Explore our curated collection of biography & memoir book reviews and recommendations.
In Order to Live is a memoir of extraordinary endurance — Yeonmi Park's first-person account of surviving North Korea's brutal deprivations, fleeing across the border, and reconstructing a self in freedom, written with co-author Maryanne Vollers and published in paperback by Penguin Books in a 2016 reprint edition.
Mar 25, 2026
A New York Times bestseller that sold more than two million copies in the United States, Upstairs at the White House is the memoir of J. B. West, who served as Chief Usher of the White House for nearly three decades, offering a behind-the-scenes account of life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue across five first families — from Eleanor Roosevelt to Pat Nixon — and illuminating the unelected, unpaid, but consequential roles the First Ladies played in shaping the presidency itself.
Apr 1, 2026
Michael Neiman's Hello My Name is Sharkbait chronicles his 2,192-mile thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine — a journey through blizzards, dehydration, laughter, and doubt that doubles as an unexpected story of friendship and a father-son bond quietly transformed by the miles.
Mar 24, 2026
From Here to the Great Unknown is a posthumously completed memoir co-authored by Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter Riley Keough, published by Random House on October 8, 2024. Lisa Marie began recording audio tapes for the book in 2022 shortly before her death in January 2023; Keough transcribed and completed those recordings into the memoir readers hold today. The result is a dual-voiced account covering Lisa Marie's childhood at Graceland alongside Elvis Presley, her marriages to Danny Keough and Michael Jackson, her battles with addiction, and the grief that threaded her entire life. A national bestseller, a New York Times bestseller, and an Oprah's Book Club pick, the memoir drew praise from The New York Times and The Washington Post for the unflinching depth with which it confronts its hardest material.
Mar 26, 2026
Ryan Benz's Wander: A Memoir of Letting Go is a B.R.A.G. Medallion Award-winning memoir in which Benz chronicles his decision to abandon a hollow but outwardly successful life and walk over two thousand miles along the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It is a searching account of physical endurance and self-discovery, written for readers who feel the pull of a different, more deliberate way of living.
Mar 26, 2026
Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park is a richly layered adventure memoir chronicling a 750-mile end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon — an undertaking that fewer than two dozen people had ever completed — attempted by Fedarko and National Geographic photographer Pete McBride with, by their own admission, a startling lack of preparation. Winner of the 2024 National Outdoor Book Award in Outdoor Literature and the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the book weaves harrowing physical ordeal with canyon geology, Native American history, and environmental pressures bearing down on one of America's most iconic landscapes.
Mar 25, 2026
First published in 1945 in the United States, Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy is a sweeping survey of Western thought from the pre-Socratic philosophers through the early twentieth century — a work cited by the Nobel Committee when Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, and one that has remained continuously in print ever since. Its strengths as an accessible, historically contextualised overview are real and well-documented; its acknowledged weaknesses — overgeneralisations and omissions, particularly in the post-Cartesian period — are equally part of its record. Both deserve honest attention.
Mar 23, 2026
Melissa L. Cook's memoir chronicles the twenty years she and her family spent living and teaching in Alaska's remote bush communities, beginning in 1995 — a candid account of wilderness adventure, personal adversity including multiple sclerosis, and the singular demands of life far beyond the reach of ordinary conveniences.
Mar 25, 2026
Maureen Callahan's Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed is a sweeping, deeply reported exposé published by Little, Brown & Company that dismantles the gilded mythology of America's most celebrated political dynasty by centering the women — wives, lovers, daughters, and bystanders — who bore the cost of Kennedy power across generations. The Guardian describes it as a "lacerating exposé," and critical coverage places it within an already crowded field of Kennedy literature, asking what Callahan hopes to add to this "vale of tears." The answer, it turns out, is a great deal: a multigenerational reckoning that spans patriarch Joseph Kennedy through John Jr., tracing a pattern of abuse, coercion, and institutional impunity that the family's mythmakers worked hard to obscure.
Apr 3, 2026
Ellen Barone's debut memoir chronicles the decade-long nomadic journey she and her husband Hank embarked on after their rented house sold unexpectedly in 2011 — a planned one-year experiment through four countries that quietly expanded into a way of life spanning multiple continents. Published in 2023 by Abhuta, the memoir is a candid, open-hearted account of long-stay travel, shifting notions of home, and the personal transformation that comes from choosing impermanence over rootedness.
Mar 30, 2026
Mark Stevenson's An Optimist's Tour of the Future is a non-fiction travelogue in which the British author, comedian, and businessman travels the world to meet scientists, engineers, and innovators working at the cutting edge of medicine, computing, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and environmental technology — making a compelling, broadly praised case that the future belongs to those willing to look at it clearly and with hope.
Mar 28, 2026
Warren Buffett Biography: Investing in the Values of Life by Shaina Loerzel is an independently published biography examining the life, principles, and investing philosophy of one of the world's most studied financial figures. Published in February 2025, it offers readers a portrait of Buffett organized around the values that shaped his approach to both business and life.
Mar 26, 2026Search
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