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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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 ... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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 ... (AI-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... (AI-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 ... (AI-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 ... (AI-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... (AI-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 ... (AI-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... (AI-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. (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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. (AI-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 ... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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... (AI-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 ... (AI-generated book description)
