Explore our curated collection of biography & memoir book reviews and recommendations.
Robert A. Caro's Master of the Senate is the third volume in his ongoing multi-book biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. It chronicles Lyndon B. Johnson's tenure in the United States Senate from 1949 to 1960 — his rise from freshman senator to Senate majority leader — and his pivotal role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such legislation since the Reconstruction era. Combining exhaustive institutional history with granular political biography, the book stands as one of the most ambitious works of American political nonfiction ever published.
Mar 19, 2026
Marla Gibbs's memoir, written with contributor Malaika Adero and published by Amistad/HarperCollins, traces the actress's journey from a turbulent Chicago childhood to decades of Hollywood stardom — a frank, personality-driven account that is, per Publishers Weekly, "funny, moving, and more than a little inspiring," even as Kirkus Reviews notes its structural looseness.
Mar 14, 2026
Eddie Jaku's memoir is a New York Times bestseller in which a man who endured Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and a forced death march chooses to call himself the happiest man on earth — a testament to gratitude, friendship, and the conviction that happiness is the best revenge against hatred.
Mar 13, 2026
Tom Piazza's Living in the Present with John Prine, published by W. W. Norton & Company in September 2025 with a foreword by Fiona Whelan Prine, is a national bestseller that blends first-person journalism, oral history, travelogue, and elegy into a compact but resonant portrait of one of American music's most beloved singer-songwriters. Born from a 2016 Oxford American magazine profile and a friendship cut short by Prine's death from COVID-19 complications in 2020, the book is an honest, warmly received tribute that Kirkus Reviews calls "a heartfelt blend of first-person journalism, oral history, travelogue, and elegy."
Mar 20, 2026
When in ROAM: A Comedy Travel Adventure Memoir is a self-deprecating, fast-paced account of a California woman's accidental years-long solo journey through Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in the mid-1990s — a debut that turns a cascade of travel disasters into genuinely entertaining storytelling.
Mar 13, 2026
First published in 1956, My Family and Other Animals is Gerald Durrell's autobiographical account of the years he spent as a child on the Greek island of Corfu with his gloriously dysfunctional family — and it remains the gold standard of warmly comic nature writing, opening the first book of what became the beloved Corfu Trilogy.
Mar 21, 2026
Sonia Purnell's A Woman of No Importance rescues Virginia Hall — one of the most consequential Allied spies of World War II — from undeserved obscurity, building a richly detailed biography around meticulous research and a subject whose true-life exploits rival anything in fiction.
Mar 16, 2026
First published by Frederick A. Stokes & Co. In 1934 and reissued by Reading Essentials in a Kindle edition, Maurice Walsh's The Road to Nowhere is a Gaelic-flavored adventure romance that earned immediate praise from Kirkus Reviews for its "enchanting glamorous romance" and "high adventure, sheer charm" — making it a solid rediscovery for readers drawn to classic Irish fiction.
Mar 15, 2026
Untamed is the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir by Glennon Doyle — a Reese's Book Club selection that has sold over two million copies — tracing Doyle's journey from a life shaped by societal expectations to one built on her own desire, intuition, and identity, anchored by her falling in love with retired soccer player and activist Abby Wambach.
Mar 9, 2026
Stolen is a memoir co-written by Katariina Rosenblatt, PhD, and prolific collaborator Cecil Murphey, tracing Rosenblatt's repeated escapes from a child sex-trafficking ring and her journey toward advocacy and healing. Published by Revell in October 2014, it is designed to function simultaneously as a personal testimony, a warning about the realities of domestic trafficking, and an argument that survival and recovery are possible — an argument Rosenblatt's own career in law enforcement collaboration and nonprofit work makes concrete.
Mar 22, 2026
Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, first published in 1926 and revised in 1933, remains one of the most enduring popular introductions to Western philosophy, profiling thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through Nietzsche, Bergson, Russell, and Dewey — tracing not just their ideas but the lives and historical conditions that shaped them. The edition under review (ASIN B0CLL5XDCR) is a Kindle release published by Grapevine in October 2023, co-credited to the Original Thinkers Institute. Critical coverage called the work "a delight," and its place as a foundational text of accessible philosophy writing is well established — though its exclusive focus on Western, predominantly European and American thinkers is a documented limitation Durant himself acknowledged.
Mar 20, 2026
Matthew Perry's memoir is an unflinching account of fame, addiction, and survival that became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller and #1 international bestseller — a legacy made more poignant by Perry's death on October 28, 2023, less than a year after the book's release.
Mar 11, 2026Search
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