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.
Keep an eye on your inbox. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart.”, “Poet, lexicographer, critic, moralist and Great Cham, Dr. Johnson had in his friend Boswell the ideal biographer.
To Stop a Warlord describes Shannon Sedgwick Davis’s extraordinary work in Africa against the warlord... Black Is the Body. 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.”, “Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. There's something great about a paperback book: They're perfect book club choices, you can throw them in your bag and go, and they've been out in... Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1), As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, The Kid: (What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant) an Adoption Story, A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed - A Memoir of the Cleveland Kidnappings, Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs, Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited, Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Discover the best Memoirs in Best Sellers. Gauri Lankesh And The Age Of Unreason by Chidanand Rajghatta (2018). The invaders kill her mother and father, the King and Queen, and take her captive. Ten Memorable Biographies & Memoirs Of The Decade 1.
This biography is unlike Du Bois’s earlier work; it is intended as a work of consciousness-raising on the politics of race.”, “[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.”, “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.”, “Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. 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. Spam or Self-Promotional The list is spam or self-promotional. Have a listen to our mystery/thriller podcast, Read or Dead. 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.”, “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.”, “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.”, “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. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained?”, “When Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857, she was 18: a professional actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep. list created July 30th, 2008 Find the top 100 most popular items in Amazon Books Best Sellers. The 10 best memoirs of the decade Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Book descriptions come from Goodreads. Permanent Record by Edward Snowden (2019). Through biography, we can also learn history, psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy, and more. What’s not to love? Inappropriate The list (including its title or description) facilitates illegal activity, or contains hate speech or ad hominem attacks on a fellow Goodreads member or author. 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.”, “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. The Woman Warrior. He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure, married with ten children. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.”, “Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. Paperback $16 Racism is still a serious issue in the US, … This memoir by the world’s best known dissident-in-exile tells such an... 2. Remember when we all fell in love with honest, real-life stories that swept us away like our favorite novels? Take a look and let me know about your favorite biography in the comments! 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 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. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.”, “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.”, “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?”, “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.”, “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.
It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. McKinley. Details * Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies.”. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 This book is more than four decades old, but I can’t think of another memoir... Fun Home. The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years Fierce Attachments. The Liar's Club. I’ve tried to keep this list focused on biography only, so there is little in the way of memoir or autobiography. Reading a great biography is both fun and educational. Here's the best of the best from the last 22 years. 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 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.”, “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.”, 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.”, “From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. 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.”, “In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Below I’ve listed 50 of the best biographies out there. 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. [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.”, “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.