Discover books that make people, society and history easier to understand.
Explore our most popular biography & autobiography books, ranked by community activity, ratings and reading interest.
Helpful when you want biographies, context and books that explain the world around you. If you are looking for biography & autobiography, this category is a strong place to browse next.
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Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson spent years talking with Steve Jobs, and with the people who worked alongside him and despaired of him. The result is no mon... (Automatically generated book description)
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Ashlee Vance
Ashlee Vance's original English biography of Elon Musk: his life from South Africa to the top of the technology world, from PayPal through T... (Automatically generated book description)
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Stephen King
Half memoir, half craft manual: Stephen King recounts his childhood, his drinking and the accident that nearly killed him, and sets out plai... (Automatically generated book description)
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Dave Pelzer
Dave Pelzer describes the years in which his mother starved him, scalded him and treated him as a thing while sparing his brothers. The acco... (Automatically generated book description)
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Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt recounts a childhood in Limerick shaped by hunger, damp and a drinking father, and does it with a humour that never makes the ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel draws the story of her father, who ran a funeral home, loved literature and concealed his homosexuality, alongside her own, w... (Automatically generated book description)
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Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden tells how a boy who loved computers became an intelligence contractor, and what he saw there that led him to break in 2013. I... (Automatically generated book description)
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Phil Knight
Phil Knight recounts how selling Japanese running shoes from the boot of a car turned into Nike, on borrowed money, in permanent near-bankru... (Automatically generated book description)
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
A long letter to his son. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about what it means to inhabit a black body in America, and refuses, deliberately, to offe... (Automatically generated book description)
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Sheryl Sandberg
Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In analyzes the internal and external barriers preventing women from reaching leadership positions and shows how wome... (Automatically generated book description)
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Dave Pelzer
The sequel to A Child Called It: Dave Pelzer describes the years afterwards in foster homes and institutions, and how hard trust is for some... (Automatically generated book description)
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Solomon Northup
Solomon Northup was a free black man in New York, kidnapped in 1841 and enslaved in Louisiana for twelve years. His 1853 account is one of t... (Automatically generated book description)
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Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow draws Ulysses S. Grant as a poor businessman, an outstanding general, and a president who took the rights of freed slaves more s... (Automatically generated book description)
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Sheryl Sandberg
After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg and psychologist Adam Grant wrote a book about resilience. Option B shows how people ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Jon Halliday
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, after ten years of research, portray Mao as a ruler whose policies cost millions of lives. The book was and rem... (Automatically generated book description)
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Amy Liptrot
Amy Liptrot returns after years of drinking in London to the Orkney islands, and between night shifts listening for corncrakes and cold sea ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Amy Liptrot
Amy Liptrot returns after years of drinking in London to the Orkney islands, and between night shifts listening for corncrakes and cold sea ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow draws John D. Rockefeller as devout Baptist and ruthless monopolist at once, and shows that for him the two were not in conflict... (Automatically generated book description)
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Jim Loehr
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz argue that the scarce resource is not time but energy, and transfer the alternation of stress and recovery from ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Adam Kay
Adam Kay was a junior doctor in the British NHS and kept a secret diary throughout. 97-hour weeks, life-and-death decisions, chronic sleep d... (Automatically generated book description)
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts his youth in 1980s Baltimore, between a father who published books and streets on which that was no help. (Automatically generated book description)
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Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Zlatan Ibrahimovic recounts his origins in Rosengard near Malmo and the road through Ajax, Juventus and Barcelona. Written down by David Lag... (Automatically generated book description)
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Rob Wilkins
Rob Wilkins was the assistant of Terry Pratchett for fifteen years and finished the biography that Pratchett could not complete because of h... (Automatically generated book description)
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Roger Lancelyn Green
Roger Lancelyn Green knew C. S. Lewis personally and wrote his biography with Walter Hooper: Oxford, the road to faith, the Inklings and Nar... (Automatically generated book description)
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Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow traces the German Jewish banking family Warburg across two centuries: Hamburg, New York, ascent, expulsion and a new beginning. (Automatically generated book description)
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Nick Tosches
Nick Tosches writes the life of Jerry Lee Lewis as an American tragedy: music, alcohol, religion, and the marriage to his thirteen-year-old ... (Automatically generated book description)
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Dave Pelzer
The third part of the Dave Pelzer memoirs: adult life after abuse and foster care, the air force, his own fatherhood, and the question of wh... (Automatically generated book description)
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Jeremy Camp
Musician Jeremy Camp tells of his first wife, who died of cancer four months after the wedding, and of how he carried on afterwards. A memoi... (Automatically generated book description)
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Ayn Rand
The working notes and journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman: the making of her novels and lines of thought she did not later publis... (Automatically generated book description)
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Mattias Boström
Mattias Bostrom tells how a character in a novel became a worldwide affair: Conan Doyle, the reader protests after the death of Holmes, the ... (Automatically generated book description)
