Best Biography Books

Kazantzakis's spiritual autobiography — addressed to his Cretan ancestor El Greco — tracing his intellectual and spiritual journey from Crete through Athens, Paris, Mount Athos, Russia, and across the battlefields of ideas of the 20th century.

Pasternak's autobiographical prose combines memoir of his own development as a writer with extended meditations on Scriabin, Rilke, and Mayakovsky — the three presences that shaped his aesthetic. The book ends with Mayakovsky's suicide, rendered with grief that is also a kind of self-examination: the poet who chose visibility and the poet who chose obscurity, and what each choice costs.

David Grann investigates the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for an ancient lost civilization he called Z.

Henry Worsley, a British explorer obsessed with Ernest Shackleton, attempts to be the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unsupported — and does not survive the attempt.

Hurston's autobiography — the most unreliable and most revealing of the Harlem Renaissance — traces her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, her years studying under Franz Boas, her folk research in the South and Caribbean, and her life as a writer. Hurston revises, omits, and invents throughout; the book is most honest about what it refuses to say.

The second volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography, covering her late teens in post-war California — working as a cook, a dancer, a madam, and eventually a prostitute, while raising her young son alone.

A selection of Sylvia Plath's correspondence with her mother Aurelia from 1950 to 1963, edited by Aurelia Plath — a complex document that reveals the public face Plath maintained for her mother and the gap between that performance and the inner life she described elsewhere.

Bourdain's follow-up to Kitchen Confidential — a decade later, more famous, more conflicted, and harder on the food world and on himself.

New York Times reporter Mike Isaac's definitive account of Uber's spectacular rise and reckoning. From Travis Kalanick's ruthless ambition to the toxic culture, surveillance, and scandals that nearly destroyed the company, Super Pumped is a gripping, deeply reported portrait of Silicon Valley at its most aggressive.

A curated anthology of Fortune magazine articles spanning five decades, edited by Carol Loomis, that traces Warren Buffett's rise from obscure Omaha investor to the world's most celebrated businessman. The collection captures Buffett's evolving philosophy, sharp wit, and uncommon candor across a remarkable career.

Mary Karr's landmark memoir of a turbulent Texas childhood. With ferocious honesty, dark humor, and dazzling prose, Karr recounts growing up in a gritty oil town with a hard-drinking father, a brilliant, volatile, much-married mother, and family secrets that threaten to destroy them all.

Reeves Wiedeman's gripping chronicle of WeWork and Adam Neumann. From a single co-working space to a $47 billion valuation and a catastrophic failed IPO, this is the story of a charismatic founder, the investors who enabled him, and one of the most spectacular corporate implosions of the startup era.

Georges Perec's haunting, formally daring memoir-novel. Alternating chapters braid Perec's fragmentary memories of a childhood shadowed by the Holocaust with a chilling fictional allegory of an island society obsessed with sport — two narratives that converge on the unspeakable horror at the heart of his lost family.

Thomas Bernhard's part-memoir, part-fiction account of a friendship. While confined to a hospital, the narrator reflects on his bond with Paul Wittgenstein — nephew of the philosopher — a brilliant, doomed man given to madness, in a mordant, obsessive meditation on illness, friendship, genius, and Austrian society.

Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux's raw, unfiltered diary of obsessive love. Kept during an all-consuming affair with a younger, married Russian diplomat, Getting Lost records desire, waiting, and self-abandonment with a candor that strips passion to its rawest reality — the unmediated source behind her novel Simple Passion.

Lewis spent a year embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange's catastrophic collapse. The result is a portrait of the man at the centre of one of the largest financial frauds in history — a portrait that refuses easy categorisation of SBF as either visionary or villain.

Andrew Kilpatrick's sprawling, encyclopedic biography of Warren Buffett chronicles the investor's life from childhood in Omaha through the building of Berkshire Hathaway into one of the world's most valuable companies. Updated across multiple editions, it serves as the most comprehensive single-volume reference on Buffett's personal and professional history.

Brian Muraresku's provocative investigation into the hidden history of psychedelics and Western religion. Across a twelve-year quest through archaeology, ancient languages, and secret archives, he argues that a psychedelic sacrament may lie at the origins of Greek mystery cults and early Christianity.