The most recommended autobiographies

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4,055 authors created a book list connected to autobiographies, and here are their favorite autobiography books.
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Book cover of Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet

Gerri Bauer Author Of At Home in Persimmon Hollow: Persimmon Hollow Legacy Series Book 1

From Gerri's 3 favorite reads in 2023.

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Sewing nerd Domestic history fan

Gerri's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Gerri Bauer Why did Gerri love this book?

Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life adds new growth to familiar portraits of the iconic poet. Eccentric she surely was. But a more complete picture of her emerges from this book than from any Dickinson biography I’ve paged through.

McDowell allows Dickinson’s life story, actions, words, and writing to provide biographical insights through a lens of gardening activities and household chores. Dickinson’s love of gardens and plants is well known. She engaged in the hobby year-round. Like plants need sunlight and air to survive, so did the woman who emerges from these pages. She becomes less the housebound recluse hiding in her bedroom, and more a real person engaging with the world on her own terms.

By Marta McDowell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"A visual treat as well as a literary one...for gardeners and garden lovers, connoisseurs of botanical illustration, and those who seek a deeper understanding of the life and work of Emily Dickinson." -The Wall Street Journal Emily Dickinson was a keen observer of the natural world, but less well known is the fact that she was also an avid gardener-sending fresh bouquets to friends, including pressed flowers in her letters, and studying botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke. At her family home, she tended both a small glass conservatory and a flower garden. In Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life, award-winning…


Book cover of Fidel: A Critical Portrait

John Thorndike Author Of A Hundred Fires in Cuba

From my list on Cuba, the Revolution, and Cuban exiles.

Why am I passionate about this?

Over fifty years ago I joined the Peace Corps in El Salvador. I married a Salvadoran woman, and our child was born during our two-year stay on a backcountry farm in Chile. My interest in Latin America has never faded—and in my latest novel, The World Against Her Skin, which is based on my mother’s life, I give her a pair of years in the Peace Corps. But it is Cuba that remains the most fascinating of all the countries south of our border, and of course I had to write about the giant turn it took in 1959, and the men and women who spurred that revolution.

John's book list on Cuba, the Revolution, and Cuban exiles

John Thorndike Why did John love this book?

It was here that I first discovered Camilo Cienfuegos—whom I write about in my book. Camilo was the last of 82 men to board a small yacht, the Granma, which sailed, in November of 1956, from Tuxpan, Mexico to the south shore of Cuba. Fifteen men survived the landing and made their way up into the Sierra Maestra to start the Revolution. This is one of the hemisphere’s most remarkable stories, and Szulc’s book remains the definitive work on Fidel Castro and his campaign to unseat Fulgencio Batista.

By Tad Szulc,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Fidel as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The outcome of a long, direct relationship, this riveting portrait reveals astonishing and exclusive information about Cuba, the revolution, and the notorious, larger-than-life leader who has ruled his country with an iron fist for more than forty years. Only Tad Szulc could bring Fidel to such vivid life--the loves and losses of the man, the devious tactics of the conspirator, the triumphs and defeats of the revolutionary leader who challenged an American president and brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. From Jesuit schools to jungle hideouts and the Palace of the Revolution, here is FIDEL...THE UNTOLD STORY.


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Book cover of We Had Fun and Nobody Died: Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter

We Had Fun and Nobody Died by Amy T. Waldman, Peter Jest,

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…

Book cover of The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling

Slava Gerovitch Author Of Soviet Space Mythologies: Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity (Russian and East European Studies)

From my list on astronauts and cosmonauts.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in space history began with stamp collecting and continued much later with visits to Russian archives, Star City, and aerospace companies, and interviews with cosmonauts and space engineers, who often told their personal stories for the first time. As a historian of science and technology teaching at MIT, I was especially interested in cases where technology and society intertwined: cosmonauts and engineers lobbied politicians with competing agendas, personal rivalries tore apart ambitious projects, and pervasive secrecy perpetuated public myths and private counter-myths. My digging into tensions and arguments that shaped the Soviet space program resulted in two books, Soviet Space Mythologies and Voices of the Soviet Space Program.

Slava's book list on astronauts and cosmonauts

Slava Gerovitch Why did Slava love this book?

This book explores the Soviet efforts to turn a living person into a propaganda icon that would embody and transmit communist values around the world. While Gagarin’s open and warm personality did resonate with wide audiences, he felt increasingly uneasy about his assigned public role, which forced him to lie, distort, and pretend. 

I find this well-documented story an excellent illustration of the Soviet use of cosmonauts in the propaganda machine: to function effectively as propaganda tools, the cosmonauts had to fulfill ritual public functions at the expense of training for new flights, and to swap their professional identity for the role of an ideologically engaged public speaker.

By Andrew L. Jenks,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Let's go!" With that, the boyish, grinning Yuri Gagarin launched into space on April 12, 1961, becoming the first human being to exit Earth's orbit. The twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel departed for the stars from within the shadowy world of the Soviet military-industrial complex. Barbed wires, no-entry placards, armed guards, false identities, mendacious maps, and a myriad of secret signs had hidden Gagarin from prying outsiders-not even his friends or family knew what he had been up to. Coming less than four years after the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit, Gagarin's voyage was cause for another round of capitalist shock and…


Book cover of Panzer Gunner: From My Native Canada to the German Ostfront and Back. in Action with 25th Panzer Regiment, 7th Panzer Division 1944-45

Michael Dorosh Author Of Indescribable Ordeal: The History of the German 65th Infantry Division 1942-1945

From my list on explaining the experience of German soldiers in the Second World War.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a Canadian with bachelor's degrees in history and communications and over thirty-five years of experience in the Canadian Army reserves. My interest in the German Army of the Third Reich period has led to interviews with surviving veterans, visits to various battlefields, a successful YouTube channel, and involvement in military-themed hobbies such as war re-enactment and wargaming which in turn has led to the publication of many related books and magazine articles. Like all of us writing on the subject of Germans in the Second World War, I find it often poorly understood yet hugely compelling for its complex legal, historical, and moral aspects.

Michael's book list on explaining the experience of German soldiers in the Second World War

Michael Dorosh Why did Michael love this book?

I think it is only natural to include an autobiography in a list like this, and Bruno Friesen's book is compelling to me for several reasons, mainly because he was a Canadian who ended up in the German Army.

Friesen talks about these curious circumstances honestly and with good humour, and the book transitions quickly from light-hearted reminiscences to a really very good technical study of what it was like to fight in tanks on the Eastern Front.

I thought the book illustrated well how an individual could fight against the multiple dehumanizing forces of modern war and come out the other end with spirit intact. The book juxtaposes well the helplessness of men fighting in machines with their human survival instincts.

By Bruno Friesen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Panzer Gunner as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

There are few memoirs available of German Panzer crews that focus on the climactic last 12 months of the war on the Eastern Front, 1944-45. What makes Bruno Friesen's account virtually unique is his family background: his parents came from a German-speaking Mennonite community in Ukraine, and were to all intents and purposes culturally German. To make matters even more complex, in 1924 his parents left Ukraine for Canada, where Bruno was born.

In March 1939 he and his brother Oscar found themselves on a ship bound for Bremerhaven in Germany. He barely spoke German, and had never been to…


Book cover of The Celtic Twilight

Lisa M. Bitel Author Of Otherworld: Nine Tales of Wonder and Romance from Medieval Ireland

From my list on lead to the otherworld.

Why am I passionate about this?

Who doesn’t love fairies and their tales? As a kid, I devoured every collection I could find in the library. It was only when I learned Irish at university, though, that I stumbled into the síd–the ancient Irish Otherworld of medieval literature—and discovered the race of ever-living, perfectly beautiful creatures who dwell there. These Irish stories inspired some of the earliest fairy romances of France and England, but they are sexier, funnier, and bloodier than better-known tales. Never mind the winged warriors of YA fiction or the twee Tinkerbells of Fairy Core—these five books led me into the hollow hills of the original fairies.

Lisa's book list on lead to the otherworld

Lisa M. Bitel Why did Lisa love this book?

William Butler Yeats is one of my favorite poets as well as a playwright, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Early in his career, though, Yeats rewrote many venerable Irish stories in verse and drama.

For a while, he lived in a run-down 15th-century tower in Co. Galway near his friend Lady Gregory, a fellow folklorist. Yeats collected tales of fairies, púcai, and ghosts from friends and locals, added his own visionary musings on the ancient landscape of caves and mounds, and created Celtic Twilight. Yeats’s fairies lured innocents to midnight feasts, abducted new brides, switched babies with fairy “changelings,” and caused all sorts of mayhem for mortals.

Yeats was an occultist and theosophist, ready to believe in fairies. He had a knack for inspiring wonder. “There are doubters even in the western villages,” he admitted, but “when all is said and done,…

By William Butler Yeats,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Celtic Twilight as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Best known for his poetry, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was also a dedicated exponent of Irish folklore. Yeats took a particular interest in the tales' mythic and magical roots. The Celtic Twilight ventures into the eerie and puckish world of fairies, ghosts, and spirits. "This handful of dreams," as the author referred to it, first appeared in 1893, and its title refers to the pre-dawn hours, when the Druids performed their rituals. It consists of stories recounted to the poet by his friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. Yeats' faithful transcription of their narratives includes his own visionary experiences, appended to the…


Book cover of Life on the Mississippi

Peter B. Dedek Author Of The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History

From my list on the history of life, death, and magic in New Orleans.

Why am I passionate about this?

Being from Upstate New York I went to college at Cornell University but headed off to New Orleans as soon as I could. By and by I became an instructor at Delgado Community College. Always a big fan of the city’s amazing historic cemeteries, when teaching a world architectural history class, I took the class to the Metairie Cemetery where I could show the students real examples of every style from Ancient Egyptian to Modern American. After coming to Texas State University, San Marcos (30 miles from Austin), I went back to New Orleans on sabbatical in 2013 and wrote The Cemeteries of New Orleans. 

Peter's book list on the history of life, death, and magic in New Orleans

Peter B. Dedek Why did Peter love this book?

Life on the Mississippi is the autobiographical story of Mark Twain’s career as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River in the mid-1800s.

I first read this book when living in the French Quarter in the 1990s and could hear ship horns out on the river as I took in Twain’s fascinating, often silly and sarcastic narrative about his life and the river.

When describing New Orleans cemeteries, Twain writes, “Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it.

By Mark Twain,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Life on the Mississippi as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Life on the Mississippi (1883) is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. It is also a travel book, recounting his trip up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Saint Paul many years after the war.


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Book cover of Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink

Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink by Ethan Chorin,

Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…

Book cover of Courtesies of the Heart

Joy Neal Kidney Author Of What Leora Never Knew: A Granddaughter's Quest for Answers

From my list on research of World War II casualties.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm the oldest granddaughter of Leora, who lost three sons during WWII. To learn what happened to them, I studied casualty and missing aircraft reports, missions reports, and read unit histories. I’ve corresponded with veterans who knew one of the brothers, who witnessed the bomber hit the water off New Guinea, and who accompanied one brother’s body home. I’m still in contact with the family members of two crew members on the bomber. The companion book, Leora’s Letters, is the family story of the five Wilson brothers who served, but only two came home.

Joy's book list on research of World War II casualties

Joy Neal Kidney Why did Joy love this book?

A WWII P-51 pilot, lost in Germany during WWII, was not located by the Americans for decades. He left a widow and a baby daughter, who felt her father’s absence her whole life. The area where he fell became part of East Germany, so was inaccessible for decades. One local man buried his remains and cared for the grave for years.

This is the amazing story of how several people, speaking three different languages, eventually became a "society of the heart" through the internet and in person. The P-51 pilot's remains were brought home for a military burial. 

By Kenneth Breaux,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Courtesies of the Heart as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The author takes the reader on a compelling odyssey, beginning with a wartime mystery which endured for nearly sixty years. A compelling and often gripping story of loss and discovery.


Book cover of Brownies and Kalashnikovs: A Saudi Woman's Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

Kim Barnes Author Of In the Kingdom of Men

From my list on Arabic writers on the destruction of colonization.

Why am I passionate about this?

In the 1950s, my mother and father left the red dirt of Oklahoma for the forests of Idaho to escape their families’ poverty. Instead of sharecropping, my father became a logger, but my aunt and her husband, a drilling rig roughneck, moved to the deserts of Saudi Arabia to work for Aramco and live in the American compound of Abqaiq. I remember the gifts they brought me: camel hide purses, Aladdin slippers. The Saudis, too, were experiencing rapid modernization and expanding wealth. I became fascinated by the conflict inherent in the sudden enmeshing of cultures and meteoric shift in power and privilege.

Kim's book list on Arabic writers on the destruction of colonization

Kim Barnes Why did Kim love this book?

Because 20th Century Aramco was a closed company inside a closed culture inside a closed country, and because the laws of Sharia and strict corporate guidelines silenced the stories of women, I found it frustrating if not impossible to uncover narratives written by female Arab authors. Then I discovered Basrawi’s fascinating memoir about growing up in Dhahran. It provided riveting insight into the life of a teenage girl whose father was one of the first Saudi Muslim employees allowed to live inside the gated community. Basrawi vividly details coming of age in the middle of a white community and her eventual move to Beirut, where she endures the strife of the country’s civil war. Her account is rare, invaluable, and poignantly told—a reminder that it is literature that offers the greatest understanding of the immediate and lasting effects of colonial imperialism.

By Fadia Basrawi,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Brownies and Kalashnikovs as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Fadia, a Saudi Arab, grew up in the strictly circumscribed and tailor-made 'desert Disneyland' of Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). This slice of modern, suburban, middle America was located in Dhahran, Aramco's administrative headquarters in Saudi Arabia, a theocratic Muslim kingdom run according to strict Wahabbi Shari'a law. Eventually, after only brief holidays abroad visiting relatives in colourful Arab cities like Medina, Damascus and Alexandria, Fadia moved to Beirut, the glitzy 'Paris of the Middle East', to attend high school. In Beirut she fell in love with a passionate and idealistic Lebanese journalist with whom she eloped against her…


Book cover of Balloonomania Belles: Daredevil Divas Who First Took to the Sky

Deborah Noyes Author Of Lady Icarus: Balloonmania and the Brief, Bold Life of Sophie Blanchard

From my list on being lighter than air and above it all.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an avid student of curious social history, I’ve wanted to tell the story of early flight for a while. A friend once took me up in a hot-air balloon for my birthday, and I’ve been a balloonomaniac ever since. I’ll never forget the awe I felt that morning in Vermont—the sensation of drifting softly above it all, passing spirit-like through orange-pink clouds just after sunrise with the muffled bark of a distant dog the only sound for miles. It was, to quote Sophie Blanchard, a “sensation incomparable.” 

Deborah's book list on being lighter than air and above it all

Deborah Noyes Why did Deborah love this book?

Also a bit gossipy or wink-wink in tone, Wright’s feminist take on early flight is good fun. She narrates the hair-raising adventures of female pioneers of balloon flight—from feisty French teenager Elisabeth Thible, the first woman in the air, to charismatic British actress Leticia Ann Sage, whom one newspaper credited with “that manly fortitude which constitutes the heroine.” Wright presents a memorable cast of women who were all willing and well able—whether for a day or for decades—to brave life in the upper stories. She narrates, too, how they did it despite danger and scandal, at a time when women had few options or outlets for challenging themselves personally or professionally.

By Sharon Wright,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Balloonomania Belles as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

_Balloonomania Belles_ reveals the astonishing stories of the fabulous female pioneers of balloon flight. More than a century before the first aeroplane women were heading for the heavens in crazy, inspired contraptions that could bring death or glory and all too often, both. Award-winning journalist Sharon Wright reveals their hair-raising adventures in a book that brings the stories of the feisty female ballooning heroines together for the first time. Women were in the vanguard of the Balloonomania craze that took hold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and swept across Europe then the world. Their exploits were a vital element…


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Book cover of Leora's Letters: The Story of Love and Loss for an Iowa Family During World War II

Leora's Letters by Joy Neal Kidney, Robin Grunder,

The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by…

Book cover of The Nature Of Gothic

Richard Weston Author Of 100 Ideas that Changed Architecture

From my list on that formed my understanding of architecture.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by architecture and landscape architecture since discovering the work of Le Corbusier at the age of sixteen. Most of my life has been spent teaching and writing about it - fifteen books and numerous articles - with occasional forays into designing and building. I took early retirement as a Professor of  Architecture in 2013, the year after enjoying ‘Fifteen Minutes of Fame’ on a BBC TV series featuring the development of my ‘mineral scarves’ for Liberty of London. This led to a creative app and website for children called Molly’s World (to be launched in 2024) and on my seventieth birthday in 2023 I launched an architectural and garden design studio.

Richard's book list on that formed my understanding of architecture

Richard Weston Why did Richard love this book?

Extracted from Ruskin’s three-volume account of ‘The Stones of Venice’, this was published with an introduction by William Morris, Ruskin’s greatest disciple and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Ruskin’s High Victorian writing style is a barrier to some, but he is the greatest English writer on architecture whose ideas about the importance of craftsmanship and moral value of authentic architecture are an antidote to our present condition.

Extolling the virtues of ‘Savageness’, ‘Changefulness’ and ‘Love of Nature’ his ideas are newly relevant as we address the environmental and social consequences of the Industrial Revolution he detested for its impact on our humanity.

By John Ruskin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Nature Of Gothic as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.


Book cover of Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet
Book cover of Fidel: A Critical Portrait
Book cover of The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling

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