Explore our curated collection of biography & memoir book reviews and recommendations.
Published by HarperOne on September 30, 2025, Truly is the long-awaited memoir of pop legend Lionel Richie — a candid, deeply personal account of his journey from a shy, anxious childhood in Tuskegee, Alabama, to global superstardom. Kirkus Reviews calls it "wildly entertaining, utterly charming," and the book lives up to that billing by blending music history, personal revelation, and an infectious spirit of gratitude across its nearly 500 pages.
Apr 29, 2026
Belonging to the World: A Journey from Grief to Connection in Every Country on Earth is a travel memoir by Barry Hoffner that chronicles his globe-spanning journey through grief, resilience, and human connection after the sudden death of his wife Jackie in 2017. A Readers' Choice Book Awards Bronze Winner in Adult Nonfiction, it is published by GFB and draws comparisons to the introspective travel writing of Paul Theroux and Cheryl Strayed's Wild. The memoir is candid, emotionally grounded, and rooted in a genuine quest to feel the pulse of the world again.
Apr 22, 2026
Leo Weston's memoir Finding Him, Finding Me is a candid, humor-laced account of queer love, chosen family, and self-acceptance set against the backdrop of London's gay pub scene during the height of HIV stigma — a story that readers on Amazon describe as funny, deeply moving, and impossible to put down.
May 10, 2026
Alexandra Stein's Inside Out is a memoir documenting her recruitment into, life inside, and eventual escape from a secretive Minneapolis political cult known as the O — a rare firsthand account praised by major voices in both literary and academic circles for its passion, insight, and unflinching honesty.
Apr 28, 2026
If You Ask Me: The Collected Columns of America's Most Beloved is a humor collection by the pen name Libby Gelman-Waxner — the creation of playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick — gathering five years of film criticism columns originally published in Premiere magazine between 1987 and 1992. The book skewers Hollywood through the voice of a delightfully suburban, pop-culture-obsessed persona, and readers who enjoy satirical cultural commentary delivered with a sharp comedic edge will find it holds up as one of the genre's most purely entertaining entries.
Apr 28, 2026
Bob Spitz's The Beatles: The Biography, first published by Little, Brown and Company in November 2005 and reissued in paperback in 2006, is a sweeping, 992-page account of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr — built on six years of research, 650 interviews, and access to previously unheard private material. It drew generally favorable reviews from major outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post, yet also attracted persistent criticism for factual errors and editorial bias, making it an essential but imperfect entry point into Beatles history.
Apr 5, 2026
The Lost Girls is a group memoir in which three Manhattan media professionals — Jennifer Baggett, Holly C. Corbett, and Amanda Pressner — quit their jobs, leave their boyfriends, and spend a year backpacking 60,000 miles across four continents. Published by HarperCollins in May 2010, the book is an entertaining portrait of friendship under pressure and the cost of a quarter-life detour, though critical reception was split: critics praised the authors' vivid, passionate writing as an intensely enjoyable read for travel-writing fans, while Kirkus Reviews found the narrative unable to fully convey the depth of what the trio experienced.
May 12, 2026
Jonathan Rosen's memoir The Best Minds is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times Top 10 Best Book of 2023 that reconstructs the author's lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor — a Yale-educated legal prodigy diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who ultimately killed his pregnant girlfriend, Caroline Costello. Drawing on court and police records, medical studies, interviews, and diaries, Rosen widens the lens beyond one devastating story to examine deinstitutionalization, the nature of mental illness, and the self-deceptions of an entire era.
Apr 27, 2026
Al Pacino's Sonny Boy, published by Penguin Press on October 15, 2024, is an instant New York Times bestseller that traces the icon's journey from a hardscrabble postwar South Bronx childhood to the heights of Hollywood — most compellingly in its early chapters, and most unevenly when it shifts into a career survey that People Magazine called "as funny as it is reflective."
Apr 14, 2026
Out of the Corner is a New York Times bestselling memoir in which Jennifer Grey traces her life from a privileged but complicated Hollywood upbringing through iconic film roles, a career-altering rhinoplasty, and a hard-won reclamation of identity — delivered with disarming frankness and self-deprecating humor, and narrated by Grey herself in the audiobook edition published by Random House Audio.
Apr 14, 2026
Jimmy Carter's A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety is a New York Times bestselling memoir that traces the 39th President's journey from rural Georgia to the White House and beyond — candid in spirit, but critics note it skims the surface of a life that deserves deeper excavation.
Apr 9, 2026
Linda I. Meyers's debut memoir, published by She Writes Press on June 5, 2018, traces her path from a chaotic Brooklyn childhood—shaped by a mobster-adjacent father, a suicidal mother, and the restrictive culture of the 1940s and '50s—to her eventual life as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Structured as a series of standalone essays, the book excavates multigenerational family dysfunction with what Kirkus Reviews calls "edgy, masterful prose" and earns its place as a frank, humor-laced account of emancipation and self-realization.
Apr 16, 2026Search
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