100 books like Anti-Memoirs

The mystery of the first paragraph drew me in, what he called "the evil of his tale," leading a guerrilla war in the Arabian desert in World War I.

I knew about the burning heat and the wind, of letting a camel find the water and the bitter cold at night, and I am in awe of his strength in fighting the Ottoman Turks. I love his descriptive writing of the wind, and the silence of a Crusader castle. He wrote at Shepherds Hotel in Cairo, left his manuscript on a train in a London station, and had to start over.

"At the bottom, we crossed the flat Gaa, matching our camels in a burst over its velvet surface until we overtook the main body and scattered them with the excitement of our gallop." It was romantic., but... "Round the bend, whistling its loudest, came the train...I touched off the… show more.

I loved learning that Theodore Roosevelt was the most beloved man in America when he was president. Is there any politician in recent memory we would call beloved?

I liked how he, as a young man, after losing his wife and his mother to illness on the same day, persevered. I liked that he, an aristocrat, went out West to be a man, where he stood his ground and punched a man in a bar, pursued and brought two outlaws to justice, and that as a politician, he kept speaking to a crowd after being shot by a gunman.

I didn't like that he all but started the Spanish-American war, but I liked that he rode with his back straight through gunfire in Cuba. Then I learned that he was ashamed of his father, who bought his way out of the Civil War. That was why, I thought, he had… show more.

In my twenties, two friends and I climbed Mt. Hood, 11,249' in Oregon. The snow cracked loudly at night, and I worried about an avalanche. When I was in my 40s, Galon Rowell, a famous mountain photographer, and I, on an assignment from National Geographic to find the source of the Brahmaputra River, climbed from the flat terrain at 16,000' up into Mt. Khalish, 21,778.' in Tibet. We looked down at the Himalayas. K-2, at 28,251", is the second highest mountain in the world (Everest is 29,032'), on the Chinese-Pakistani border, and is considered by mountaineers to be the hardest to climb.

I loved the story, written by a fellow climber, about the boldness, tenacity, camaraderie, and competition of men, and women, pushing for weeks through rough storms to make the team that would go for the summit. What I love most is the story of Jim Wickwire approaching the… show more.

Since 9/11, beginning with the slaughter of Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal by al-Qaida in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002, the kidnapping of journalists has grown to become a state-sponsored industry, mainly in the Muslim world from the Philippines to Africa, to the Middle East. Many survivors write about their kidnappings.

I especially liked Michael Scott Moore's book, in part because I know him, but more because he was held and tormented for three years in the desert by Somali pirates; yet forgives them to save himself. Moore is a German-American journalist and a surfer from California who also lives in Berlin. I loved his courage of diving, naked, from the deck of the ship he was on into the Red Sea, and swimming for freedom.

To be a kidnap victim is to live in a primal, sometimes reptilian world. I liked that he didn't hold back in telling… show more.

Charles de Gaulle is a consequential leader of the 20th century.

In an extraordinary turn of events, this little-known colonel emerged as the leader of France in exile during Hitler’s occupation. Following the Second World War he became a dominant political figure.

He can be seen as the founder of modern France, whose shadow reaches into our present moment.

In the 1930s he wrote a brilliant mediation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword. Though distilled from his lived experience in the military, de Gaulle provides insights that apply in many situations.

The book takes on additional significance when one considers the project of self-creation that the author undertook—first on himself, then on the re-creation of France, finally on Europe and the world, in his time and into our own.

This funny and fascinating memoir is a great read and provides a window into what life was like behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s, under a brutal and oppressive regime. 

Mackay spends two years in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, as visiting professor at the University. Spied on, treated warily by locals, and forbidden to travel, he nevertheless finds ways to see the country and gain insight into its culture and people.

Whether you want to find out more about Romania or you just want a captivating read which will open your mind to how different life can be without the freedoms and privileges we currently enjoy in the West, you will love this book.

It is rare for anyone with real power to write an interesting diary. They do not have the time or the self-awareness. Harold Macmillan is the exception because his diaries are fantastic and those that he writes as prime minister are much better than those that he writes earlier in his career. He is such a lonely man (England’s most famous cuckold) and one senses that his diary is his only real confidant. He is also so extraordinarily aware of historical change. He is himself a considerable historian and one who reads very widely even when prime minister. There is a moment in the early 1960s when he gets back to Downing Street after a weekend in the country and writes in his diary about having read Theodore Zeldin’s, The Political System of Napoleon III – not exactly bedtime reading for most people but a work that inspires Macmillan into… show more.

If you want to understand the assassin genre, then you can’t forget the classics, and this is an all-timer.

The Jackal is the assassin to end all assassins—mysterious, brutally efficient, and terrifying. Forsyth writes with a level of realism that’ll make you believe that if you cross the wrong person, someone like the Jackal could end up knocking on your door… 

If we want to understand medieval or modern Paris, we need to gain some familiarity with all of the stages along the way. Robb provides some episodic portraits of some of those stages, and the chapter on the eighteenth-century architect Charles-Axel Guillaumot is one of the most arresting discussions I’ve ever seen of how the actions of those living in one epoch can reverberate for generations to come. Guillaumot literally saved Paris from collapsing in on its medieval past by bracing up the swiss-cheese-like network of tunnels that had been left behind by its medieval quarry workers.

This is the heartwarming and inspiring story of the journey a great chef took from serving as a lowly apprentice to becoming a leader in establishing new food traditions in America. I especially enjoyed the many funny stories about Pepin and his family. Warning: the book includes many of his favorite recipes that will cause hunger pangs as you read the book.