Best Biographies and Memoirs of All Time
I'm Glad My Mom Died (Released: January 2022)
Author(s): Jennette McCurdy
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.47 (1192 Ratings, 202 Reviews)
Pages: 313
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income. In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants. Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.
Genre(s): Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Biography & Autobiography, autobiography
Man's Search for Meaning (Released: January 1946)
Author(s): Viktor E. Frankl
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.23 (680 Ratings, 68 Reviews)
Pages: 240
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. At the heart of his theory, known as logotherapy, is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful. Man's Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy, Biography & Autobiography, Classics, Spirituality, Concentration camp inmates, Existential psychotherapy, History, General
Crying in H Mart (Released: January 2021)
Author(s): Michelle Zauner
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.25 (502 Ratings, 91 Reviews)
Pages: 239
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Biography, Family & Relationships
Between the World and Me (Released: January 2015)
Author(s): Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.55 (462 Ratings, 69 Reviews)
Pages: 166
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward. Source: http://www.booksontape.com/book/220290/between-the-world-and-me/
Genre(s): Biography, Nonfiction, General, African Americans, History, United States, social science, Americas, political science, Memoir
The Complete Maus (Released: January 1980)
Author(s): Art Spiegelman
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.65 (416 Ratings, 32 Reviews)
Pages: 295
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first publication, here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (Wall Street Journal) and "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker). The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in "drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust" (The New York Times). Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century's grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.
Genre(s): Graphic novels, War, Comics, Biography, History, Classics, Religion, Young Adult, Children of Holocaust survivors, Biography & Autobiography
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Released: January 2000)
Author(s): Anthony Bourdain
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.14 (330 Ratings, 39 Reviews)
Pages: None
A celebrity chef shares anecdotes of his experience in the restaurant industry, and of his journey from dishwasher to a position of fame in the food industry.
Genre(s): Nonfiction, History, Biography, Memoir, Cooking
The Anthropocene Reviewed (Released: August 2019)
Author(s): John Green
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.35 (314 Ratings, 62 Reviews)
Pages: 305
Traditional Chinese edition of The Anthropocene Reviewed
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Essays, Biography, Memoir
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (Released: January 2013)
Author(s): Allie Brosh
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.22 (302 Ratings, 40 Reviews)
Pages: 384
ROM THE PUBLISHER: Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written. Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to. FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book: Pictures Words Stories about things that happened to me Stories about things that happened to other people because of me Eight billion dollars* Stories about dogs The secret to eternal happiness* *These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!
Genre(s): Comics, Humor, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography
This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor (Released: January 2017)
Author(s): Adam Kay
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.29 (185 Ratings, 24 Reviews)
Pages: 189
In the US edition of this international bestseller, Adam Kay channels Henry Marsh and David Sedaris to tell us the "darkly funny" (The New Yorker) -- and sometimes horrifying -- truth about life and work in a hospital. Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships. Welcome to the life of a first-year doctor. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the front lines of medicine. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking by turns, this is everything you wanted to know -- and more than a few things you didn't -- about life on and off the hospital ward. And yes, it may leave a scar.
Genre(s): Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Humor, Biographies & Memoirs, C.
Gender Queer (Released: January 2019)
Author(s): Maia Kobabe (Author, Illustrator), Phoebe Kobabe (Colorist)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.45 (167 Ratings, 30 Reviews)
Pages: 240
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity―what it means and how to think about it―for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
Genre(s): Nonfiction, Biography, Comics, LGBTQ, Young Adult, Literature