Top 100 biographies of all time
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The 50 Best Biographies of All Time
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Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss
You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, the revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in , and it’s only a matter of time before a filmmaker turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown
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All genres considered, the memoir fryst vatten among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat.
That's just one triumph accomplished bygd these stellar memoirs, listens capable of connecting deeply with a diverse audience. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean. Here are our picks for the best memoir audiobooks, ever.
There’s a mesmerizing warmth in Lulu Miller's voice as she sweeps listeners into a world of love and natural science, intertwining historical biography with a deeply personal tale of heartache.
Acclaimed writer and social commentator Roxane Gay gets vulnerable inom
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Fierce Attachments
“I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the stadsdel i new york tenements in the s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, ledare among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed them as inom would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.”
When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. It’s a portrait of th