of a fictional character? In the 1930s and 1940s, Charlie Chan came to popularity as a Chinese American police detective in Earl Derr Biggers’s mystery novels and their big-screen adaptations. In writing this book, Yunte Huang became something of a detective himself to track down the real-life inspiration for the character, a Hawaiian cop named Chang Apana born shortly after the Civil War. The result is an astute blend between biography and cultural criticism as Huang analyzes how Chan served as a crucial counterpoint to stereotypical Chinese villains in early Hollywood.

Random House Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford

Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most fascinating women of the twentieth century—an openly bisexual poet, playwright, and feminist icon who helped make Greenwich Village a cultural bohemia in the 1920s. With a knack for torrid details and creative insights, Nancy Milford successfully captures what made Millay so irresistible—right down to her voice, “an instrument of seduction” that captivated men and women alike.

Simon & Schuster Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Few people have the luxury of choosing their own biographers, but that’s exactly what the late co-founder of Apple did when he tapped Walter Isaacson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Adapted for the big screen by Aaron Sorkin in 2015, Steve Jobs is full of plot twists and suspense thanks to a mind-blowing amount of research on the part of Isaacson, who interviewed Jobs more than forty times and spoke with just about everyone who’d ever come into contact with him.

Brand: Random House Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff

The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Without my wife, I wouldn’t have written a single novel.” And while Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra could also easily make this list, her telling of Véra Nabokova’s life in Russia, Europe, and the United States is revolutionary for finally bringing Véra out of her husband’s shadow. It’s also one of the most romantic biographies you’ll ever read, with some truly unforgettable images, like Vera’s habit of carrying a handgun to protect Vladimir on butterfly-hunting excursions.

Greenblatt, Stephen Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt

We know what you’re thinking. Who needs another book about Shakespeare?! But Greenblatt’s masterful biography is like traveling back in time to see firsthand how a small-town Englishman became the greatest writer of all time. Like Wroe’s biography of Pontius Pilate, there’s plenty of speculation here, as there are very few surviving records of Shakespeare’s daily life, but Greenblatt’s best trick is the way he pulls details from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets to construct a compelling narrative.

Crown Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

When Kiese Laymon calls a book a “literary miracle,” you pay attention. James Baldwin’s legacy has enjoyed something of a revival over the last few years thanks to films like I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk , as well as books like Glaude’s new biography. It’s genuinely a bit of a miracle how he manages to combine the story of Baldwin’s life with interpretations of Baldwin’s work—as well as Glaude’s own story of discovering, resisting, and rediscovering Baldwin’s books throughout his life.

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The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2022

Featuring buster keaton, jean rhys, bernardine evaristo, kate beaton, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Memoir and Biography .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright) 17 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span … it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us … O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust …

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase … But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.”

–Colum McCann ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (Milkweed)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Assured and affecting … A powerful and bracing memoir … This is a book that will make you see the world differently: it asks you to reconsider the animals and insects we often view as pests – the rat, for example, and the moth. It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are.”

–Lynn Enright ( The Irish Times )

3. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton’s] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant … Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment …

There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white … And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.”

–Rachel Cooke ( The Guardian )

4. Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

14 Rave • 3 Positive

“… quietly wrenching … To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity … This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion—all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life … Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

5.  Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove)

13 Rave • 4 Positive

“Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling … With ribald humour and admirable candour, Evaristo takes us on a tour of her sexual history … Characterized by the resilience of its author, it is replete with stories about the communities and connections Evaristo has cultivated over forty years … Invigoratingly disruptive as an artist, Evaristo is a bridge-builder as a human being.”

–Emily Bernard ( The Times Literary Supplement )

1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Rundell is right that Donne…must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called ‘felt thought’, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract … It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before … Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on … This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an ‘infinity merchant’ … To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness”

–Laura Feigel ( The Guardian )

2. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (Harper)

12 Rave • 3 Positive

“Compelling … We know about Auschwitz. We know what happened there. But Freedland, with his strong, clear prose and vivid details, makes us feel it, and the first half of this book is not an easy read. The chillingly efficient mass murder of thousands of people is harrowing enough, but Freedland tells us stories of individual evils as well that are almost harder to take … His matter-of-fact tone makes it bearable for us to continue to read … The Escape Artist is riveting history, eloquently written and scrupulously researched. Rosenberg’s brilliance, courage and fortitude are nothing short of amazing.”

–Laurie Hertzel ( The Star Tribune )

3. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (W. W. Norton & Company)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan

“…illuminating and meticulously researched … paints a deft portrait of a flawed, complex, yet endlessly fascinating woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken … Following dismal reviews of her fourth novel, Rhys drifted into obscurity. Ms. Seymour’s book could have lost momentum here. Instead, it compellingly charts turbulent, drink-fueled years of wild moods and reckless acts before building to a cathartic climax with Rhys’s rescue, renewed lease on life and late-career triumph … is at its most powerful when Ms. Seymour, clear-eyed but also with empathy, elaborates on Rhys’s woes …

Ms. Seymour is less convincing with her bold claim that Rhys was ‘perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.’ However, she does expertly demonstrate that Rhys led a challenging yet remarkable life and that her slim but substantial novels about beleaguered women were ahead of their time … This insightful biography brilliantly shows how her many battles were lost and won.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Wall Street Journal )

4. The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Grisly yet inspiring … Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable. The suspense of her narrative comes not from any interpersonal drama but from the formidable challenges posed by the physical world … The Facemaker is mostly a story of medical progress and extraordinary achievement, but as Gillies himself well knew—grappling daily with the unbearable suffering that people willingly inflicted on one another—failure was never far behind.”

5. Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis (Knopf)

8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Keaton fans have often complained that nearly all biographies of him suffer from a questionable slant or a cursory treatment of key events. With Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life —at more than 800 pages dense with research and facts—Mr. Curtis rectifies that situation, and how. He digs deep into Keaton’s process and shows how something like the brilliant two-reeler Cops went from a storyline conceived from necessity—construction on the movie lot encouraged shooting outdoors—to a masterpiece … This will doubtless be the primary reference on Keaton’s life for a long time to come … the worse Keaton’s life gets, the more engrossing Mr. Curtis’s book becomes.”

–Farran Smith Nehme ( The Wall Street Journal )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The 30 best biographies to add to your reading list

Some stories involve incredible, larger-than-life characters. these are the best biographies ever written..

Writing a great biography is no easy task. The author is charged with capturing some of the most iconic and influential people on the planet, folks that often have larger than life personas. To capture that in words is a genuine challenge that the best biographers relish.

The very best biographies don't just hold a mirror up to these remarkable characters. Instead, they show us a different side of them, or just how a certain approach of philosophy fueled their game-changing ways. Biographies inform, for certain, but they entertain and inspire to no end as well.

Below, we gathered a comprehensive list of the best biographies ever written. Some of these biographies were selected because of the subject matter and others were chosen because of the biographer. It’s often said that reading biographies is the best way to gain new knowledge, so we suggest you start with these great selections. If you love history, you’ll certainly want to include these best history books to your home library.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

The former parks commissioner of New York, Robert Moses was a man who got power, loved power, and was transformed by power. This 1,000-plus page biography could be the definitive study of power and legacy. It’s a great learning tool of mostly what not to be and who not to become.

Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi

Totto-Chan is a special figure in modern Japanese culture and is on the same celebrity status level as Oprah is to us here in the United States. The book describes the childhood in pre-World War II Japan of a misunderstood girl who suffered from attention disorders and excessive energy and who later was mentored by a very special school principal who truly understood her. The book has sold more than 5 million copies in Japan.

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Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith

The man who was responsible for winning World War II, twice prevented the use of nuclear weapons, and attempted to keep our soldiers out of Vietnam, all while making it look easy, is none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. This biography is a history lesson as well as an opportunity to get inside the mind of a brilliant man.

Edison: A Biography by Matthew Josephson

This particular biography dates back more than 50 years, which means it was written without the worry of being politically correct or controversial, but instead focused on providing a conclusive picture of the man. Modern enough to be historically accurate, this biography details a lot of the little-known facts about Mr. Edison in addition to his accomplishments, as well as his failures.

Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office by Zach O’Malley Greenburg

Empire State of Mind is both an unofficial biography of the rap mogul Jay-Z as well as a business book. It shows how the rapper hustled his way to the top of the music industry to become one of the most powerful and influential people in music.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer

The story of the professional football player who gave up a $3 million NFL contract to join the Army Rangers after 9/11, only to die under suspicious circumstances in the hills of Afghanistan, is a book about everything that is right and wrong with the U.S. military. Pat Tillman wasn’t perfect, but he was a man we could all learn something from. His incredible story is one of bravery and selflessness -- and will forever be tied to the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Titan: The Life of John. D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow has written some of the best biographies of our time. In this 832-page biography of John. D. Rockefeller, he shares the main lessons you would take away from someone like Rockefeller, a strangely stoic, incredibly resilient, and -- despite his reputation as a robber baron -- humble and compassionate man. Most successful people get worse as they age, but Rockefeller instead became more open-minded and more generous. The biography also details his wrongdoings and permits you the opportunity to make your own judgment on Rockefeller’s character.

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Another example of Chernow’s brilliance in biographical writing is given in his biography of George Washington. Today, we study Washington not only for his against-the-odds military victory over a superior British Army but also for his strategic vision, which is partially responsible for many of the most enduring American institutions and practices. It’s another long read of the type Chernow is famous for, but it's also a page-turner. Although it’s intimidating to look at, the reading time goes by quickly.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson has written some of the greatest biographies in contemporary literature. Our modern-day genius, Steve Jobs, will forever be remembered as the mastermind who brought us Apple. This biography shows Jobs at his best, which includes illustrations of his determination and creativity but also details the worst of him, including his tyrannical and vicious ways of running a business (and his family). From this book, you will learn to appreciate the man for the genius that he was, but it will most likely not inspire you to follow in his path.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

Most depictions show the Mongols as bloodthirsty pillagers, but in this biography, we are also shown how they introduced many progressive advances to their conquered nations. You will learn how Genghis Khan abolished torture, permitted universal religious freedom, and destroyed existing feudal systems.

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank

his five-volume retelling of the life and times of Russian literary giant Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered the best biography available on the subject. The mammoth exploration sheds light on Dostoevsky's works, ideology, and historical context. For those who are not specifically interested in the famous author, the also book paints a picture of 19th-century Russia.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man by Martin Kemp

Kemp’s account of da Vinci’s life and work is considered the go-to biography of the famous Renaissance figure. This incredible book sheds light on one of the most creative figures who ever lived, guiding readers through a fully integrated account of his scientific, artistic, and technological works, as well as the life events that helped form the man that made them.

Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury by Leslie-Ann Jones

After the massive success of the movie recently released about rock legend Freddie Mercury and his band, Queen, you might be interested in learning more about the frontman. This biography draws from hundreds of interviews with key figures in his life to create a revealing glimpse into Mercury’s life.

Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes by Donald Barlett

This is an epic biography of an epic man. It shows the heights of his incredible success as well as the depths of his inner struggles. Readers learn about the tough but eccentric figure in a story that details his incredible success as an aviator, film producer, and more.

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

The brilliant mathematician, cytologist, and computer pioneer Alan Turing is beautifully depicted in this biography. It covers his heroic code-breaking efforts during World War II , his computer designs and contributions to mathematical biology in the years following, and the vicious persecution that befell him in the 1950s when homosexual acts were still a crime and punishable by law.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Of course, we couldn’t highlight Ron Chernow’s best works without including his biography on Alexander Hamilton , which is not only the inspiration for a hit Broadway musical but also a work of creative genius itself. Another more than 800-page book (an ongoing theme for Chernow biographies), this book details every knowable moment of the youngest Founding Father’s life, from his role in the Revolutionary War and early American government to his sordid affair with Maria Reynolds. If you’ve seen the musical, this book will help answer a lot of those burning questions that you may have.

Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

The focal point of this biography is not the suffering that was endured by Frida Kahlo, but instead, her artistic brilliance and her immense resolve to leave her mark on the world. Herrera’s 1983 biography of one of the most recognizable names in modern art has since become the definitive account of her life.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Recommended reading for any adventurer or explorer -- the story of Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, who hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the Denali wilderness in April 1992 only to have his remains discovered in his shelter five months later -- Into the Wild retraces his steps along the trek, attempting to discover what the young man was looking for on his journey. Krakauer delivers one of the best biography books in recent memory.

Prince: A Private View by Afshin Shahidi

Compiled after the superstar’s untimely death in 2016, this intimate snapshot into the life of Prince is largely visual. The author served as the musician’s private photographer from the early 2000s until his passing. You already know the expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and in this case, they are worth a lot more.

Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

The “Kennedy Curse” didn’t bring forth an assassination or a mysterious plane crash for Rosemary Kennedy, although her fate might have been the worst of them all. As if her botched lobotomy that left her almost completely incapacitated weren’t enough, her parents then hid her away from society, almost never to be seen again. Penned by Kennedy scholar Kate Larson, the full truth of her post-lobotomy life is finally revealed.

Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is likely the most divisive U.S. president of modern times. The comprehensive biography of Trump is reported by a team of award-winning Washington Post journalists and co-authored by investigative political reporter Michael Kranish and senior editor Marc Fisher. The book gives the reader an insight into Trump, from his upbringing in Queens to his turbulent careers in real estate and entertainment to his astonishing rise as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang

Most are familiar with the revolutionary Mao Zedong. This carefully curated biography by Jung Chang digs deeper into the life of the "Red Emperor." You won't find these interviews and stories about the world leader in history books alone. This extensive account of the man known simply as Mao begins with a horrific statistic: He was responsible for the deaths of more than 70 million people during his regime.

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell 

Biographies often give us the stories of people we know and love, but they can also reveal new stories about people that may have been lost to history. In her bestseller, Sonia Purnell tells the story of Virginia Hall, a prolific and heroic spy from World War II who took down the Axis Powers on one leg. 

Black Boy by Richard Wright

A standard biography is usually given by a historian after years and years of research and writing, but sometimes it’s better to go straight to the source. In his memoir, Richard Wright details his life as he recalls it as a black American in the 20th century. Black Boy is a harsh, painful, beautiful, and revealing read about race in the United States -- and about a towering figure of literature. 

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Isaacson represents the gold standard for contemporary biographers, and his tome on Leonardo da Vinci was a bestseller for a reason. Isaacson is able to show a detailed, intimate portrait of the most famous painter of all time from centuries away.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Want to know how the biggest sports company of all time came to be? Hear it from the man himself. Phil Knight’s book takes you through how his little sneaker company in Oregon became the worldwide leader in sportswear. 

The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

One of the most famous biographies ever, The Autobiography of Malcolm X remains a classic and an important read. Malcolm X’s politics, though controversial at the time and today, is a valuable and provocative perspective that will make you reconsider how you think about America and the American Dream. 

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Long before becoming Jon Stewart’s successor on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah lived many, many lifetimes. Born to apartheid South Africa, Noah’s story is one of perseverance and triumph, and one that he manages to make funny by some sort of magic trick. 

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

Of course, today, you know Issa Rae as the writer, actor, and star of HBO’s Insecure, but before her hit show came her webseries and book of the same name, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Rae’s memoir wrestles with the idea of being an introvert in a world that considers Black people inherently cool.

Robin by Davie Itzkoff

One of the most beloved comedians and actors of all time, Robin Williams' passing in 2014 shook fans across generations. In his book, New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff covers the life, work, and emotions of one of the most complicated and misunderstood comedians ever. Oh captain, my captain...

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Mark Stock is a writer from Portland, Oregon. He fell into wine during the Recession and has been fixated on the stuff since. He spent years making, selling, and sipping Pinot Noir in the Dundee Hills before a full return to his journalistic roots in 2016. He's helplessly tied to European soccer, casting for trout, and grunge rock. In addition to The Manual, he writes for SevenFifty Daily , Sip Northwest , The Somm Journal , The Drake , Willamette Week , Travel Oregon , and more. He has a website and occasionally even updates it: markastock.com .

Send all editorial inquiries  HERE .

It's never too late to be a kid. Sure, technically it is, but that's your adult brain at work. With the right state of imagination and a few helpful tools, you can relive your youth.

A great way to do so is by way of our favorite kind of weapon: the fake one. Nerf guns have ruled the category for generations, with their signature soft ammo and inventive designs. Best, they don't hurt anybody involved in a shootout. They'll take you straight back to the playground, with the sound of an ice cream truck and the distance and laughter all around. It's a healthy kind of battle, one that involves lots of exercise and carefree joy. Best, you're also an adult, so if you feel like having a beer or staying out a little later when the battle is over, you can.

Shopping for the best gifts for men can at times seem like a daunting task, whether it be for a birthday, an anniversary, or any gift in between. So, we decided to help you out and lend you a hand and make gift-giving a little less stressful with a thoughtfully curated list of tried-and-true gifts suited for men. And at times, no matter how well or how long you have known someone, you just don't know where to look.

From small everyday carry items and others from the cool tech world to experiences that help you disconnect to reconnect, we offer you a gift guide for every guy on your list or some nice ways to treat yourself, too. Ahead, you will find a list of the best practical gifts for every type of guy. With that being said, here are the best gifts for men in 2023.

We're living in crazy times, especially since this whole pandemic mess started a few long years ago. With so much instability out there, it's easy to feel, well, a little uneasy. That's why it's not a bad idea to consider a few self-defense weapons to have at your disposal, just in case. You never know really know what lies ahead but you can be prepared if things do go very, very wrong.

There are many options out there, but the best of the bunch are packable, discreet, effective, and non-lethal (because you don't necessarily have to put somebody six feet under to "take them out"). Now, it's one thing to have one of these on your person and quite another to use it safely and properly. So make sure you know what you're dealing with beforehand and maybe even set up some training time with your new tool. Whether you're planing to get (intentionally) lost in the backcountry or just milling about in the city, it's not a bad idea to consider getting one of these. Here are the best self-defense weapons for protecting yourself in 2023.

9 New Memoirs For Your Next Book Club Pick

As a current member of three book clubs — and counting — I speak from personal experience when I say the announcement(s) of my next book club selection is always a much-anticipated event. I love when my book clubs pick a title I would have never thought to grab on my own, or one I haven’t even heard of yet — it’s the best way to broaden my reading horizons, especially since I know I’ll be reading alongside a group of people just as eager to discuss our latest book as I am. But I also know that when it’s my turn to pick my book club’s next great read , the pressure is definitely on.

Memoirs are a great option for book clubs for a lot of reasons: they can be empowering and relatable, they’ll introduce you to lives outside your own experience, they’ll definitely give your book club plenty to dish about at your next meeting, and they’re a great way to introduce a little nonfiction into your book club — even if your fellow readers are usually wary of that section of their local bookstore. These new memoirs for fall are perfect for the next time it’s your turn to agonize over what your book club should read next .

Here are 9 new memoirs for your next book club pick . Happy reading!

1. Chasing Portraits : A Great-Granddaughter's Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy by Elizabeth Rynecki

When Elizabeth Rynecki learned the history of all that her Polish-Jewish ancestors had suffered during World War II, including the loss of her great-grandfather, the artist Moshe Rynecki’s, paintings, she realized she had to do something to find the long-lost art. Although Moshe’s artwork was dispersed all over the world after his death in Majdanek concentration camp, Elizabeth turns to historians, curators, and art collectors in order to track down her grand-grandfather’s paintings — and along the way she finds a lot more than art. Your book club gals will love diving into the intersections of art, war, and family with this touching and compelling memoir.

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2. The Telling : A Memoir by Zoe Zolbrod

A powerful memoir about life in the aftermath of sexual abuse, Zoe Zolbrod’s The Telling describes her journey from silence to empowerment, from girlhood through her haphazard coming-of-age experiences, meeting and falling in love with her husband, and finally becoming a mother herself. Exploring what it means to grow into one’s own sexuality, develop healthy relationships, and experience motherhood in a life beyond abuse, this memoir offers a moving portrait of one woman’s courage to find her own voice — and it’s a voice everyone in your book club will be inspired by.

3. TREYF : My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw by Elissa Altman

Elissa Altman spent her childhood learning religious rules that she immediately broke, and spent her young adulthood navigating (and hiding) her sexuality. Diving into the lives of the three most influential people in Altman’s young life — her father, her mother, and her grandmother, TREYF: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw takes readers on a journey that most young people have to go through, regardless of the specifics of religion, family history, or sexual identity. TREYF acts as a space for Altman to both ask and answer universal questions about where she comes from, how her life was shaped, what she’ll choose to keep from her past, and what is better left behind.

4. Marrow : A Love Story by Elizabeth Lesser

If your book club read and loved the novel My Sister’s Keeper , then you’ve got to add Elizabeth Lesser’s memoir Marrow: A Love Story to your group’s TBR list. When the memoirist discovers that her sister Maggie needs a bone marrow transplant and that Lesser herself is a perfect match, the sisters are forced to not only face the difficulties of Maggie’s life-threatening illness, but to explore their own family history and their bond as sisters as well — learning together what it means to move past the hurts of childhood, and to love another unconditionally as their truest self.

5. The Art of Waiting : On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood by Belle Boggs

Based on a viral essay published in Orion magazine in 2012, Belle Boggs memoir-through-essay, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood dissects what it means to parent and procreate in our modern world — especially the myriad paths to getting there. Faced with her own inability to conceive, Boggs catalogs the examples of fertility, infertility, and parenting that seem to exist all around her — not only that of her fellow humans, but also taking note of local baby eagles, 13-year cicadas, and the pregnancy and birthing experiences of other species we share our world with. Boggs’ message is clear: there is no one path to parenthood, and no experience of mothering more valid than another.

6. Darling Days : A Memoir by iO Tillett Wright

At just six-years-old, after being excluded from a neighborhood ballgame, iO Tillett Wright adopted a new persona for herself — that of a young boy named Ricky. Taking readers back to New York's Lower East Side in the 1980s and ‘90s, Wright’s memoir Darling Days describes the writer’s coming-of-age experiences: being raised by her widowed, showgirl mother Rhonna, and forming and re-forming her own ideas about gender and identity against the backdrop of a neighborhood where drag and performance art abounded, and the punk rock scene had taken over. Darling Days is the contemplative memoir you’ll want to share with all the readers you know — perfect for your next book club pick.

7. I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This : A Memoir by Nadja Spiegelman

A memoir about three generations of women all navigating the hard truths and complex contradictions of their pasts, I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This follows Nadja Spiegelman, the daughter of Maus creator Art Spiegelman, from New York to Paris as she tries to piece together the truth about her mother’s past, and discover how this has informed her own upbringing. At Nadja’s age, Nadja’s mother left home for New York in order to release herself from the grip of her own mother — Nadja’s grandmother. Now Nadja crosses that same ocean, traveling from the United States to Paris in order to answer some questions of her own about her mother’s past. Any reader who has ever wondered how their family legacy has informed their own life will be completely drawn in by Spiegelman’s story.

8. Look at You Now : My Journey from Shame to Strength by Liz Pryor

When Liz Pryor became pregnant during her senior year of high school, in 1979, there were no MTV series to help her make sense of the experience. Instead, her family decided to keep it a secret, sending Pryor to a facility for unwed pregnant teens, where she found herself surrounded by young women with lives, homes, and family histories entirely different from her own. But despite their differences the girls manage to come together over their shared journeys through pregnancy, shame, and resilience — challenging one another’s assumptions, struggling (but ultimately making peace) with the decision to put their babies up for adoption, and pressing forward in their lives utterly changed by the brief, but transforming, time they spent together.

9. The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner

When Betsy Lerner returns to her hometown to help her mother recover from a surgery, she isn’t looking forward to re-immersing herself in the landscape she spent her childhood desperate to leave behind. So she certainly never expected to join her mother’s bridge club, of all things — but Lerner can’t fight the draw these bridge-playing women hold for her: their friendship, their loyalty, their inside jokes and shared histories. And it is through witnessing and partaking in these friendships — ones that make Lerner’s social media connections pale in comparison — that this memoirist is able to reconcile her tense feelings about her own past with her mother.

Image: Alexis Brown /Unsplash

The Cheshire Library Blog

Library news, books to choose, info to peruse, 10 favorite biographies and memoirs for book clubs, ten favorite biographies and memoir suggestions for your book club to read and discuss:.

• Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
• Born to Run: a hidden tribe, super athletes, and the greatest race the world has ever seen by Christopher McDougall
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling
• Tiny Beautiful Things: advice on love and life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• Kitchen Confidential: adventures in the culinary underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
• Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: the lost legacy of Highclere Castle by Countess Fiona Carnarvon
• Where Men Win Glory : the odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer
• Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

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More From Forbes

30 great biographies to bury yourself in.

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Jonathan Eig's "King: A Life," a biography of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was ... [+] recognized as one of the best books of 2023.

Biographies offer a chance to explore the decision-making and circumstances around some of history’s most fascinating events. The best biography books offer fresh insights into familiar situations that you may have learned about in history class but never explored in-depth. You can learn the unexpected reasoning behind why a president went with option A instead of option B, or how a scientist’s early failures led to a groundbreaking discovery. Biographies often chronicle the lives of famous people, but sometimes they focus on people who never attained celebrity status despite doing extraordinary things. This list of the top biographies includes people of all backgrounds who can teach us things about life, passion, perseverance and more.

Top Biography Books

Biographies are different from autobiographies. A biography is an account of someone’s life written by someone else. An autobiography is an account of someone’s life that they write themselves. For instance, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was written by the Founding Father. But more than two centuries later, Walter Isaacson wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin.

Some of the most popular and well-known biographies include Isaacson’s recent book about Elon Musk, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton , which inspired the musical about the former Secretary of the Treasury, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, about a woman who changed the course of modern medicine. The biographies on this list were selected based on critical acclaim, sales and impact on popular culture.

Cincinnati Reds great Pete Rose is the subject of one of the best biographies, a new one called ... [+] "Charlie Hustle."

30. Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O'Brien (2024)

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The newest book on the list, this New York Times bestseller chronicles the highs and lows of baseball’s all-time hits leader, who was banned from the Hall of Fame for betting on baseball. Keith O’Brien looks at FBI records and press coverage to build a comprehensive portrait of the former Cincinnati Reds star.

This book is best for sports fans who want to go beyond Xs and Os. Keith O’Brien’s Charlie Hustle is available from Penguin Random House .

29. The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore (2021)

Kate Moore ( Radium Girls ) uncovers the story of Elizabeth Packard, a woman confined to a mental asylum in the 19 th century for daring to have opinions and push back against social norms by giving a voice to other women like herself. It earned a GoodReads Choice nomination for Best History & Biography.

This book is best for history buffs looking for lesser-known stories. Kate Moore’s The Woman They Could Not Silence is available from Sourcebooks .

28. The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura (2021)

Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female physician in the United States in 1849—and perhaps more remarkably, her sister, Emily, soon became the second. This New York Times bestseller traces their journeys and the founding of the famed New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first U.S. hospital run by women.

This book is best for anyone interested in medical history, science pioneers or sibling rivarly. Janice P. Nimura ’s The Doctors Blackwell is available from W.W. Norton .

27. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)

There have been many biographies of the 16 th president, but this stands out for presenting his story based around his cabinet, which (as the title suggests) he stacked with his political enemies. Pulitzer Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin presents the story, which inspired Steven Spielberg ’s Oscar-winning movie Lincoln , like a fast-paced novel.

This book is best for those who enjoy the psychology of rivalries. Doris Kearns Goodwin ’s Team of Rivals is available from Simon & Schuster .

Author Doris Kearns Goodwin's Abraham Lincoln biography is one of the best reads about the 16th ... [+] president.

26. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (2002)

Arguably the most famous Mexican woman of her (or any) generation, Frida Kahlo has inspired many with her art. This biography in turn explores her own inspirations and influences, adding greater depth to her well-known romance with Diego Rivera and other stories. The San Francisco Chronicle said the book made Kahlo “fully human.”

This book is best for those who appreciate art or want to learn more about Mexican history. Hayden Herrera ’s Frida is available from HarperCollins .

25. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2001)

Young mother Henrietta Lacks died of cancer in 1951, but her “immortal cells” live on today, fueling countless medical advances. Yet her family didn’t learn of her contributions until two decades later and didn’t profit from them. Journalist Rebecca Skloot uncovers the racism and disturbing history of discrimination within medicine while telling a human story.

This book is best for anyone who watched the Oprah Winfrey film about Lacks on HBO and wants to learn more. Rebecca Skloot ’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is available from Penguin Random House .

A painting of Henrietta Lacks hangs in the entryway of the Henrietta Lacks Community Center at Lyon ... [+] Homes in the Turner Station neighborhood of Baltimore. She is the subject of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," one of the best biographies.

24. Becoming Dr. Seuss by Brian Jay Jones (2019)

Rhyming isn’t easy, but Dr. Seuss made it look breezy. In this comprehensive look at the former advertising man’s life, Brian Jay Jones traces Theodor Geisel’s career trajectory to political cartoonist and author, as well as discussing some of the views that have received criticism in recent years.

This book is best for anyone who ever read a Dr. Seuss book, which is everyone. Brian Jay Jones ’ Becoming Dr. Seuss is available from Penguin Random House .

23. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (2011)

From his extreme diets to his trademark black turtlenecks, Steve Jobs was a man like none other, for better or worse. Esteemed biographer Walter Isaacson captures the nuance of his personality and the genius that drove him to create companies that made things people feel passionately about. The bestselling book became a 2015 movie.

This book is best for anyone who loves or hates Apple products. Walter Isaacson ’s Steve Jobs is available from Simon & Schuster .

Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the subject of an acclaimed biography by Walter Isaacson.

22. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner (2021)

This National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography made the best books of the year list for Time , The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times . It pulls back the curtain on the women who led the largest resistance groups against the Nazis in Germany, including the author’s great-great aunt.

This book is best for those looking for a new perspective on World War II. Rebecca Donner ’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is available from Little, Brown & Co .

21. Redbone: The True Story of a Native American Rock Band by Christian Staebler and Sonia Paoloni, illustrated by Thibault Balahy (2020)

At what price does commercial success come? That question haunted musicians Pat and Lolly Vegas, Native American brothers who influenced stars like Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, as they rose to fame with the Redbone hit “Come and Get Your Love.” But they later shifted their focus to the American Indian Movement.

This book is best for fans of the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack and those looking for a different take on Native American history. Christian Staebler and Sonia Paoloni ’s Redbone is available from Penguin Random House .

20. The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn by Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (2023)

Richard Mentor Johnson, vice president under Martin Van Buren, married enslaved Black woman Julia Ann Chinn. Though he refused to give her freedom, he did give her power on his estate. The relationship, which was likely not consensual, ultimately cost him his political career, and this book details how.

This book is best for fans of presidential history looking for untold stories. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers ’ The Vice President’s Black Wife is available from University of North Carolina Press .

19. Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff (2011)

Cleopatra may be the most famous woman in history, but her notoriety has overshadowed her incredible life and accomplishments. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff adds depth to her story through a thoroughly researched history that also dispels misogynistic myths about the queen of Egypt.

This book is best for anyone curious about Egyptian history or who loves the classics . Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra is available from Little, Brown & Co .

Stacy Schiff wrote an outstanding biography of Egyptian queen Cleopatra.

18. All That She Carried by Tiya Miles (2021)

This National Book Award winner and New York Times bestseller chronicles a bag passed down from an enslaved woman to future generations, which becomes the starting point for this poignant and well-researched book about the generational impact of slavery.

This book is best for everyone and should be required reading to humanize topics too often glossed over in political debates. Tiya Miles ’ All That She Carried is available from Simon & Schuster .

17. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne (2011)

Quanah Parker, the biracial son of a pioneer woman who became the last Comanche chief, battled white settlers over land in the American West for decades. The book traces both his personal story (he was undefeated in battle) and the greater implications of the stealing of tribal lands.

This book is best for those looking for new stories about the Old West. S.C. Gwynne ’s Empire of the Summer Moon is available from Simon & Schuster .

16. Becoming Nicole: The inspiring story of transgender actor-activist Nicole Maines and her extraordinary family by Amy Ellis Nutt (2016)

Nicole Maines rose to fame when she became the first transgender woman to play a superhero on TV. Chronicling her journey from adoption to getting the job on Supergirl , this Amazon Editors Pick and New York Times bestseller also shows how her family changed their views on gender identity and the impact on their community.

This book is best for fans of comic books. Amy Ellis Nutt ’s Becoming Nicole is available from Penguin Random House .

Actress Nicole Maines speaks at a "Supergirl" presentation at Comic-Con International. She's the ... [+] subject of a heralded biography.

15. Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird (2016)

The Victoria depicted in history books is way too dry. An Esquire and New York Times pick for best book of 2016, Victoria illuminates how the future monarch went from fifth in line for the crown to a teenage queen to a mother of nine who somehow survived eight attempts on her life.

This book is best for anyone who’s ever struggled with work-life balance. Julia Baird’s Victoria is available from Penguin Random House .

14. The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs (2021)

This remarkable book draws a line between the mothers of three of the most important Black men in American history, celebrating Black motherhood and shining a light on how they resisted Jim Crow while bringing up their sons. It was named one of Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2021.

This book is best for parents and anyone interested in civil rights. Anna Malaika Tubbs ’ The Three Mothers is available from Macmillan .

13. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (2004)

Lin-Manuel Miranda was so inspired by this Founding Father biography that he famously wrote some of the music for Hamilton on his honeymoon. Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow follows Alexandar Hamilton from immigration to member of George Washington’s cabinet to death in a duel with his nemesis, Aaron Burr.

This book is best for fans of the Broadway show and presidential history. Ron Chernow ’s Alexander Hamilton is available from Penguin Random House .

"Hamilton" author Ron Chernow and the cast appear onstage at the opening night curtain call for ... [+] "Hamilton" at the Pantages Theatre on August 16, 2017 in Los Angeles.

12. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography by Miriam Pawel (2014)

Pulitzer Prize winner Miriam Pawel tells the story of one of the most influential and revered U.S. labor leaders in this National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She doesn't cover up his flaws, but she does illustrate why he was so successful while saluting his enduring humanity.

This book is best for those looking for deep dives on labor or Latine history. Miriam Pawel ’s The Crusades of Cesar Chavez is available from Macmillan .

11. Warhol by Blake Gopnik (2020)

Andy Warhol is so famous, you only need to mention his last name for instant recognition. Art critic Blake Gopnik blends understanding of Warhol’s medium with excellent research and conclusions to paint the most complete picture yet of one of the defining artists of the 20 th century.

This book is best for pop culture devotees and fans of art history. Blake Gopnik ’s Warhol is available from HarperCollins .

10. Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Bradley Hope and Tom Wright (2018)

The Financial Times and Fortune tabbed this one of the best books of 2018 for telling the unlikeliest of stories: How a Malaysian MBA used Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions to steal billions of dollars he used to pay for real estate, parties—and even the making of The Wolf of Wall Street .

This book is best for Hollywood and movie lovers. Bradley Hope and Tom Wright’s Billion Dollar Whale is available from Hachette Books .

9. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis (2013)

There’s so much more to Rosa Parks’ story than one day on a bus in Montgomery. Jeanne Theoharis takes a comprehensive look at her six decades of activism and why she wasn’t the “accidental catalyst” the history books have made her sound like, regaining Parks her agency.

This book is best for those who know how the Montgomery Bus Boycott began but don’t know about Parks’ earlier involvement in organizing. Jeanne Theoharis’ The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is available from Penguin Random House .

8. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (2005)

The inspiration behind Christopher Nolan ’s summer’s blockbuster film Oppenheimer won the Pulitzer Prize and hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It tells J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life story, with a particular focus on the bomb and how it played into the Cold War.

This book is best for anyone who saw the movie and wants to know more. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus is available from Penguin Random House .

"Oppenheimer" cast members Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh. The movie is ... [+] based on the prize-winning biography.

7. Self Made: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker by A'Lelia Bundles (2002)

Madam C.J. Walker, her enslaved parents’ first freeborn child, became one of the wealthiest women of her time. Entirely self-made, she used wealth gained from her cosmetics empire caring for Black hair to help uplift other women and connect with civil rights leaders. The author is Walker’s great-great granddaughter.

This book is best for people obsessed with the Forbes billionaire lists. A’Lelia Bundles ’ Self Made (originally titled On Her Own Ground) is available from Simon & Schuster .

6. Three Ordinary Girls: The Remarkable Story of Three Dutch Teenagers Who Became Spies, Saboteurs, Nazi Assassins—and WWII Heroes by Tim Brady (2021)

World War II is a hugely popular literary period, and here’s another worthy biography from that era, following the Nazi resistance efforts of Dutch teens Hannie Schaft and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen. They saved countless children and Jews from concentration camps and even assassinated German soldiers.

This book is best for World War II aficionados and fans of hidden history. Tim Brady’s Three Ordinary Girls is available from Kensington Books .

5. Bruce Lee: A Life by Matthew Polly (2018)

This highly rated (4.8/5 stars on Amazon) book incorporates information gleaned from more than 100 interviews, which helped Polly piece together scenes from Lee’s childhood in Hong Kong and the challenges he faced from racism in Hollywood. It also investigates his shocking and still mysterious death.

This book is best for fans of martial arts or who want to know what it was like to be Asian in Hollywood decades ago. Matthew Polly ’s Bruce Lee is available from Simon & Schuster .

Bruce Lee from the 1972 film "The Way of the Dragon." He is the subject of Matthew Polly's ... [+] biography.

4. Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit (2021)

This finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award explores author George Orwell’s career from a unique angle: looking at his passion for gardening. Rebecca Solnit ties his devotion to his plants to his work as a writer and an antifascist. It presents him in a different light than past biographies.

This book is best for gardeners and those who’ve read 1984 . Rebecca Solnit ’s Orwell’s Roses is available from Penguin Random House .

3. Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth by John Szwed (2015)

Billie Holiday’s story is too often simplified to a rags-to-riches tale focusing on her struggles pre- and post-fame. But her influence, accomplishments and enduring power are far too grand to tokenize. This biography focuses on her music, allowing jazz scholar John Szwed to illustrate what made her so spectacular.

This book is best for jazz and music fans. John Szwed ’s Billie Holiday is available from Penguin Random House .

2. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (2023)

The Sacklers were once revered for their philanthropy, but the opioid epidemic unmasked how they sold and marketed a painkiller that catalyzed the crisis. This New York Times bestseller traces three generations of the family and their insistence on downplaying the addictiveness of opioids. It asks and answers how they avoided accountability.

This book is best for fans of Hulu’s Dopesick and anyone looking for more information about the opioid crisis. Patrick Radden Keefe ’s Empire of Pain is available from Penguin Random House .

Tufts employee Gabe Ryan removes letters from signage featuring the Sackler family name at the Tufts ... [+] building. The biography "Empire of Pain" details what led to the Sacklers' fall from grace.

1. King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (2023)

Hailed by the New Yorker , Washington Post , Time and Chicago Tribune as one of the best books of 2023, King is a definitive biography of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. It’s also the first to rely on recently declassified FBI files, giving greater depth to the narrative and this unique American story.

This book is best for those who want to go beyond the “I Have a Dream” speech. Jonathan Eig ’s King is available from Macmillan .

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the most entertaining biographies.

The most entertaining biographies will teach lessons and impart wisdom while also keeping you on the edge of your seat, anticipating the next development in a storied life. Famed pop culture figures and entertainers make great subjects. 

For an in-depth and fast-paced look at one of our most celebrated jurists, check out 2018’s  Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life by Jane Sherron de Hart. If you want laughs and a behind-the-scenes peek at a seminal variety show, try David Bianculli’s 2010 book The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour . And to lose yourself in a dishy, reads-like-a-novel bio of the ultimate girlboss, try Marisa Meltzer’s 2023 Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier .

What Are The Best Professional Biographies?

The best professional biographies make connections between the habits and hopes of dreamers and their eventual success. They often provide a blueprint for success that readers can adopt for their own lives. 

To learn how to build a truly impressive empire, read Neal Gabler’s 2006  Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination . Another American legend is the subject of T.J. Stiles’ 2010 National Book Award winner The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt , which is as much about capitalism as Vanderbilt. And in 2016’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race , Margot Lee Shetterly shows how Black women professionals were discriminated against at NASA—but still helped land a man on the moon. 

What Are The Best Presidential Biographies?

The best presidential biographies reveal never-before-known details about famous leaders’ lives. It can be challenging to dig up something new but so rewarding because it helps our understanding of how these men governed and led. 

Arguably the best presidential biography is Robert Caro’s portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson, starting with 1990’s  The Path to Power , which traces LBJ’s journey from early childhood to the start of his political career. An enduring book is Edmund Morris’ acclaimed 1979 The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt , which paints a full picture of a complicated man. And 2017’s  The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger shows that even a long-forgotten president still has influence and value. 

Bottom Line

Biographies offer an escape into someone else’s story, giving you the chance to see why they made their decisions and second-guess them if you like. Whether you prefer biographies focused on history, pop culture or science, you can find a book you’ll love on this list.

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18 Memoirs That Will Change The Way You See The World

As recommended by BuzzFeed Book Club members.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

We asked BuzzFeed Book Club members to tell us about their favorite memoirs, in honor of our June 2019 selection, Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer. Here are some of the books that got the most love:

1. first they killed my father: a daughter of cambodia remembers by loung ung.

"My current favorite memoir is First They Killed My Father . I just finished it this past weekend. It was FANTASTIC. I hurt for the author and her family for having to go through all of that pain and heartbreak." —Abby M.

2. Kitchen Privileges: A Memoir by Mary Higgins Clark

"One memoir I love is Kitchen Privileges by Mary Higgins Clark. Initially, I thought Clark was a longtime successful writer who probably knew all along what she wanted to do. I never considered how long it would take her to publish and how much I would relate to her story. Clark had many struggles and had to change plans several times to make things work and to make ends meet. She didn't come to writing early and had already had several careers when she was finally published.

"I think this memoir speaks to perseverance in a strong way, partly because Clark doesn't preach about it — she just tells a story of how she kept trying different things and finally made the choice to write. Anyone struggling in life and/or struggling to be a writer can relate in so many ways to this book." —Michelle L.

3. My Father's Daughter: A Memoir by Tina Sinatra with Jeff Coplon

"I loved Tina Sinatra's memoir, My Father's Daughter. It was completely heartfelt and riveting." —Jaime G.

4. My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme

"I've been getting into memoirs this last year or so. Some of my most recent include I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott, I Might Regret This by Abbi Jacobson , and Educated by Tara Westover. My favorite, though, is a classic in the genre: My Life in Paris by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme. I fell in love with Child's personality that emanated from the pages. She was such a free spirit and incredibly vivacious. She's also inspirational in that she started her cooking career fairly late in her life, but became one of the most famous chefs in the world." —Gabrielle B.

5. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"My girlfriends and I read Between the World and Me for our book club last year, and I was very moved by it. As a white woman, there are just some things I will never be able understand about the black experience. This book was a reminder about just how much I don't know — even though I call myself a liberal and an ally — about just how much pain I will never have to experience. It was tough to read because of all of the emotions and feelings associated with it, but I am so glad that I did. It reminded me that we cannot be complacent, and that we cannot assume to understand the true pain of others." —Olivia N.

6. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

"My husband is finally getting around to reading Educated , and he asked me just tonight to remind him why I loved it so much and why I found the book life altering. In a nutshell, Tara’s story is so inspiring and real. She survives such a challenging childhood (which she accepted at face value), only to be reborn as a young adult. Tara teaches us to never take anything for granted and to recognize there are so many ways to live, that we all have choices, that some of the most heart-wrenching choices compel us to become better than we know how to be. She reminds us that in order to truly live, we need to keep growing and be open to change even when it’s painful and we aren’t sure where life will take us. Tara Westover's memoir reminds us that you can still find love and joy even when life is imperfectly imperfect." —Amy V.

7. Personal History by Katharine Graham

" This remains my favorite memoir because it was honest and self-deprecating. I read it just after reading a hard-hitting biography of her. She was candid about her weaknesses and flaws and did not shy way from sharing mistakes that she had made in her personal and professional life. She was tougher on herself than the biography! And it was all her. You could hear her voice in the writing." —Annmarie P.

8. The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley

"You say 'memoir,' my mind automatically goes to The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley. It's about a woman who goes on to open book clubs in Canada prisons. I saw the lives of prisoners being changed for the better with every book they read, learning things from each character. And we also see the author learning to deal with her PTSD from being mugged a few years earlier. A good read, indeed." —Sai R.

9. The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir by Maude Julien

"I love the memoir The Only Girl in the World by Maude Julien. It’s incredible the way she was able to make sense of the world in a devastating situation — her parents raised her in isolation, abusing her to 'eliminate weakness.' The memoir is extremely fast-paced, which I liked, because it reflected how childhood — even one as extraordinary as Julien’s — goes by." —Hayley S.

10. Happy Birthday or Whatever: Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters by Annie Choi

"I LOVED Happy Birthday or Whatever. It perfectly showed the relationship between first-generation Korean parents and their American-born children." —Esther Yoo

11. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

" Wild by Cheryl Strayed was a magical book to read. I am glad I read it before the movie came out so my imagination was not tarnished yet. It is a raw and beautiful story of a woman taking control of her own life!" —Christine H.

12. My Squirrel Days by Ellie Kemper

"I really like Ellie Kemper's My Squirrel Days . I love memoirs that make me LAUGH!! —Amy K.

13. The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed by Judy Shepard

"I loved, and cried through, The Meaning of Matthew . My mom is gay, and there was a time that I very much feared for her safety. This tragic event was part of what shaped my fear. It was also a part of what made me such a big ally and fighter for social justice." —Jesse H.

14. and 15. All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg and Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

"There are two memoirs that I particularly liked, both by Southerners. I read All Over but the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg when it first was published many years ago and just recently reread it for my book club. I had forgotten how much I like it. The other is Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, which I know is controversial to many, but it, too, had real meaning for me. Although I didn't grow up in a broken home or around addiction, I did grow up with only the bare necessities. Perhaps that is why I identified with the authors of these two books." —Lana Maskus

16. And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready by Meaghan O'Connell

"My favorite memoir that I’ve read recently is And Now We Have Everything . I’m a new mom and find it super comforting to read about other moms’ experiences, especially when they don’t gloss over the many difficulties that come with parenting." —Sonya P.

17. In Pieces by Sally Field

"I adored Sally Field's recent memoir, In Pieces . Although it deals with really heavy subject matter — sexual violence, childhood trauma — which made me step away for a break at times, her writing is so captivating. It brings you right into the moment, even moments that took place decades ago, and brings you along on her journey of admitting truths to herself about all of the trauma she has experienced. Her descriptions of acting — as her emotional release, her true love, her craft — were beautiful, especially interwoven with what was occurring in her personal life. What a remarkable woman. (PS: This book made me call my mom and thank her for being my mom.)" —Abby F.

18. Becoming by Michelle Obama

"My current favorite is Michelle Obama's Becoming . Her writing style is truly wonderful, and it's so interesting to learn about her life apart from Barack's. She also has a ton of inspiring things to say. Her writing about what it means to become a mother definitely had me tearing up!" —Hannah G.

Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Sign up for the BuzzFeed Book Club and discuss the best new books with our most avid readers.

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Make Your Own List

Nonfiction Books » Best Biographies

The best biographies of 2023: the national book critics circle shortlist, recommended by elizabeth taylor.

Winner of the 2023 NBCC biography prize

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Talented biographers examine the interplay between individual qualities and greater social forces, explains Elizabeth Taylor —chair of the judges for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award for biography. Here, she offers us an overview of their five-book shortlist, including a garlanded account of the life of J. Edgar Hoover and a group biography of post-war female philosophers.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman

Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs

1 G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

2 the grimkés: the legacy of slavery in an american family by kerri k. greenidge, 3 mr. b: george balanchine’s twentieth century by jennifer homans, 4 metaphysical animals: how four women brought philosophy back to life by clare mac cumhaill & rachael wiseman, 5 up from the depths: herman melville, lewis mumford, and rediscovery in dark times by aaron sachs.

I t’s a pleasure to have you back , Elizabeth—this time to discuss the National Book Critics Circle’s 2023 biography shortlist. You’ve been chair of the judging panel for a while, so you’re in a great position to tell us whether it has been a good year for biography.

That comes through in the shortlist, I think. There’s a real range here. I think any reader is bound to find something to appeal to their tastes.

Shaping a shortlist seems quite like arranging a bouquet. A clutch of peony, begonia, or orchid stems…each may be lovely, an exemplar in its own way. We aspire to assemble a glorious arrangement—a quintet of blooms that reflect the wildly varied human experiences represented in the verdant garden of biography.

Let’s talk about G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century first, then, shall we? It is your 2023 winner of the NBCC’s prize for best biography; it also won a Pulitzer Prize . It’s also, and correct me if I’m wrong, the most traditional of the biographies that made the list.

G-Man is traditional in as much as Beverly Gage captures the full sweep of Hoover’s life, cradle to grave: 1895 to 1972. In that way, structurally G-Man sits aside the epics of David McCullough ( Truman , John Adams ) and Ron Chernow ( Grant , Alexander Hamilton ).

Unlike those valorized national leaders, Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents , of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: “We cannot know our own story without understanding his.”

In G-Man , Yale University professor Gage untangles the contradictions in Hoover’s aspirations and cruelty, and locates the paradoxical American story of tensions and anxieties over security, masculinity, and race.

“This year, many biographies were deeply rooted in American soil that required years of research to till”

Hoover lived his entire life in Washington D.C., and Gage entwines his story in the city’s evolution into a global power center and delves deeply into the dark childhood that led him to remain there for college. Critical to understanding Hoover, Gage demonstrates, was his embrace of the Kappa Alpha fraternity; its worldview was informed by Robert E. Lee and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the South , in which racial equality was unacceptable. He shaped the F.B.I. in his image and recruited Kappa Alpha men to the Bureau.

For Hoover, Gage writes, Kappa Alpha was a way to measure character, political sympathies, and, of course, loyalty. One of those men was Clyde Tolson, and Gage documents their trips to nightclubs, the racetrack, vacations, and White House receptions. Hoover did not acknowledge that he and Tolson were a couple, but in the end their separate burial plots were a few yards from one another.

While Hoover feels very much alive on the page, Gage captures the full sweep of American history, chronicling events from the hyper-nationalism of the early part of the century, moving into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., making use of newly unclassified documents. When Hoover’s F.B.I. targeted Nazis and gangsters, there was clarity about good guys and bad guys. But by the mid-century, as the nation began to fracture, he regarded calls for peace and justice as threats to national security. Among the abuses of power committed by Hoover’s F.B.I., for instance, was the wiretapping and harassment of King.

Beyond Hoover’s malfeasance, Gage emphasizes that Hoover was no maverick. He tapped into a dark part of the national psyche and had public opinion on his side. Through Hoover, Americans could see themselves, and, as Gage argues, “what we valued and refused to see.”

A biography like this does make you realize how deeply world events might be impacted or even partially predicted by the family background or the personalities of a small number of key individuals.

We should step through the rest of the books on your 2023 biography shortlist. Let’s start with Kerri K. Greenidge’s The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family , which is the story not only of the Grimké Sisters Sarah and Angelina, two well-known abolitionists, but Black members of their family as well.

I was eager to read The Grimkés as I had admired Greenidge’s earlier biography, Black Radical , about Boston civil rights leader and abolitionist newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter. Greenidge, a professor at Tufts University, brings her unique, perceptive eye to African American civil rights in the North.

Now Greenidge’s The Grimkés sits on my bookshelf next to The Hemingses of Monticello , the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Annette Gordon-Reed who exposed the contradictions of one of the most venerated figures in American history, Thomas Jefferson. In the Grimke family, Greenidge has found a gnarled family tree, deeply rooted in generations of trauma.

Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been exalted as brave heroines who defied antebellum Southern piety and headed northward to embrace abolition. Greenridge makes the powerful case that, in clinging to this mythology, a more troubling story is obscured. In the North, as the Grimké sisters lived comfortably and agitated for change, they enjoyed the financial benefits of their slaveholding family in South Carolina.

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After the Civil War, they learned that their brute of a brother had fathered at least two sons with a woman whom he had enslaved. The sisters provided some financial assistance in the education of these two young men, one attended Harvard Law School and the other Princeton Divinity School—and did not let their nephews forget it.

Not only does Greenidge provide a revisionist history of the Grimke sisters, but she also takes account of the full Grimké family and extends their story beyond the 19th century. She delves into the dynamics of racial subordination and how free white men who conceive children — whether from rape or a relationship spanning decades with enslaved women—destroy families. Generations of children are haunted by this history.  Poignantly, Greenidge evokes the life and work of the sisters’ grandniece Angelina (‘Nana’) Weld Grimké , a talented—and troubled—queer playwright and poet, who carried the heavy weight of the generational trauma she inherited.

This sounds like a family saga of the kind you might be more likely to find in fiction.

Let’s turn to Mr B . : George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans, the story of the noted choreographer. Why did this make your shortlist of the best biographies of 2023?

The perfect match of biographer and subject! A dancer who trained with Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York and is now dance critic for The New Yorker, Homans has written a biography of the man known as ‘the Shakespeare of Dance.’ In felicitous prose, Homans channels the dancer’s experience onto the page, from the body movements that can produce such beauty to the aching tendons and ligaments. Training is transformation, Homan writes, and working with Balanchine was a kind of metamorphosis tangled with pain. She evokes the dances so vividly that one can almost hear the music.

“At the heart of biography is the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces”

Homans captures Balanchine in a constant state of reinvention, tracing his life from Czarist Russia to Weimar Berlin , finally making his way to post-war New York where he revitalized the world of ballet by embracing modernish, founding New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine was genius whose personal history shape-shifted over the years. Homans grounds Mr. B in more than a hundred interviews, and draws from archives around the world.

Homans captures Balanchine’s charisma and cultural importance, but Mr. B. is no hagiography. Homans grasps the knot of sex and power over women used in his work. He married four times, always to dancers. They were all the same kind of swan-necked, long-waisted, long-limbed women, and although Homans does not write this, his company often sounds more like a cult than art.

And, of course, there is the matter of weight, which Homans dealt with directly, as did Balanchine. He posted a sign: ‘BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY—YOU MUST WEIGH.’

I don’t think I’ve ever considered reading a ballet biography before, but it sounds fascinating.

The next book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist brings us to Oxford, England. This is Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.

At the outset of World War II , a quartet of young women, Oxford students—Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley—were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men,” as Mac Cumhaill, a Durham University professor, and Wiseman, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, write. In their marvelous group biography, MacCumhaill and Wiseman vivify how the friendships of these women congealed to bring “philosophy back to life.”

As their male counterparts departed for the front lines, this brilliant group of women came together in their dining halls and shared lodging quarters to challenge the thinking of their male colleagues. In the shadows of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, these friends rejected the logical positivists who favoured empirical scientific questions. They didn’t really create a distinct philosophical approach as much as they shared an interest in the metaphysics of morals.

Brilliant. A book that is ostensibly ‘improving’ but which turns out to be absolutely chock-full of gossip sounds perfect to me. Let’s move on to the fourth book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist, which is Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs.

A biography about writing biography ! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs   entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis.

While Melville is now firmly ensconced in the American canon, most appreciation and respect for him was posthumous. The 20th-century Melville revival was largely sparked by a now overlooked Mumford, once so prominent that he appeared on a 1936 Time  magazine cover.

Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times.

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As Mumford grappled with tragedies wrought by World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic and urban decay, Melville had dealt with the bloody Civil War , slavery , and industrialization. In a certain way, this book is about the art of biography itself, two writers wrestling with modernity in a bleak world. In delving into Melville’s angst, Mumford was thrust into great turmoil. Sachs evokes so clearly and painfully this bond that almost did Mumford in, and writes that “Melville, it turns out, was Mumford’s white whale.”

There’s a real sense of range in this shortlist. But do you get a sense of there being certain trends in biography as a genre in 2023?

In many ways, this is a golden era for biography. There are fewer dull but worthy books, more capacious and improvisational ones. More series of short biographies that pack a big punch. We see more group biographies and illustrated biographies. But just as figures and groups once considered marginal are being centered, records that document those lives are vanishing.

The crisis in local news and the homogenization of national and international news will soon be a crisis for biographers and historians. Where would historians be without the ‘slave narratives’ from the Federal Writers Project , or the Federal Theatre Project ? Reconstruction of public events—federal elections, national tragedies, and so on—may be possible, but we lose that wide spectrum of human experience. We need to preserve these artifacts and responses to events as they happen. Biographies are time-consuming labors of love and passion, and are often expensive to produce. We need to ensure that we are generating and saving the emails, the records, the to-do lists of ordinary life.

The affluent among us will always be able to commission histories of their companies or families, but are those the only ones that will endure?

June 30, 2023

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.

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16 Inspiring Memoirs by Women That Are More Addictive Than Fiction

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Whoever may have told you that non-fiction is boring was either a) reading the wrong books, or b) just plain wrong. We're here to set the record straight with these captivating true stories about and by women that will remind you that the memoir genre is addictive-to-read, and extremely vital. They'll also remind you that women are undeniably resilient.

These stories are motivating, funny, powerful, sad, and evocative. From famous female role-models, like Michelle Obama and Sally Field, to the women you never realized you needed to know, like Lisa Brennan-Jobs, here are the memoirs to add to your reading list, beside table, and tote bag immediately.

1. 'From the Corner of the Oval' by Beck Dorey-Stein

Why You Should Read It:  Everyone knows a likable plot depends on perspective. Who's telling the story? Well, how about this point of view: A 20-something stenographer for the Obama White House details her personal life and career at 30,000 feet in the air, aboard Air Force One. If that sounds interesting, you'll want to check out Beck Dorey Stein's,  From the Corner of the Oval , detailing her spur of the moment decision to quit her five part-time jobs, buy a microphone, and become Barack Obama 's shadow.

2. 'Small Fry' by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Why You Should Read It:  Black turtleneck and glasses. You could describe Steve Jobs by just those four words and everyone would know who you were talking about. But for Lisa Brennan-Jobs, her father was never that simple.  Small Fry  details the complicated relationship between the tech mogul and his eldest daughter, and how Silicon Valley shaped her life.

3. 'The Girl Who Smiled Beads' by Clemantine Wamariya

Why You Should Read It:  Clemantine Wamariya is a survivor.  Following the Rwandan genocide , she and her sister spent six years as refugees migrating through seven different African countries, never knowing if their parents in Rwanda were even alive.

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Eventually, she and her sister were granted refuge in the United States, where Clemantine stumbled into a life of privilege. Taken in by a family, she attended private school and eventually Yale University. Even so, she struggled to rationalize the life she'd been given with the life she'd run away from. This is the story of that struggle.

4. 'Becoming' by Michelle Obama

Why You Should Read It:  True tales from the White House never get old—especially when they're told by someone as remarkable as Michelle Obama.  Her memoir,  Becoming ,  is a candid reflection of her journey to the White House, from a little girl on the South Side of Chicago to an accomplished lawyer, mother, and First Lady.

5. 'Educated' by Tara Westover

Why You Should Read It:  You know those fundamental childhood classroom experiences: Raising baby chicks, being named line leader, scooting over to your best friend's desk when the teacher tells you to "find a partner" for a project?  Yeah , Tara Westover never had those. She was raised a survivalist, spending most of her childhood preparing for the end of the world. But at 17, when she first stepped into a classroom at Brigham Young University, everything changed. Her testament to that time is moving and beautiful.

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6. 'Tomorrow Will Be Different' by Sarah McBride

Why You Should Read It:  Government policies can seem so abstract, especially if you don't think they affect you personally.  Tomorrow Will be Different  gives readers the dose of empathy they need to understand them. Sarah McBride was first transgender person to speak at a National Convention in 2016. Through heartbreaking personal stories, McBride sheds light on the constant struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion. Bonus: Her forward was written by ( future presidential candidate? ) Joe Biden .

7. 'Unbowed' by Wangari Maathai

Why You Should Read It:  A photo of Wanagari Maathai should be next to the definition of "persistence" in dictionaries around the world. Here, the Nobel Prize winner, who passed away in 2011, recounts her life's story: Raised in rural Kenya, Maathai developed the transformative  Green Belt Movement  in 1977, empowering women and combatting food instability in the country. Despite being jailed, beaten, and bruised, Maathai remained unbowed—making it a fitting title for her memoir.

8. 'Wholly Unraveled' by Keele Burgin

Why You Should Read It:  Kathleen (the author's birth name) lived a life of fear: Of her father, of her religion, even of how she dressed.  Wholly Unraveled  is her memoir detailing one Catholic cult escapee's journey to a life of normalcy, self-worth, and belonging.

9. 'Monsoon Mansion' by Cinelle Barnes

Why You Should Read It:  Natural disasters can do serious damage, but so can disasters caused by human error. Cinelle Barnes has experience with both. Her memoir,  Monsoon Mansion,  takes place in the Philippines and details her lavish lifestyle in the Mansion Royale. But when a Monsoon hits, her beloved home deteriorates, her wealthy father bails, and she's left to be raised by an abusive step-father and a mother in denial. Somehow, Cinelle survives.

10. 'In Pieces' by Sally Field

Why You Should Read It:  She's the actress that brought you  Gidget  and  Not Without My Daughter,  but Sally Field's memoir really bears it all. She discusses her personal struggle with self-esteem, the controlling relationship she had with Burt Reynolds, and even her own childhood experience of sexual assault. The memoir, which was seven years in the making, is an honest, occasionally chilling look at the life of one of Hollywood's most timeless actors.

11. 'Never Enough' by Judith Grisel

Why You Should Read It:  This is not your mother's autobiography. Author and neuroscientist Judith Grisel takes a no-holds-barred approach to the topic of addiction, tackling the subject through a mix of science, her own experiences, and a little bit of humor. Grisel is determined to help readers better understand the way addicts think and, in turn, to hopefully find a solution to the epidemic of drug abuse.

12. 'The Last Black Unicorn' by Tiffany Haddish

Why You Should Read It:  If the saying "laugh to keep from crying" is true, then it's no wonder that Tiffany Haddish became a comedian. Her biography recounts plenty of opportunities for a reasonable person to break down in tears, from Haddish's experience in foster care to her encounter with sexual abuse. But instead, the comedian finds a reason to smile and to make others laugh with her. It's a painful story, but told with pure hilarity. Haddish truly is a unicorn.

13. 'All the Lives We Ever Saved' by Katharine Smyth

Why You Should Read It:  Calling all English majors: This is the memoir for you. Katharine Smyth manages to entangle her personal experience of grief with—wait for it—Virginia Woolf's  To the Lighthouse.  Smyth's memoir is an ode to both her father and her favorite writer, whose words brought her comfort and clarity in a time of loss.

14. 'Under the Red Skies' by Karoline Kan

Why You Should Read It:  Former  New York Times  reporter Karoline Kan tells the story of three generations of women in Beijing who are willing and ready to defy the odds. Kan's grandmother survived the Great Famine, and her mother knowingly ignored the One-Child Policy rule when she gave birth to Karoline. Now it's up to Kan herself to reach for the dreams society told her she could never achieve.

15. 'The Mother of Black Hollywood' by Jenifer Lewis

Why You Should Read It:  No matter what role she plays, Jenifer Lewis exudes confidence. You don't go from Kinloch, Missouri, to Hollywood without that. But her telling memoir,  The Mother of Black Hollywood , reveals how life for the  Black-ish  actress is more complicated than it looks. She opens up about her battle with bipolar disorder and her recovery from sexual addiction—proving that even some of the greatest divas have to overcome a lot.

16. 'Inheritance' by Dani Shapiro 

Why You Should Read It:   Inheritance  tells the story of Dani Shapiro who, upon taking a genealogy test, discovers that the man she's called Dad for the past 50 years isn't her biological father. And the family secrets just keep on coming from there. Shapiro's novel is a poignant examination of identity and what happens when one's wholeness and understanding of who they are is completely uprooted.

Alexis Jones is an assistant editor at Women's Health where she writes across several verticals on WomensHealthmag.com, including life, health, sex and love, relationships and fitness, while also contributing to the print magazine. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University, lives in Brooklyn, and proudly detests avocados.

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History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Bleg: good biographies for a book club.

In a quick e-mail to my neighbor, I recommended Laurel Thather Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale (1990), and Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt , vol. I. (1992).  (I probably should have warned her that the Cook bio is 600+ pages!)  My guess is that this book club will want to be able to read and hear the voice of the subject, so while I admire Camilla Townsend’s accomplishments as a historian in Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004), and her Malintzin’s Choices:  An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006), my guess is that an audience of non-experts will feel that the subject of their book is rather elusive.

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22 thoughts on “ bleg: good biographies for a book club ”.

This is more autobiography than biography, but how about Majane Satrapi’s _Persepolis_? It’s a two-part graphic novel that tells her story of growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. Compulsively readable, and there’s lots to talk about in terms of not only the text but also Satrapi’s artwork.

Great idea, Rose–this is what I’m looking for from you readers: recommendations for stuff pre-1500 and post-1800!

I really liked Alice Echols’ biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise , but I’m probably a sucker for it based on the subject matter.

Evgeniia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind is also good reading.

I haven’t read it yet (just bought it) but what about Annette Gordon-Reed’s Hemmings of Monticello? And I loved the first volume of Cook’s Roosevelt book. Was it 600 pages? Didn’t feel like it…

How about Natalie Zemon Davis’s Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds or Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal ?

I had a great time reading _Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire_ by Amanda Foreman. I read it for guilty pleasure and enjoyed every moment of it.

Although published by an academic press, I recommend “Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign” by Adams and Keene. Alice Paul’s story and what she achieved is so incredible that it leaves me wondering why she is not in our history books… Because of her efforts 20 million American women were enfranchised. If that’s not a revolution I don’t know what is! I also like “Sisters –the Lives of American Suffragists” by Jean Baker which has a good overview of Alice Paul.

I haven’t read it yet, but what might also be of interest is the just published “The Muse of the Revolution” by Nancy Rubin Stuart. It is about Mercy Otis Warren who wrote our Bill of Rights.

I love A Midwife’s Tale! Ulrich is my idol.

Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol Katherine Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity Jean Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography

Some goodies from US disability history:

Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner’s _Unspeakable_ (UNC Press, probably 2006?) is the story of Junius Wilson, a deaf African-American man who was arrested and soon imprisoned as “criminally insane” (without ever being tried); he was castrated and stayed in the state hospital in North Carolina for more than 70 years, with no one to converse with (the kind of sign language he learned in a segregated deaf school in the 1920s wasn’t standard ASL). With changes in policy and practice, his predicament came to light in the 1990s, with extensive news coverage and protracted lawsuits. The book is readable and fascinating, and would be bound to raise discussion topics among intelligent, reflective readers.

Kim Nielsen’s _The Radical Lives of Helen Keller_ (NYU Press 2004) is another good choice, because it’s a familiar historical figure whose real life is so much more interesting and complicated than her mythology. That alone should make it a good book group discussion.

Ernest Greenberg and Elisabeth Gitter both published biographies of Laura Bridgman (a deafblind woman whose education was a matter of public fascination in the mid-19c) about five years ago. I’ve only read the Greenberg, but Bridgman’s is another story that gathers up so many broader trends into one life’s course. If the reading group includes a lot of educators, this would be an especially good choice.

“Peter the Great” by Robert K. Massie is splendid.

William Manchester’s first two biographies of Churchill are fantastic as well. I have a soft spot for Manchester, as he died while I wrote my dissertation chapter on him. (sob) The third and final volume is coming out and, if i remember correctly, is being completed by a journalist who knew Manchester in his later days. Any info about that release date would be appreciated (of course).

Oh, old stuff.

I guess you are probably picking up on my dead white mae fixation. Eep!

I’ve always loved Catherine of Aragon by Garrett Mattingly.

This is great! I’m not an historian and don’t get a chance to read much for fun, but love biographies, and will have to check some of these out. I read one a couple years ago, “Ada Blackjack: A true story of survival in the Arctic” by Jennifer Niven. Blackjack was an Inuk woman who was the sole survivor in a mission that was meant to prove the “Friendly Arctic” theory. Reviews are available at the author’s website http://www.jenniferniven.com/?act=reviewsada

I’ll echo historymaven re: Joan Hedrick’s book.

Since this is the Lincoln bicentennial, I’d also recommend David Herbert Donald’s _Lincoln_.

OH, and if they would do memoir, I think Obama’s first book (Dreams from my Father) is really good. Not a politician’s book, really.

I’ll add a memoir – Unbowed by Wangari Maathai. She was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and is just amazing. Moreover, her story allows folks who only see the negative image of Africa to see African women (in particular) taking a proactive role in protecting the environment (and the delicate state structure) in an African society. She also gives some prescient context for the ethnic violence that flared up in Kenya last year and shows that African women do not let men walk all over them. Usually memoirs about women in Africa are from a colonial white perspective (Alexandra Fuller and Isak Dinesen come to mind) which is why Maathai’s book is so unique and enjoyable.

I love the biography of Ida B. Wells by Paula J. Giddings – “Ida: A Sword Among Lions”, published by Amistad. It’s 800 pages so perhaps a bit long, but intriguing and rich.

Since someone else pointed out that we’re all celebrating Lincon, why not a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln? I’ve not read any (I’m more of an 18th century kid), but there was one recently reviewed in the WasPost; Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, by Catherine Clinton.

I second Peresopolis – it was a challenging read, and very enlightening.

I agree on Peresopolis! I’d also suggest Al Young, Masquerade and Martha Hodes, The Sea Captains Wife (the latter has its own website). For a popular but absorbing bio of Edna St. Vincent Millay, see Nancy Mitford, Savage Beauty.

Hi! I am the neighbor who is in this bookclub and I want to thank everyone for their input! I got some great titles to suggest over the next few months. We had a meeting last night and in celebrating Lincoln we are going with “The Madness of Mary Lincoln Todd” by Jason Emerson. This is our first non-fiction and we want to alternate fiction and non-fiction so I wrote down some of these titles for the future. Thanks again Ann and everyone! (PS its my first time blogging on here but I visit often)

I would probably have some valuable insight into some useful biographies as my favorite hobby is to read about all the great people of times past. Among my favorites are:

– “Duty of a Statesmen” by William Lee Miller. This is a biography of Abraham Lincoln and his presidency with respect to his moral and principled character.

– “Confessions” by Jean-Jacque Rousseau is indeed my favorite autobiography of all-time! His constant introspections and questioning about life provides for a very good teacher of human psychology.

– “Metternich” by Alan Palmer. This biography of perhaps the world’s most able diplomat delves deep into this exciting but controversial man.

– “Napoleon’s Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand” by David Lawday is an extremely entertaining biography of the most ostentatious, intelligent, controversial, and shrewd statesman that has probably ever known to exist.

I hope this reply helped provide this forum with some useful biographies that indeed helped me open my eyes to the lives of history’s great men.

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Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman Kindle Edition

• Print length 428 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Pegasus Crime
• Publication date September 8, 2022
• File size 26576 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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About the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09RX5DLMG
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pegasus Crime (September 8, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 8, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 26576 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 428 pages
• #61 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
• #122 in Biographies of the Rich & Famous
• #334 in Author Biographies

About the author

Lucy worsley.

Dr Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, and other historic places. (Yes, this is a fabulous job, but no, you can't have it. Bribes have been offered, and refused.)

After studying history at Oxford, she worked at a minor stately home called Milton Manor, near Abingdon, where she tidied up the archives, gave guided tours and fed the llamas. After that she became an Inspector of Ancient Monuments at English Heritage, doing historical research at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire: this led to her first book, 'Cavalier', about a dissolute Royalist duke. Since 2003, while working at Historic Royal Palaces, she has continued publishing historical non-fiction for adults and historical fiction for 11-14 years olds. She also presents history documentaries for the BBC.

Do please check out @Lucy_Worsley, or visit her on Facebook.

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Winfrey picks David Wroblewski’s ‘Familairis’ for her book club

This cover image released by Blackstone Publishing shows “Familiaris” by David Wroblewski. (Blackstone Publishing via AP)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Author David Wroblewski has reached special status among contemporary authors: a two-time selection for Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

Winfrey announced Tuesday that she had chosen “Familiaris,” a prequel to Wroblewski’s Oprah-endorsed debut novel from 2008, the Shakespearean saga “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.” The new novel, published this week, looks back to the origins of the Wisconsin-based Sawtelle family and its roots in the state’s north woods.

“I’m delighted for us to dive into an epic novel from the tremendously talented bestselling author David Wroblewski with his latest creation ‘Familiaris,’” Winfrey said in a statement. “David takes us on an extraordinary journey that brilliantly interweaves history, philosophy, adventure, and mysticism to explore the meaning of love, friendship and living your life’s true purpose.”

Additional material about “Famialaris” and the author will be available on the book club’s online hub.

Wroblewski said in a statement that he was, “to put it mildly, thrilled and grateful.”

“I’m looking forward to discussing this story, whose characters have been part of my imaginative life for so long,” he added.

Other authors in the two-time (and more) Winfrey club include Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver and Wally Lamb. At times, she has selected multiple books at once. In 2021, she chose four interlinked novels by Marilynne Robinson : “Gilead,” “Home,” “Lila” and “Jack.”

Movie Stars, Mobsters, and Memories: Griffin Dunne Tells All in a New, Must-Read Memoir

The filmmaker and literary scion's book, The Friday Afternoon Club , is out now.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

There isn’t much that Griffin Dunne hasn’t tried. He’s been an actor and a director, he’s hawked popcorn at Radio City Music Hall, he’s worked with Madonna and Martin Scorsese, been roommates with Carrie Fisher, and gotten stoned with Harrison Ford. But until now, he’s never written a book.

“I’m from a long line of storytellers,” Dunne says on a recent afternoon in his Manhattan apartment. “I’ve had some crazy things happen throughout my life, and over the past 10 years I began to jot them down when I thought, now there’s a story to remember.”

“I was always humiliated to be from Beverly Hills,” Dunne says. “I was embarrassed that my parents were so social and gave these parties that were so important to them and that my father kept scrapbooks documenting them.”

Dunne’s parents were Dominick and Ellen “Lenny” Griffin Dunne. He was a closeted Catholic war hero from New Haven whose own father had reportedly performed the first recorded open-heart surgery, she was the daughter of another wheel scion (and a woman whose family ran afoul of the Mexican Revolution) raised in Nogales, Arizona—at least until she shipped off to Miss Porter’s .

Dunne was born in New York City, where his father was working as a stage manager on The Howdy Doody Show , and spent his earliest years on the Upper East Side; a pre-stardom Elizabeth Montgomery was his babysitter. The family moved to Los Angeles—thanks in part, you might not be surprised to learn, to both Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra—and the Dunnes and their brood (Griffin was joined by a brother, Alexander, and a sister, Dominique) made themselves at home.

What comes next could have ended up a rich-kid memoir full of gold-plated names, but instead The Friday Afternoon Club offers something different. Dunne’s sharp wit, warm mien, and finely tuned bullshit detector allow him to tell stories about a world he was in but not always of. He writes about his parents’ parties and their friendships with movie stars and studio heads, but not without noting the transactional nature of the relationships, the waning notoriety of the guests, and the fin de siecle feeling of the entire operation.

“My parents’ social world in Hollywood exactly mirrored the movies that were being made at the time, which were being made by the great directors of the 1940s and ’50s whose best years might've been behind them,” he says. “The ’70s were right on their heels, and they were going to be deemed irrelevant the moment Easy Rider came out.”

.css-4rnr1w:before{margin:0 auto 1.875rem;width:60%;height:0.125rem;content:'';display:block;background-color:#9a0500;color:#fff;} .css-gcw71x{color:#030929;font-family:NewParis,NewParis-fallback,NewParis-roboto,NewParis-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.625rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.8125rem;line-height:1.1;}}.css-gcw71x b,.css-gcw71x strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-gcw71x em,.css-gcw71x i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} “I was always humiliated to be from Beverly Hills."

But for young Griffin, his parents’ world provided essential lessons in being observant and developing an appreciation for the absurd. “The things that I remember from a very early age have always been very vivid,” he says. “From driving with my father as a five-year old and him pretending he was having a heart attack. I don’t remember that as a traumatic incident, I remember that as a hilarious example of his sense of humor and how I got my sense of humor, which could be dark.”

John Burnham Schwartz, the editor of Dunne's memoir says, “Griffin’s almost the last man standing in this extraordinary family, and that’s something that I think sits with him very meaningfully. He takes that responsibility seriously, but at the same time he's got this great sense of humor—that sort of black Irish humor that he inherited, albeit maybe in a warmer degree, from John and Nick. All of that makes the book special and really meaningful.”

Traumatic incidents do, of course, make their mark in the book. Dunne covers his father’s battles with addiction and his sexuality (one passage finds a young Griffin dropping acid and fooling around with one of his dad’s boyfriends; the drugs agreed with him, the guy did not), his mother’s experience with multiple sclerosis, the bruised egos and grudges of family feuding, and the 1982 murder of his sister—and the subsequent trial of her killer.

“Writing about the trial was hard, but not in an emotional way as one would expect,” Dunne says. “It was hard in almost a technical way. I wanted to get the facts right, I wanted people to understand the pettiness of the players in the judicial system and how they bring their own personal feelings to decisions, and how a jury looks at the family of the victim's personality instead of the crime itself.

Nothing in Dunne’s life, or that of his family, feels off the table, and in the places he does hold back, it isn’t for the sake of propriety. “It was more for balance, when there was too much of a sad trajectory, like with my father’s decline,” he says. “In this book, my family members were sort of like characters in a movie, and I would see their arc. I knew where they were going to end up, so I could talk about—me included—flaws, weaknesses, deficiencies, and hardships, because I knew we were all going to come out on the other side and that we were going to grow out of pain.”

(Dunne has told tales about his family before. In 2017, he directed the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold about his aunt . “We'd had a great time doing a short movie to promote [her book] Blue Nights,” he says, “and we had so much fun that she let me take it to a feature length and extend our time shooting together. Because I knew her, she knew that I would be coming from the inside out as opposed to the outside looking in her, so she didn't think twice about that. I felt compelled to show this aspect of her because nobody else would ever get it, just as nobody else would ever be able to describe or know my family the way I did.’)

Dunne’s brother Alexander, the only living member of his immediate family, plays a large part in the story and encouraged Dunne not hold back when it came to their battles. “I didn't want to start writing until I got his permission, because I had to talk about his hardships,” Dunne says. “And he said, ‘you say whatever you want about me, Griffin, just have it come from a place of love.’ That was great direction that didn’t just apply to him but to everyone. I knew I could show my family warts and all because I love them, and I am proud of how they all came out.”

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

The overall tone of the book isn’t as much macabre as it is mischievous, however. For example, even during the trial, Dunne reports that on the set of his film Johnny Dangerously , a particulary connected colleague offered to help sort out his sister's killer—an offer that Dunne declined. “I found writing [the book] incredibly fun,” Dunne says. “I made myself laugh out loud writing about Carrie [Fisher], and I'm very proud of that part. I was just talking to Fisher Stevens who made the documentary about Carrie, and he said, ‘Oh my God, it was like she was alive.’ It wasn’t only Carrie, either; with pretty much everyone in my family, I would get into a zone where it felt like they were in my company.”

In fact, Dunne says, the most difficult part of writing about his life was when the writing process finished. “The hardest part was not having to go into my office when I was finished, or going into my office for any other reason than writing the book,” he says. “I really missed the damn thing—it kept the family alive somehow.”

Adam Rathe is Town & Country 's Deputy Features Director, covering arts and culture and a range of other subjects. 

@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1jdielu:before{margin:0.625rem 0.625rem 0;width:3.5rem;-webkit-filter:invert(17%) sepia(72%) saturate(710%) hue-rotate(181deg) brightness(97%) contrast(97%);filter:invert(17%) sepia(72%) saturate(710%) hue-rotate(181deg) brightness(97%) contrast(97%);height:1.5rem;content:'';display:inline-block;-webkit-transform:scale(-1, 1);-moz-transform:scale(-1, 1);-ms-transform:scale(-1, 1);transform:scale(-1, 1);background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-1jdielu:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/townandcountrymag/static/images/diamond-header-design-element.80fb60e.svg);}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1jdielu:before{margin:0 0.625rem 0.25rem;}} Best Books of 2024 @media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-128xfoy:before{margin:0.625rem 0.625rem 0;width:3.5rem;-webkit-filter:invert(17%) sepia(72%) saturate(710%) hue-rotate(181deg) brightness(97%) contrast(97%);filter:invert(17%) sepia(72%) saturate(710%) hue-rotate(181deg) brightness(97%) contrast(97%);height:1.5rem;content:'';display:inline-block;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-128xfoy:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/townandcountrymag/static/images/diamond-header-design-element.80fb60e.svg);}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-128xfoy:before{margin:0 0.625rem 0.25rem;}}

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Books We Love

Here are the nonfiction books npr staffers have loved so far this year.

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We see you, hard-core NPR readers — just because it's summer doesn't mean it's all fiction, all the time. So we asked around the newsroom to find our staffers' favorite nonfiction from the first half of 2024. We've got biography and memoir, health and science, history, sports and more. (And, sure, if you only want to take fiction to the beach, we've got you: Click here. )

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Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher Kara Swisher pulls off a magic trick here, delivering several sharply written books in one. There’s her story of becoming media’s most influential tech analyst, chronicling the rise of Facebook, Amazon, Google and, of course, X/Twitter — psychoanalyzing all the driven, flawed (mostly) dudebros who turned them into world-shaking platforms. There’s also an affecting personal memoir, charting her journey as a gay woman, spouse, mother, entrepreneurial journalist and advocate. And there’s a passionate critique of toxic technology, slamming self-centered tech CEOs who pursue engagement through enragement, unleashing social division. It’s all knit together with nimble-yet-effective prose, outlining how Silicon Valley works, how journalism works and how society works in one neat package . — Eric Deggans, TV critic

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Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream Nuns have captured our imaginations as characters in fiction and on film over the years, but it’s rare to hear from one firsthand. This compelling memoir provides a glimpse into the life of a cloistered nun as the author shares her journey into — and ultimately out of — an order of Carmelite nuns in England. Coldstream seamlessly weaves her own personal motivations for seeking a life of solitude, contemplation and service alongside an exploration of the challenges, reforms and purpose of such orders at the turn of the 21st century. This book will push you to reflect on faith, power and personal agency in your own communities as you consider Coldstream’s experience. — Tayla Burney, director, Network Programming & Production

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Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley I spent most of the last year mourning my mother and found few books that even got close to capturing my altered mental state. My brain kept rehashing the past and finding significance in the oddest things, and I so wanted to share that experience with the very person I was missing. In a slim 191 pages, Sloane Crosley nails it precisely as she details mourning her best friend, who died suddenly by suicide. While poignant and vulnerable, her memoir is also insightful and funny, especially as she recounts adventures with Russell and her attempts to track down and reclaim jewelry that was stolen from her apartment about a month before he died: a caper he would have enjoyed in the telling. I finished it feeling grateful for her friend’s life and even more appreciative of my mom’s. — Melissa Gray, senior producer, Weekend Edition

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Grown Woman Talk: Your Guide to Getting and Staying Healthy by Sharon Malone M.D. If you want to be more proactive in managing your health, Dr. Sharon Malone can help. Grown Woman Talk is a playbook for navigating a fragmented and flawed health care system, written by a doctor who has spent more than 30 years practicing as an OB/GYN and is a certified menopause practitioner. She weaves in insights from her childhood in Mobile, Ala., when doctor visits were rare for her family. She recalls the first time she saw a doctor, entering the hospital through the “colored” door for an emergency tonsillectomy — and describes her mother as a “Jedi master” of managing injuries and illnesses with home remedies. Her deep sense of loss and anger at the death of her mom from cancer when she was 12 inspired her to be the kind of doctor and caretaker we need more of. — Allison Aubrey, health correspondent

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Here After: A Memoir by Amy Lin In this memoir, the past and the present bleed together, as short wisps of chapters build the case for Kurtis and Amy as soul mates, while also telling the story of Kurtis' sudden and unexplained death. Poetic, visceral and stark, this beautifully crafted book is a gift, pulling back the curtain on the intimate processes of love and grief. Steeped in the greatest of personal losses, Amy Lin allows us to witness her plod against the cascading losses that follow and behold the life raft that is memory. — Beck Harlan, visuals editor, Life Kit

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Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality by Renée DiResta At a time when our screens are clogged with viral lies and conspiracy theories, Invisible Rulers takes a long view toward explaining media manipulation and how we got to this moment. The book skillfully weaves together history and technology to explain the changing iterations of political propaganda over the past century. Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford University, shares her own experiences on the front lines of the struggle to define objective reality, including entering the field after confronting anti-vaccine sentiment when she became a parent. In the years since, DiResta has found herself a focal point for conspiracy theories, as powerful politicians have sought to discredit her work and that of other researchers in the field. — Brett Neely, supervising editor, Disinformation Reporting

Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House by Jared Cohen The American presidency is viewed as the most powerful position in the world. What happens when the job ends? History is often surprising. Not everyone found the role to be the most fulfilling one they ever had. Jared Cohen looks at some fascinating case studies that back that up. John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft found greater joy in other branches of government: Congress and the Supreme Court. George Bush enjoys his private life and art studio. Life after power CAN be much more rewarding. — Edith Chapin, senior vice president and editor in chief

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The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony by Annabelle Tometich This family memoir begins with a courtroom scene like no other. After a night in jail, Annabelle Tometich’s mom is charged with firing at a man who, she says, was stealing mangoes from the tree in her front yard. Tometich then hits rewind, taking readers back through her Fort Myers, Fla., childhood — with her Filipino American mom and white dad, a couple whose personality differences do not make them stronger together. The writing is both jewel-like and effortless, and Tometich’s memories — some mundane, some extraordinary — are mesmerizing. — Shannon Rhoades, senior editor, Weekend Edition

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Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie Not the End of the World sifts through the evidence on pollution, extinction threats and deforestation. Once the numbers are clinically separated from emotion, a surprising guidebook to an eco-friendly life emerges. Food miles: not likely to affect climate change much. Meatless Mondays: helpful, especially if eschewing beef. Not everyone will interpret the world’s chances of staying within 2 degrees Celsius of warming with the same cautious optimism as Hannah Ritchie (“I’m confident we can keep moving closer”). But Ritchie’s data-first perspective makes this book an invaluable chaser to climate doomscrolling. — Darian Woods, co-host, The Indicator from Planet Money

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson Gretchen Sisson's research and careful retelling of first/birth mothers' experiences sheds light on the people who are too often ignored, dehumanized and erased within the institution of adoption. This book deepened my understanding of how adoption, while typically viewed as a noble, feel-good form of family building, actually hinges on the trauma of family separation. Relinquished reveals the structural forces behind this loss, commonly blamed on the individual failures of a mother or birth parents. These are interviews that broadened my understanding of reproductive justice and myself as an adopted person. It’s essential reading in this era of reproductive rights under threat, for anyone who has thought of adoption as "a simple alternative" to abortion, and anyone considering adoption as a family plan. — Schuyler Swenson, content development producer

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Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport If you’re the typical knowledge worker, your life is overwhelmed by a dizzying flurry of emails and Slack messages breaking your focus every few minutes. You breathlessly ricochet from task to task yet never get enough real work done. Stop. Take a deep breath. Then read Slow Productivity, which expounds on productivity expert Cal Newport’s tripartite philosophy of 1) do fewer things 2) work at a natural pace and 3) obsess over quality. He provides practical hacks to implement these principles into your life, while weaving in examples of how deep thinkers such as Jane Austen embodied slow productivity. Newport writes, “The way we’re working no longer works.” But if enough knowledge workers embrace slow productivity, we can revolutionize the world of work. — Preeti Aroon, copy editor, NPR.org

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Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh This is a gripping tale of how the British became history's first narco state, curiously, to help pay for the tea its people so loved to drink. Amitav Ghosh narrates how the British forced opium into China, creating a market by creating addicts. But opium did so much more. Ghosh investigates how it created many of the modern merchant families of India and the United States, including the fortunes of the Delanos (Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather) and the Forbeses. But perhaps the most important part of this book is how Ghosh looks at the history of opium through the prism of what we know now about opioid addiction, and the relatively newfound sympathy we have toward addicts — white addicts. — Diaa Hadid, international correspondent

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Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South by Kate Medley As someone who travels Southern backroads reporting for NPR, I’ve long noticed how gas stations tend to serve as hubs in rural communities. And I have certainly sampled my share of convenience store fried chicken and sweet tea. Now, photojournalist Kate Medley, a native of Mississippi, takes us on a picturesque road trip across 11 states to document the food cultures you find at service stations. It’s a lovely coffee table book that puts a fascinating lens on a changing American South. There’s a little bit of everything — live bait and ammunition, hot tamales, catfish plates, Cajun banh mi, boiled peanuts, chicken tikka masala and hand-cut steaks. Writer Kiese Laymon’s forward sets the table with a story from his Mississippi youth as he recalls “my favorite restaurant served gas.” — Debbie Elliott, national correspondent

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There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib I don’t even watch basketball all that much. And yet, there’s something alluring about Hanif Abdurraqib’s meditation on the sport. Because, sure, it’s about hoops and LeBron James and Cleveland and the funny way time works when you’re watching a Game 7. But it’s also about losing loved ones. Fans of Abdurraqib’s work will recognize his rhythms and stylistic flairs that hardly ever fail to draw a reader in, and his talent at making you see the beauty in the things he finds beautiful. — Andrew Limbong, correspondent, Culture Desk, and host, NPR's Book of the Day

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The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster In this cinematic page-turner, Time correspondent Simon Shuster paints a vivid portrait of the Ukrainian president, who honed his powerful communication skills during decades as one of Ukraine’s most popular comedians. Shuster charts the rise from naïve political novice to steely — and unforgiving — wartime president. Deeply reported and deftly written, this book is a feat not only because it sheds light on one of today’s most consequential political figures, but also the history that shaped him and the tectonic shift in geopolitics that he’s now forced to navigate. — Joanna Kakissis, Ukraine correspondent

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The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism by Marjorie N. Feld The world is a very confusing place right now — at least, that's how it feels to me — so I'm always looking for books that can help me better understand where we are as a society and how we got here. The Threshold of Dissent is one of those books. In clear, careful language, the author illustrates some of the major moments over the past century that have shaped Jewish beliefs about Zionism, anti-Zionism and non-Zionism. It's a history told with both rigor and compassion — two qualities that seem especially essential when embarking in conversation on such a fraught and contentious subject. — Leah Donnella, senior editor, Code Switch

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A Very Private School: A Memoir by Charles Spencer Charles Spencer — younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales — turns his considerable talents as a writer and historian on his own childhood. A Very Private School details what, he says, happened to him and his classmates — physical, sexual, emotional abuse — at one of Britain’s most elite boarding schools. Undergirding all is a culture of privilege, yes, but also silence and tradition rooted in the British Empire, sending 8-year-olds away from home as “the done thing.” Spencer’s quote from author Hilary Mantel in the book’s epigraph is telling, “I am writing in order to take charge of my childhood.” — Shannon Rhoades, senior editor, Weekend Edition

Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice by David S. Tatel David Tatel has written the book that his friends and admirers always hoped he would write, but expected he would not. One that deals candidly with his “vision” — his blindness, and his years of treating it as an asterisk, all while becoming one of the most prominent and thoughtful judges in the country. This book is both novelistic and introspective in its treatment of his lack of sight — from his love affair with his wife and children, to his “cane lessons,” to his later-in-life affection for his guide dog, Vixen. Along the way, it is also a book about the law, the art of judging and today's Supreme Court. And it’s fascinating. —  Nina Totenberg, legal affairs correspondent

Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler Judith Butler's groundbreaking 1990 book Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies by arguing that gender is socially constructed, almost mythlike, but that myth can create reality. In this book, Butler leans into the titular question: Why has gender become such a “phantasm" in American life, and what does it tell us about how we’re approaching some of the biggest problems facing us, like climate change and far-right extremism? Butler has a clear perspective — and spells out the dangers of an ascendant “anti-gender ideology.” But it’s also an invitation to consider how we think about gender — and what that might tell us about who we are. —  Tinbete Ermyas, editor, All Things Considered

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You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World by Ada Limón This anthology of 50 never-before-published poems about nature was edited by the 24th poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón. The collection is both achingly beautiful and terrifyingly urgent. From a humorous take on getting drenched in a rainstorm to a beloved tree on its last day of existence to a woman processing the bleak reality of the world her grandchildren will inherit, these poems encouraged a heightened noticing in me and (bonus!) introduced me to the work of many new-to-me poets I’m eager to explore. — Beck Harlan, visuals editor, Life Kit