Best Biography & Memoir Books

Elie Wiesel's memoir of his experiences as a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy deported from Sighet, Transylvania to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. One of the foundational documents of Holocaust testimony — a first-person account of the camps, the death marches, and the systematic destruction of faith, family, and identity.

Nike founder Phil Knight's memoir of building one of the world's most iconic brands — from $50 borrowed from his father and a handshake deal for Japanese running shoes to a multi-billion dollar empire. Brutally honest and compulsively readable.

The diary kept by a Jewish teenager hiding in a secret annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands — the most widely read personal account of the Holocaust.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, one of America's most consequential and underestimated presidents.

A neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 36 confronts the questions he spent his career preparing to face — and writes a book about mortality, meaning, and what makes a life worth living.

Tara Westover's memoir of growing up in the mountains of Idaho without formal education, in a survivalist family, and her journey to Cambridge and Harvard.

Anthony Bourdain's legendary memoir of twenty-five years in professional kitchens — the drug use, the violence, the camaraderie, and the obsessive craft of restaurant cooking.

David McCullough tells the gripping story of two self-taught bicycle mechanics from Dayton who changed the world by inventing powered flight.

The authorised biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, based on more than forty interviews with Jobs and over one hundred with family members, friends, adversaries, and colleagues.

The authorised biography of Warren Buffett — written by analyst Alice Schroeder with Buffett's full cooperation. Covers his childhood in Omaha, the development of his investment philosophy under Benjamin Graham, the building of Berkshire Hathaway, and the personal life that shaped and constrained the world's greatest investor.

William Dodd, the first US Ambassador to Hitler's Germany, arrives in Berlin in 1933 with his family. Through his diary and his daughter Martha's letters and memoirs, Larson reconstructs what it was like to watch the Nazi regime consolidate power from inside the American Embassy.

What happens to human bodies donated to science — surgical training, crash testing, forensic decomposition research, ballistics testing, and the specific history of what cadavers have contributed to human knowledge. Rendered with Roach's characteristic meticulous research and deadpan wit.

Tobias Wolff's memoir of his childhood in the late 1950s in Chinook, Washington, with his mother and her brutal second husband Dwight. He lies compulsively, reinvents himself repeatedly, and eventually escapes to a Connecticut boarding school on fraudulently obtained recommendations. One of the great American coming-of-age memoirs — about the self as a thing to be constructed rather than discovered.

The definitive life of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the theoretical physicist who directed the Manhattan Project, witnessed the first atomic detonation at Trinity, and was subsequently destroyed by the McCarthyite security apparatus he had helped to empower. Twenty-five years in the making, it won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's harrowing account of surviving Auschwitz forms the foundation of logotherapy — the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of meaning. One of the most important psychological texts of the 20th century.

The story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, told through the abduction and murder of Jean McConville and the lives of IRA members Dolours Price and Gerry Adams.

The epic story of the Great Migration — the decades-long exodus of six million Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West.

A rich biography of history's greatest creative genius, based on Leonardo's notebooks and the latest scholarship, exploring the intersection of art and science that defined his work.

Andre Agassi's remarkably candid memoir about a sporting career built on hating the sport that made him famous — written with J.R. Moehringer.

Beryl Markham's memoir of growing up in Kenya in the early twentieth century, training horses, becoming the first person to fly solo non-stop from England to North America west to east, and living a life that defied every category available to women of her era.

A sweeping history of the digital revolution — from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, William Shockley, and the personal computer pioneers — arguing that the most important innovations were always the product of collaboration, not lone genius.