best biography book club

50 Must-Read Biographies

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

The best biographies give us a satisfying glimpse into a great person’s life, while also teaching us about the context in which that person lived. Through biography, we can also learn history, psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy, and more. Reading a great biography is both fun and educational. What’s not to love?

Below I’ve listed 50 of the best biographies out there. You will find a mix of subjects, including important figures in literature, science, politics, history, art, and more. I’ve tried to keep this list focused on biography only, so there is little in the way of memoir or autobiography. In a couple cases, authors have written about their family members, but for the most part, these are books where the focus is on the biographical subject, not the author.

The first handful are group biographies, and after that, I’ve arranged them alphabetically by subject. Book descriptions come from Goodreads.

Take a look and let me know about your favorite biography in the comments!

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

“In  All We Know , Lisa Cohen describes their [Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland’s] glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. At once a series of intimate portraits and a startling investigation into style, celebrity, sexuality, and the genre of biography itself,  All We Know  explores a hidden history of modernism and pays tribute to three compelling lives.”

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

“Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers,’ calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women.”

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

“In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them – in works that readers of all kinds could admire.  The Life You Save May Be Your Own  is their story – a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.”

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

“As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.”

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

“In a sweeping narrative, Fraser traces the cultural, familial and political roots of each of Henry’s queens, pushes aside the stereotypes that have long defined them, and illuminates the complex character of each.”

John Adams by David McCullough

“In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot — ‘the colossus of independence,’ as Thomas Jefferson called him.”

A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee’s Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival by Melissa Fleming

“Emotionally riveting and eye-opening,  A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea  is the incredible story of a young woman, an international crisis, and the triumph of the human spirit. Melissa Fleming shares the harrowing journey of Doaa Al Zamel, a young Syrian refugee in search of a better life.”

At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England by Walter Dean Myers

“One terrifying night in 1848, a young African princess’s village is raided by warriors. The invaders kill her mother and father, the King and Queen, and take her captive. Two years later, a British naval captain rescues her and takes her to England where she is presented to Queen Victoria, and becomes a loved and respected member of the royal court.”

John Brown by W.E.B. Du Bois

“ John Brown is W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking political biography that paved the way for his transition from academia to a lifelong career in social activism. This biography is unlike Du Bois’s earlier work; it is intended as a work of consciousness-raising on the politics of race.”

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen L. Carter

“[Eunice Hunton Carter] was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s ― and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted.”

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

“An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members.”

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

“Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.”

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

“Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.”

Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother by Sonia Nazario

“In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.”

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

“After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve ‘the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century’: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett & his quest for the Lost City of Z?”

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

“Amanda Foreman draws on a wealth of fresh research and writes colorfully and penetratingly about the fascinating Georgiana, whose struggle against her own weaknesses, whose great beauty and flamboyance, and whose determination to play a part in the affairs of the world make her a vibrant, astonishingly contemporary figure.”

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik Ping Zhu

“Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg never asked for fame she was just trying to make the world a little better and a little freer. But along the way, the feminist pioneer’s searing dissents and steely strength have inspired millions. [This book], created by the young lawyer who began the Internet sensation and an award-winning journalist, takes you behind the myth for an intimate, irreverent look at the justice’s life and work.”

Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd

“A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—acknowledges Hurston as a literary foremother.”

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

“ Shirley Jackson  reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as ‘The Lottery’ and  The Haunting of Hill House .”

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro

“This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart.”

The Life of Samuel Johnson   by James Boswell

“Poet, lexicographer, critic, moralist and Great Cham, Dr. Johnson had in his friend Boswell the ideal biographer. Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate, Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail.”

Barbara Jordan: American Hero by Mary Beth Rogers

“Barbara Jordan was the first African American to serve in the Texas Senate since Reconstruction, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, and the first to deliver the keynote address at a national party convention. Yet Jordan herself remained a mystery.”

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

“This engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children.”

Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical by Sherie M. Randolph

“Often photographed in a cowboy hat with her middle finger held defiantly in the air, Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy (1916–2000) left a vibrant legacy as a leader of the Black Power and feminist movements. In the first biography of Kennedy, Sherie M. Randolph traces the life and political influence of this strikingly bold and controversial radical activist.”

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

“In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food.”

The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma by Peter Popham

“Peter Popham … draws upon previously untapped testimony and fresh revelations to tell the story of a woman whose bravery and determination have captivated people around the globe. Celebrated today as one of the world’s greatest exponents of non-violent political defiance since Mahatma Gandhi, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize only four years after her first experience of politics.”

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”   by Zora Neale Hurston

“In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

“Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine.”

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

“Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.”

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

“A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro — the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.”

Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux

“Drawing from the private archives of the poet’s estate and numerous interviews, Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde’s iconic status, charting her conservative childhood in Harlem; her early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian; and her canonization as a seminal poet of American literature.”

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams

“Thurgood Marshall stands today as the great architect of American race relations, having expanded the foundation of individual rights for all Americans. His victory in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the landmark Supreme Court case outlawing school segregation, would have him a historic figure even if he had not gone on to become the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

“In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself.”

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts

“ The Mayor of Castro Street  is Shilts’s acclaimed story of Harvey Milk, the man whose personal life, public career, and tragic assassination mirrored the dramatic and unprecedented emergence of the gay community in America during the 1970s.”

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

“The most famous poet of the Jazz Age, Millay captivated the nation: She smoked in public, took many lovers (men and women, single and married), flouted convention sensationally, and became the embodiment of the New Woman.”

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell

This book is “a vivid portrait of Montaigne, showing how his ideas gave birth to our modern sense of our inner selves, from Shakespeare’s plays to the dilemmas we face today.”

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

“From the moment it was first published in The New Yorker, this brilliant work of literary criticism aroused great attention. Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies.”

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley   by Peter Guralnick

“Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, [this book] traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world.

Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale

“Kate Summerscale brilliantly recreates the Victorian world, chronicling in exquisite and compelling detail the life of Isabella Robinson, wherein the longings of a frustrated wife collided with a society clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of marriage, and female sexuality.”

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

“A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained?”

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan by Claire Tomalin

“When Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857, she was 18: a professional actress performing in his production of  The Frozen Deep . He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure, married with ten children. This meeting sparked a love affair that lasted over a decade, destroying Dickens’s marriage and ending with Nelly’s near-disappearance from the public record.”

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter

“Slowly, but surely, Sojourner climbed from beneath the weight of slavery, secured respect for herself, and utilized the distinction of her race to become not only a symbol for black women, but for the feminist movement as a whole.”

The Black Rose by Tananarive Due

“Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America’s first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful beauty company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes.”

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

“With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life, [Chernow] carries the reader through Washington’s troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian Wars, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention and his magnificent performance as America’s first president.”

Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings

“ Ida: A Sword Among Lions  is a sweeping narrative about a country and a crusader embroiled in the struggle against lynching: a practice that imperiled not only the lives of black men and women, but also a nation based on law and riven by race.”

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

“But the true saga of [Wilder’s] life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser—the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series—masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography.”

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

“Although mother and daughter, these two brilliant women never knew one another – Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other.”

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

“Subscribing to Virginia Woolf’s own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact.”

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

“Of the great figures in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins’ bullets at age thirty-nine.”

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

“On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.”

Want to read more about great biographies? Check out this post on presidential biographies , this list of biographies and memoirs about remarkable women , and this list of 100 must-read musician biographies and memoirs .

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Blog – Posted on Friday, Apr 02

The 35 best book club books to get you talking in 2024.

It seems that everybody and their dog has a book club these days. But whether you’re a seasoned old-timer, or you started up an online book club in 2020, you’re probably facing the same question: “What should we read next”?

When decision fatigue sets in, picking the next group read can be the hardest part of the process. But fear not, because we’re here to help. Whether you’re looking for cutting-edge releases new for 2021 or classic recommendations, we’ve selected 35 of the very best book club books sure to spark conversation. So get that coffee brewing and have your page tabs handy, because we’re ready to dive in.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great book club books out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized book recommendation for your club 😉

Which book club book should you read next?

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2021 releases your book club will lap up

If your book club prides itself on being on top of the latest literary releases, we’ve got you covered. Here are 12 book club books we think you’ll love that are new in 2021. Pencil them into your TBR and you’ll be set for the rest of the year.

1. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

In this year’s most anticipated sci-fi release , Booker-winner Kazuo Ishiguro returns with gusto and sensitivity to the theme of personhood and what it means to be human — his bread and butter. Klara is a humanoid robot built to be an “Artificial Friend”. When chosen as a companion for a gravely ill 14-year old, Klara is confronted by aspects of the human condition to which she’d previously been naïve: love, loneliness, and mortality. Tackling major questions regarding AI and the ethics of technology, Klara and the Sun is fuel for a fascinating book club discussion.

2. Girl A by Abigail Dean

Is there a member of your book club who, despite their best efforts, never gets around to finishing the book? (And hey, no judgement! We all have busy lives!). Well, fear not: we have the answer. Abigail Dean’s debut novel Girl A is a gripping thriller guaranteed to get even the most sluggish reader racing to the end . The novel follows Lex, the titular Girl A, who escapes her abusive home — dubbed the “house of horrors” by the media — and tries to put the past behind her. But when Lex’s mother dies in prison, leaving the house to her and her siblings, it becomes apparent that she can’t outrun her past. An unflinching look at the aftermath of trauma, Girl A is one of those much-hyped book club books that your own club is guaranteed to devour.

3. Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

Of Fake Accounts , Zadie Smith wrote: “This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it.” And we couldn’t agree more. A cutting-edge look at internet culture, social media, and the malleability of identity in the modern age, Fake Accounts is a challenging but timely debut from author Lauren Oyler. The narrator, an unnamed young woman, is snooping through her boyfriend’s phone on the night of Donald Trump’s inauguration when she makes a startling discovery: he’s a notorious online conspiracy theorist. A series of incredible revelations leads the narrator to Berlin, where the story is only just beginning. Oyler clearly has her finger on the pulse of 2020s culture, and the stark truths in Fake Accounts are sure to spark heated debate among your reading group. 

4. Aquarium by Yaara Shehori

The Ackermans live in a world of their own, entirely by choice. Father Alex, mother Anna, and daughters Lili and Dori are all deaf — avoiding “the hearing” at all costs. Instead, they live an alternative lifestyle, only observing outsiders from afar. But when an earth-shattering secret is revealed, the family unit is torn apart, and the girls are forced to navigate the world of the hearing alone. A beautiful exploration of love and sisterhood, Aquarium raises fascinating questions about the nature of disability and identity.

5. Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

If you’re looking for a palate cleanser after a string of dense novels, you could do far worse than Filthy Animals. A series of interlinked vignettes from critically acclaimed author Brandon Taylor, Filthy Animals provides a snapshot of life in the American Midwest from a number of perspectives, including a young woman fighting cancer, a young man navigating an open relationship, and a group of teenagers whose tensions reach boiling point. Your book club will delight in untangling this complex web of relationships, and the breadth of stories guarantees there’ll be something for everyone.

6. Outlawed by Anna North

Ada’s running out of time. In a frontier town where women who can’t have children are hanged for witchcraft, she’s still not pregnant — and quickly approaching her first wedding anniversary. As panic sets in, Ada realizes her hometown is no longer safe, so she goes on the run. She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang,  a group of female and non-binary outlaws who dream of setting up a safe haven for women on the frontier — but the risks they’ll have to take to get there are steep. Unlike anything your book club has read before, this wild wild Western piece of feminist fiction is a little bit True Grit , a little bit The Handmaid’s Tale , and a whole lot of adventure.

7. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

In Cherie Jones’ much-hyped debut novel, a murder brings two very different couples crashing into each other’s orbits . Set on Barbados, this thriller shatters our conceptions of the island paradise and exposes the dark underbelly lurking beneath even the most picturesque communities. We follow two women: pregnant hairdresser Lala, trapped in a violent marriage, and the wealthy Mira, who has left her life of luxury in London and returned home to Baxter’s Beach. When Lala knocks on Mira’s front door late at night, in labor and alone, what unfurls is as brutal as it is shocking. A searing study of class and crime, there’s no chance you’ll put this book club book down before the final page.

8. One of the Good Ones by Maika and Maritza Moulite

When teenage activist Kezi is tragically killed after a social justice rally, the public outrage is overwhelming. Her sisters Happi and Genny, while dealing with their own grief, must also reckon with an unexpected outcome: their brilliant, but ultimately very human sister’s elevation as an infallible martyr. As the public stamps Kezi’s memory with the label “one of the good ones”, her sisters struggle to reconcile the real-life Kezi with the angelic figure she’s become. They confront uncomfortable questions about legacy, fallibility, and who “deserves” to be mourned — and by implication, who doesn’t. Deeply timely and edifying, One of the Good Ones is a certified must-read by a powerhouse sister duo.

10. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

Another great option for any book club facing novel fatigue, fans of the essay form will be delighted to hear that 2021 is bringing a whole new arrangement of writings by the incomparable Joan Didion. This timeless collection of pieces — spanning the breadth of her career — tackles insecurity, femininity, and the wider culture. A colorful array of characters and situations populate the pages of this carefully curated anthology, meaning you’ll be spoiled for choice when it comes to talking points.

11. With Teeth: A Novel by Kristen Arnett

 Sammie is losing her grip on life. Her troubled son has become increasingly threatening and she’s started to resent her absent wife. As tensions reach boiling point, she’s forced to reckon with her own failings as she attempts to figure out where things went wrong. Peppered with surprising moments of dry humor despite the challenging subject matter, Kristen Arnett’s latest novel is a profoundly honest examination of family dynamics and the trials and tribulations of parenthood.

12. A Pho Love Story by Loan Le

It’s a tale as old as time: young lovers from feuding families are forced to battle against the odds to make their star-crossed romance work. But Loan Le’s 21st-century reimagining has a (not so) secret ingredient — a whole lot of noodle soup. Bao and Linh’s families run rival Vietnamese restaurants, so when a romance sparks between them, they’ll need to decide what they’re willing to risk to follow their hearts’ desire. A nourishing, savory rom-com that’s guaranteed to delight, this debut novel is the heaping portion of comfort your book club has been craving. (Noodle soup for the soul, anyone?)

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Evergreen classics for book club books

If you’re not in the mood for a new release and want to go for some tried-and-true reads, here are some we’ve hand-selected for their ability to spark conversation. These much-discussed volumes range from the oldest of the old (we’re talking 800BC ) to hyped recent releases that your book club may have missed and we think are worth circling back round to.

13. The Secret History by Donna Tartt

If you still haven’t picked up this cult classic, it’s definitely time to suggest The Secret History to the group. A heady, atmospheric mystery that spawned an entire subculture (“dark academia”, anyone?), The Secret History is a coming-of-age novel like no other. Following a group of classics students at an elite college, the story details their gradual unraveling — a downward spiral that ends with a death amongst their ranks. As you’ll know if you’ve ever met one of the novel’s devoted fanbase, it’s a book people simply cannot stop talking about  — perfect book club fodder.

14. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

More than 200 years after its release, the questions raised by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remain as pressing as ever. Considering its enduring relevance in popular culture, you probably know the plot already, so we won’t bore you; but suffice to say, this seminal story about a scientist creating a sentient creature still holds up today. Frankenstein will have your book group up until the wee hours discussing issues of personhood, humanity, and the ethics of science —not least because this horror classic will leave you more than a little spooked. 

16. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

There’s a certain amount of snobbery around including YA and children’s literature within a book club reading list. However, even the most sceptical reader will find their preconceptions challenged by Mark Haddon’s superlative coming-of-age mystery novel. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime follows Christopher, a boy with autism who investigates the mysterious death of his neighbor’s pet dog, only to stumble across a number of unexpected and uncomfortable truths about his family. Raising important discussions about identity, and providing insight into both the challenges and possibilities of neurodivergence, The Curious Incident is deeply thoughtful YA. Moral of the story: don’t think kidlit can’t be serious!

17 . Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

A word of warning: this 2020 Booker winner isn’t an easy one to stomach. The heartbreaking tale of Shuggie, a working class boy in Thatcher-era Glasgow, is relentlessly harrowing, touching on themes of addiction, abuse, sexual assault, and suicide. This brutal examination of a toxic mother-son bond shocked readers and critics, yet captured something universal in its authentic depiction of family life in impossible circumstances. If your club is looking for a critically acclaimed read that tackles serious topics, Shuggie is an important recent release to get under your belt.

18. The Odyssey by Homer

Ancient Greek literature might sound dry, but there’s a reason readers have been attracted to The Odyssey’s siren song for millenia. The story of Odysseus’ voyage home to his faithful wife Penelope is a foundational text — one that you’ll find echoes of in many of your favorite modern titles. So if you want to dig down into literary history, or have a greater appreciation for some of your modern picks by way of better understanding their ancient allusions, treat your book club to this blast from the past. 

19. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people call it “the intellectual equivalent of Kraft macaroni and cheese” (and by “some people” we mean Stephen King). Wherever you land, it’s undeniable that Dan Brown’s blockbusting bestseller The Da Vinci Code is divisive enough to get conversation flowing. This art-historical thriller follows a twisting tale of murder and code-cracking, steeped in art history and religion, and it’s literally impossible to have nothing to say about it — for better or worse.

20. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Your book club might usually stick to literary fiction, but if you want a well-rounded diet, you shouldn’t neglect genre fiction! For those in the market for a healthy helping of sci-fi , you might want to start with HG Wells’ 1897 classic, War of the Worlds . Beyond the surface-level plot, which chronicles the traumatic arrival of Martians on Earth, you’ll find deftly crafted social commentary, exploring the devastating effects of colonialism in allegorical terms. Careful reading and close examination are rewarded here, making it a book club staple.

21. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

The great book club books often pose one overarching question and challenges its reader to discern an answer. In the case of Girl, Woman, Other, that question is clear : What does it mean to be a girl, a woman, or a gender-nonconforming person in Black Britain? This breathtaking portrait of twelve female and nonbinary people across the African diaspora is as vividly realized as it is absorbing. Evaristo’s mastery in the field of the short story ensures  every section is a self-contained gem, each following one of our twelve leads, whose intersecting lives cross lines of class and identity. As beautiful as it is important, if you haven’t read it already you’ll want to pick this one up sooner rather than later.

22. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

For a stylish slice of historical fiction, Markus Zusak’s Book Thief is a go-to choice for many book clubs. Covering broad thematic ground, this WWII novel tells the story of Liesel, a young girl coming of age in Nazi Germany. Perhaps best-known for being a book narrated by Death, this might sound a little out there for some readers. But far from being bleak or gimmicky, the beautiful prose and moments of joy make this expertly executed and unique narrative perspective a delight to analyze.

23. My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

If there’s one thing book lovers love reading about, it’s book lovers. For those who want to get a little self-indulgent, My Life in Middlemarch is a beautiful reflection on the importance of reading that bookworms are guaranteed to enjoy. Part memoir, part ode to literature, author Rebecca Mead leads us through the story of her life-long, evolving relationship with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (another book club classic, if you don’t mind your books running long). An ideal pick if your club’s motivation is flagging and you need a reminder of the life changing magic of a good book.

24. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

While we might instinctively resist the books we’ve always been told to read, sometimes, there’s a reason the classics are classics. As brilliant as it is controversial ( it’s the eighth most banned book in American libraries ), The Lord of the Flies is shocking, visceral, and a guaranteed conversation starter. A tale about a group of boys left to their own devices on a desert island, and their ensuing struggle to find order among chaos, Golding’s book is a brutal look at humanity, community, and civilization. It’s a staple for any book club due to the timelessness of its themes, but be warned: it isn’t for the faint of heart.

25. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

If you had to pick between saving the man you love's life, or preserving your sister's freedom, which would you choose? Or, to put it another way, is blood thicker than water when actual blood is involved? Okinyan Braithwaite's searingly tense yet darkly humorous debut novel asks this among many other questions: not least, where the line between comedy and horror lies. One of our picks for must-read books by black authors , My Sister, the Serial Killer will produce heated debate and nervous giggles in equal parts .

26 . Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Released to incessant buzz in 2019, Fleishman is in Trouble tells the story of an acrimonious divorce, a forty-something man navigating the world of online dating, and a sudden disappearance. The tale of Fleishman and his ex-wife’s vanishing act has a lot to say about 21st-century marriage and the anxieties that underpin middle-class life, meaning there’s every chance it’ll hit a little close to home for some readers (in a way only a truly incisive book can). But if you can wince through the pain, you won’t be disappointed by this blisteringly funny, yet fiercely moving, page-turner that stealthily packs a powerful feminist punch. 

27. Animal Farm by George Orwell

It might seem to have become the reserve of high school English classes over time, but there’s still a lot to unpack in George Orwell’s 1945 novella. This allegorical tale of political power, democracy, and communism — all explored through the lens of farm animals — is an enduring statement that never fails to leave us reeling, and therefore a guaranteed big hitter for any discussion group. Even if your knowledge of WWII and the era of Stalin is a little rustier than you’d like, Orwell’s prose is so sharp, compelling, and clear that you can’t fail to hear something of what he’s saying in Animal Farm — and feel a little blinded by its brightness. Packed with wit and humor, this is a book for everyone.

28. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Another book that explores literature’s power to transport and transform us, The Midnight Library makes poignant fodder for the kind of avid readers that make up a book club. The premise is an intriguing one: imagine you could retrace every fork in the road over the course of your life, and lead any of the lives you might have lived if you’d made different choices. What would you change? Well, reading the books that stock the shelves of the Midnight Library allows you to do just that. A delightful dose of magical realism, The Midnight Library posits questions about regret and fate that won’t fail to get you reminiscing.

29. Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Sometimes, the best book discussions are thinly veiled arguments. If you want to throw a cat among the pigeons, suggest this Harper Lee’s deeply controversial first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird to your book club . Divisive among casual readers as it has among critics and literary historians, this book offers an unexpected divergence from the civil rights classic we are more familiar with. It’ll spark interesting discussions around authorship, ownership, and how much a book can belong to its readers. And hey, if you’re happy to do a double bill, why not read both Watchman and Mockingbird — the comparison between the two is where the debate really heats up.

30. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

If you’re looking to broaden your genre horizons, why not give narrative nonfiction books a try? Lisa Taddeo’s breathtaking Three Women is a great way to dip your toes into the waters of creative journalism. Following the true stories of (surprise, surprise) three women, Taddeo chronicles their sexual and emotional lives in stunning detail. A complex snapshot of the internal worlds and sexuality of American women in the 21st century, this book will challenge your preconceptions of what nonfiction should look like.

31. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley’s classic masterpiece is an uncanny prediction of a future that arrived far quicker than he expected. Reading this 1932 novel only gets more rewarding as the decades pass, and we’re able to read with one foot firmly in the present, spotting the eerie parallels between Huxley’s speculative future and our own modern world. A prescient and brilliant work of dystopian sci-fi, Brave New World is a must-read — so why not kill two birds with one stone, and tick off a book club read and one of the books you should read before you die in one go?

32 . The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Another SFF classic that sparks fascinating discussion, Philip Pullman’s fantasy series is so thematically rich that the fantastical elements are just the cherry on top — although, talking polar bears and shape-shifting daemons are quite the cherry. For those who enjoy drawing out parallels between fiction and the real world, Pullman’s presentation of an alternative Oxford touches astutely upon religious and political power in a world far closer to our own than initial impressions might suggest, creating ample room for debate and analysis as a group.

33. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

He's undeniably one of the most influential authors of all time, but the deeply idiosyncratic Haruki Murakami's work is deeply challenging, and usually provokes either an ecstatically positive, or strongly negative reaction. His sparse style is divisive, and his often bizarre narrative structures are deliberately posing a riddle to his readers. Kafka on the Shore is our recommended starting point for this extraordinary author : it's one you’ll want to talk out the second you’re finished with it, so it’s best to rope a whole book club into doing it with you.

34 . Little Fires Everywhere: A Novel by Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng’s gripping 2017 psychological thriller explores unnervingly familiar territory for most readers. This domestic drama details the anxieties of a mother, and the dangers of hanging on to your children too tightly, drawing relatable concerns out to their most extreme conclusions. Also bringing important conversations about race and class to the table, Ng’s second novel became a book club classic immediately upon launch. If you skipped it the first time around, it’s well worth circling back to.

35. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

Children’s books may seem like a thing of your literary past, but don’t forget that there’s often more than meets the eye in some of your childhood favorites. One classic that’s well worth revisiting is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe : CS Lewis’ biblical allegory may have gone over your head when you were a kid, but it’s a masterpiece of symbolism that you’ll appreciate on a whole new level as an adult. Plus, it gets extra points for nostalgia, making it a surefire crowd-pleaser at any book club night. 

Hungry for more recommended reads? Check out our list of the 115 best books of all time .

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100 Best Book Club Books of All Time (By Year)

If you’re looking for the next book for your book club, this is a list of the 100 Best Book Club Books of All Time . The books are listed in reverse chronological order (so newer books are first), based on publication year.

The list has a preference for titles released in more recent years, but includes notable titles that were published in earlier years as well that have remained firmly on book club reading lists.

Happy reading and if you think there’s something missing, feel free to drop me a line in the comments below!

For more book club reads, see the Best Book Club Books of 2021 or the Best Book Club Books of 2020 .

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Great list! I have heard a lot about some of the books from this list. I have read only 3 but I plan to add some to my TBR. Thank you for sharing!

My book group have read many of the books on this list, and I personally have read and loved even more of them – thanks for producing this list, I’ll certainly check out some of the ones I haven’t read!

I only count 91 books. Are there more to come?

This is an incredible list! I’m definitely inspired to make better use of my Kindle. Great blog and site Jennifer!

What a great list of books!! I have read quite a few on this list…24!!! And others on this list are already on my nightstand waiting impatiently. Not sure if you have a section of “If you like this book, you should read this”. I follow authors so something like that would be helpful. Either way, this list is amazing and the goal now is to read them all. Thank you! Your site is beautiful!!

What an amazing list!! We must be of like minds because I have read 24 of them…like The Handmaid’s Tale and my favorite, A Thousand Splendid Suns!! I am not sure if you have a section like “If you like this book, you should read this” but that would be really helpful. Either ways this is a great list and the goal now is to read all of them. Thank you for such a beautiful site!!!

The 50 Best Biographies of All Time

Think you know the full and complete story about George Washington, Steve Jobs, or Joan of Arc? Think again.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

Biographies have always been controversial. On his deathbed, the novelist Henry James told his nephew that his “sole wish” was to “frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter” by destroying his personal letters and journals. And one of our greatest living writers, Hermione Lee, once compared biographies to autopsies that add “a new terror to death”—the potential muddying of someone’s legacy when their life is held up to the scrutiny of investigation.

Why do we read so many books about the lives and deaths of strangers, as told by second-hand and third-hand sources? Is it merely our love for gossip, or are we trying to understand ourselves through the triumphs and failures of others?

To keep this list from blossoming into hundreds of titles, we only included books currently in print and translated into English. We also limited it to one book per author, and one book per subject. In ranked order, here are the best biographies of all time.

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 1844 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 2013, and it’s only a matter of time before a filmmaker turns it into a big-screen blockbuster.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown

Few biographies are as genuinely fun to read as this barnburner from the irreverent English critic Craig Brown. Princess Margaret may have been everyone’s favorite character from Netflix’s The Crown , but Brown’s eye for ostentatious details and revelatory insights will help you see why everyone in the 1950s—from Pablo Picasso and Gore Vidal to Peter Sellers and Andy Warhol—was obsessed with her. When book critic Parul Sehgal says that she “ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice,” you know you’re in for a treat.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, by Alec Nevala-Lee

If you want to feel optimistic about the future again, look no further than this brilliant biography of Buckminster Fuller, the “modern Leonardo da Vinci” of the 1960s and 1970s who came up with the idea of a “Spaceship Earth” and inspired Silicon Valley’s belief that technology could be a global force for good (while earning plenty of critics who found his ideas impractical). Alec Nevala-Lee’s writing is as serene and precise as one of Fuller’s geodesic domes, and his research into never-before-seen documents makes this a genuinely groundbreaking book full of surprises.

Free Press Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D.G. Kelley

The late American jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk has been so heavily mythologized that it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. But Robin D. G. Kelley’s biography is an essential book for jazz fans looking to understand the man behind the myths. Monk’s family provided Kelley with full access to their archives, resulting in chapter after chapter of fascinating details, from his birth in small-town North Carolina to his death across the Hudson from Manhattan.

University of Chicago Press Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest

There are dozens of books about America’s most celebrated architect, but Secrest’s 1998 biography is still the most fun to read. For one, she doesn’t shy away from the fact that Wright could be an absolute monster, even to his own friends and family. Secondly, her research into more than 100,000 letters, as well as interviews with nearly every surviving person who knew Wright, makes this book a one-of-a-kind look at how Wright’s personal life influenced his architecture.

Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad

Ralph Ellison’s landmark novel, Invisible Man , is about a Black man who faced systemic racism in the Deep South during his youth, then migrated to New York, only to find oppression of a slightly different kind. What makes Arnold Rampersand’s honest and insightful biography of Ellison so compelling is how he connects the dots between Invisible Man and Ellison’s own journey from small-town Oklahoma to New York’s literary scene during the Harlem Renaissance.

Oscar Wilde: A Life, by Matthew Sturgis

Now remembered for his 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde was one of the most fascinating men of the fin-de-siècle thanks to his poems, plays, and some of the earliest reported “celebrity trials.” Sturgis’s scintillating biography is the most encyclopedic chronicle of Wilde’s life to date, thanks to new research into his personal notebooks and a full transcript of his libel trial.

Beacon Press A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, by Angela Jackson

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1950, but because she spent most of her life in Chicago instead of New York, she hasn’t been studied or celebrated as often as her peers in the Harlem Renaissance. Luckily, Angela Jackson’s biography is full of new details about Brooks’s personal life, and how it influenced her poetry across five decades.

Atria Books Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, by Dana Stevens

Was Buster Keaton the most influential filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century? Dana Stevens makes a compelling case in this dazzling mix of biography, essays, and cultural history. Much like Keaton’s filmography, Stevens playfully jumps from genre to genre in an endlessly entertaining way, while illuminating how Keaton’s influence on film and television continues to this day.

Algonquin Books Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation, by Dean Jobb

Dean Jobb is a master of narrative nonfiction on par with Erik Larsen, author of The Devil in the White City . Jobb’s biography of Leo Koretz, the Bernie Madoff of the Jazz Age, is among the few great biographies that read like a thriller. Set in Chicago during the 1880s through the 1920s, it’s also filled with sumptuous period details, from lakeside mansions to streets choked with Model Ts.

Vintage Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee’s biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton could easily have made this list. But her book about a less famous person—Penelope Fitzgerald, the English novelist who wrote The Bookshop, The Blue Flower , and The Beginning of Spring —might be her best yet. At just over 500 pages, it’s considerably shorter than those other biographies, partially because Fitzgerald’s life wasn’t nearly as well documented. But Lee’s conciseness is exactly what makes this book a more enjoyable read, along with the thrilling feeling that she’s uncovering a new story literary historians haven’t already explored.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark

Many biographers have written about Sylvia Plath, often drawing parallels between her poetry and her death by suicide at the age of thirty. But in this startling book, Plath isn’t wholly defined by her tragedy, and Heather Clark’s craftsmanship as a writer makes it a joy to read. It’s also the most comprehensive account of Plath’s final year yet put to paper, with new information that will change the way you think of her life, poetry, and death.

Pontius Pilate, by Ann Wroe

Compared to most biography subjects, there isn’t much surviving documentation about the life of Pontius Pilate, the Judaean governor who ordered the execution of the historical Jesus in the first century AD. But Ann Wroe leans into all that uncertainty in her groundbreaking book, making for a fascinating mix of research and informed speculation that often feels like reading a really good historical novel.

Brand: History Book Club Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana

In the early nineteenth century, Simón Bolívar led six modern countries—Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela—to independence from the Spanish Empire. In this rousing work of biography and geopolitical history, Marie Arana deftly chronicles his epic life with propulsive prose, including a killer first sentence: “They heard him before they saw him: the sound of hooves striking the earth, steady as a heartbeat, urgent as a revolution.”

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, by Yunte Huang

Ever read a biography of a fictional character? In the 1930s and 1940s, Charlie Chan came to popularity as a Chinese American police detective in Earl Derr Biggers’s mystery novels and their big-screen adaptations. In writing this book, Yunte Huang became something of a detective himself to track down the real-life inspiration for the character, a Hawaiian cop named Chang Apana born shortly after the Civil War. The result is an astute blend between biography and cultural criticism as Huang analyzes how Chan served as a crucial counterpoint to stereotypical Chinese villains in early Hollywood.

Random House Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford

Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most fascinating women of the twentieth century—an openly bisexual poet, playwright, and feminist icon who helped make Greenwich Village a cultural bohemia in the 1920s. With a knack for torrid details and creative insights, Nancy Milford successfully captures what made Millay so irresistible—right down to her voice, “an instrument of seduction” that captivated men and women alike.

Simon & Schuster Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Few people have the luxury of choosing their own biographers, but that’s exactly what the late co-founder of Apple did when he tapped Walter Isaacson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Adapted for the big screen by Aaron Sorkin in 2015, Steve Jobs is full of plot twists and suspense thanks to a mind-blowing amount of research on the part of Isaacson, who interviewed Jobs more than forty times and spoke with just about everyone who’d ever come into contact with him.

Brand: Random House Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff

The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Without my wife, I wouldn’t have written a single novel.” And while Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra could also easily make this list, her telling of Véra Nabokova’s life in Russia, Europe, and the United States is revolutionary for finally bringing Véra out of her husband’s shadow. It’s also one of the most romantic biographies you’ll ever read, with some truly unforgettable images, like Vera’s habit of carrying a handgun to protect Vladimir on butterfly-hunting excursions.

Greenblatt, Stephen Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt

We know what you’re thinking. Who needs another book about Shakespeare?! But Greenblatt’s masterful biography is like traveling back in time to see firsthand how a small-town Englishman became the greatest writer of all time. Like Wroe’s biography of Pontius Pilate, there’s plenty of speculation here, as there are very few surviving records of Shakespeare’s daily life, but Greenblatt’s best trick is the way he pulls details from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets to construct a compelling narrative.

Crown Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

When Kiese Laymon calls a book a “literary miracle,” you pay attention. James Baldwin’s legacy has enjoyed something of a revival over the last few years thanks to films like I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk , as well as books like Glaude’s new biography. It’s genuinely a bit of a miracle how he manages to combine the story of Baldwin’s life with interpretations of Baldwin’s work—as well as Glaude’s own story of discovering, resisting, and rediscovering Baldwin’s books throughout his life.

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Best Biographies

The best biographies of 2023: the national book critics circle shortlist, recommended by elizabeth taylor.

Winner of the 2023 NBCC biography prize

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Talented biographers examine the interplay between individual qualities and greater social forces, explains Elizabeth Taylor —chair of the judges for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award for biography. Here, she offers us an overview of their five-book shortlist, including a garlanded account of the life of J. Edgar Hoover and a group biography of post-war female philosophers.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge

Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman

Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs

1 G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

2 the grimkés: the legacy of slavery in an american family by kerri k. greenidge, 3 mr. b: george balanchine’s twentieth century by jennifer homans, 4 metaphysical animals: how four women brought philosophy back to life by clare mac cumhaill & rachael wiseman, 5 up from the depths: herman melville, lewis mumford, and rediscovery in dark times by aaron sachs.

I t’s a pleasure to have you back , Elizabeth—this time to discuss the National Book Critics Circle’s 2023 biography shortlist. You’ve been chair of the judging panel for a while, so you’re in a great position to tell us whether it has been a good year for biography.

That comes through in the shortlist, I think. There’s a real range here. I think any reader is bound to find something to appeal to their tastes.

Shaping a shortlist seems quite like arranging a bouquet. A clutch of peony, begonia, or orchid stems…each may be lovely, an exemplar in its own way. We aspire to assemble a glorious arrangement—a quintet of blooms that reflect the wildly varied human experiences represented in the verdant garden of biography.

Let’s talk about G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century first, then, shall we? It is your 2023 winner of the NBCC’s prize for best biography; it also won a Pulitzer Prize . It’s also, and correct me if I’m wrong, the most traditional of the biographies that made the list.

G-Man is traditional in as much as Beverly Gage captures the full sweep of Hoover’s life, cradle to grave: 1895 to 1972. In that way, structurally G-Man sits aside the epics of David McCullough ( Truman , John Adams ) and Ron Chernow ( Grant , Alexander Hamilton ).

Unlike those valorized national leaders, Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents , of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: “We cannot know our own story without understanding his.”

In G-Man , Yale University professor Gage untangles the contradictions in Hoover’s aspirations and cruelty, and locates the paradoxical American story of tensions and anxieties over security, masculinity, and race.

“This year, many biographies were deeply rooted in American soil that required years of research to till”

Hoover lived his entire life in Washington D.C., and Gage entwines his story in the city’s evolution into a global power center and delves deeply into the dark childhood that led him to remain there for college. Critical to understanding Hoover, Gage demonstrates, was his embrace of the Kappa Alpha fraternity; its worldview was informed by Robert E. Lee and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the South , in which racial equality was unacceptable. He shaped the F.B.I. in his image and recruited Kappa Alpha men to the Bureau.

For Hoover, Gage writes, Kappa Alpha was a way to measure character, political sympathies, and, of course, loyalty. One of those men was Clyde Tolson, and Gage documents their trips to nightclubs, the racetrack, vacations, and White House receptions. Hoover did not acknowledge that he and Tolson were a couple, but in the end their separate burial plots were a few yards from one another.

While Hoover feels very much alive on the page, Gage captures the full sweep of American history, chronicling events from the hyper-nationalism of the early part of the century, moving into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., making use of newly unclassified documents. When Hoover’s F.B.I. targeted Nazis and gangsters, there was clarity about good guys and bad guys. But by the mid-century, as the nation began to fracture, he regarded calls for peace and justice as threats to national security. Among the abuses of power committed by Hoover’s F.B.I., for instance, was the wiretapping and harassment of King.

Beyond Hoover’s malfeasance, Gage emphasizes that Hoover was no maverick. He tapped into a dark part of the national psyche and had public opinion on his side. Through Hoover, Americans could see themselves, and, as Gage argues, “what we valued and refused to see.”

A biography like this does make you realize how deeply world events might be impacted or even partially predicted by the family background or the personalities of a small number of key individuals.

We should step through the rest of the books on your 2023 biography shortlist. Let’s start with Kerri K. Greenidge’s The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family , which is the story not only of the Grimké Sisters Sarah and Angelina, two well-known abolitionists, but Black members of their family as well.

I was eager to read The Grimkés as I had admired Greenidge’s earlier biography, Black Radical , about Boston civil rights leader and abolitionist newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter. Greenidge, a professor at Tufts University, brings her unique, perceptive eye to African American civil rights in the North.

Now Greenidge’s The Grimkés sits on my bookshelf next to The Hemingses of Monticello , the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Annette Gordon-Reed who exposed the contradictions of one of the most venerated figures in American history, Thomas Jefferson. In the Grimke family, Greenidge has found a gnarled family tree, deeply rooted in generations of trauma.

Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been exalted as brave heroines who defied antebellum Southern piety and headed northward to embrace abolition. Greenridge makes the powerful case that, in clinging to this mythology, a more troubling story is obscured. In the North, as the Grimké sisters lived comfortably and agitated for change, they enjoyed the financial benefits of their slaveholding family in South Carolina.

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After the Civil War, they learned that their brute of a brother had fathered at least two sons with a woman whom he had enslaved. The sisters provided some financial assistance in the education of these two young men, one attended Harvard Law School and the other Princeton Divinity School—and did not let their nephews forget it.

Not only does Greenidge provide a revisionist history of the Grimke sisters, but she also takes account of the full Grimké family and extends their story beyond the 19th century. She delves into the dynamics of racial subordination and how free white men who conceive children — whether from rape or a relationship spanning decades with enslaved women—destroy families. Generations of children are haunted by this history.  Poignantly, Greenidge evokes the life and work of the sisters’ grandniece Angelina (‘Nana’) Weld Grimké , a talented—and troubled—queer playwright and poet, who carried the heavy weight of the generational trauma she inherited.

This sounds like a family saga of the kind you might be more likely to find in fiction.

Let’s turn to Mr B . : George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans, the story of the noted choreographer. Why did this make your shortlist of the best biographies of 2023?

The perfect match of biographer and subject! A dancer who trained with Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York and is now dance critic for The New Yorker, Homans has written a biography of the man known as ‘the Shakespeare of Dance.’ In felicitous prose, Homans channels the dancer’s experience onto the page, from the body movements that can produce such beauty to the aching tendons and ligaments. Training is transformation, Homan writes, and working with Balanchine was a kind of metamorphosis tangled with pain. She evokes the dances so vividly that one can almost hear the music.

“At the heart of biography is the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces”

Homans captures Balanchine in a constant state of reinvention, tracing his life from Czarist Russia to Weimar Berlin , finally making his way to post-war New York where he revitalized the world of ballet by embracing modernish, founding New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine was genius whose personal history shape-shifted over the years. Homans grounds Mr. B in more than a hundred interviews, and draws from archives around the world.

Homans captures Balanchine’s charisma and cultural importance, but Mr. B. is no hagiography. Homans grasps the knot of sex and power over women used in his work. He married four times, always to dancers. They were all the same kind of swan-necked, long-waisted, long-limbed women, and although Homans does not write this, his company often sounds more like a cult than art.

And, of course, there is the matter of weight, which Homans dealt with directly, as did Balanchine. He posted a sign: ‘BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY—YOU MUST WEIGH.’

I don’t think I’ve ever considered reading a ballet biography before, but it sounds fascinating.

The next book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist brings us to Oxford, England. This is Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.

At the outset of World War II , a quartet of young women, Oxford students—Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley—were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men,” as Mac Cumhaill, a Durham University professor, and Wiseman, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, write. In their marvelous group biography, MacCumhaill and Wiseman vivify how the friendships of these women congealed to bring “philosophy back to life.”

As their male counterparts departed for the front lines, this brilliant group of women came together in their dining halls and shared lodging quarters to challenge the thinking of their male colleagues. In the shadows of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, these friends rejected the logical positivists who favoured empirical scientific questions. They didn’t really create a distinct philosophical approach as much as they shared an interest in the metaphysics of morals.

Brilliant. A book that is ostensibly ‘improving’ but which turns out to be absolutely chock-full of gossip sounds perfect to me. Let’s move on to the fourth book on the NBCC’s 2023 biography shortlist, which is Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times by Aaron Sachs.

A biography about writing biography ! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs   entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis.

While Melville is now firmly ensconced in the American canon, most appreciation and respect for him was posthumous. The 20th-century Melville revival was largely sparked by a now overlooked Mumford, once so prominent that he appeared on a 1936 Time  magazine cover.

Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times.

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As Mumford grappled with tragedies wrought by World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic and urban decay, Melville had dealt with the bloody Civil War , slavery , and industrialization. In a certain way, this book is about the art of biography itself, two writers wrestling with modernity in a bleak world. In delving into Melville’s angst, Mumford was thrust into great turmoil. Sachs evokes so clearly and painfully this bond that almost did Mumford in, and writes that “Melville, it turns out, was Mumford’s white whale.”

There’s a real sense of range in this shortlist. But do you get a sense of there being certain trends in biography as a genre in 2023?

In many ways, this is a golden era for biography. There are fewer dull but worthy books, more capacious and improvisational ones. More series of short biographies that pack a big punch. We see more group biographies and illustrated biographies. But just as figures and groups once considered marginal are being centered, records that document those lives are vanishing.

The crisis in local news and the homogenization of national and international news will soon be a crisis for biographers and historians. Where would historians be without the ‘slave narratives’ from the Federal Writers Project , or the Federal Theatre Project ? Reconstruction of public events—federal elections, national tragedies, and so on—may be possible, but we lose that wide spectrum of human experience. We need to preserve these artifacts and responses to events as they happen. Biographies are time-consuming labors of love and passion, and are often expensive to produce. We need to ensure that we are generating and saving the emails, the records, the to-do lists of ordinary life.

The affluent among us will always be able to commission histories of their companies or families, but are those the only ones that will endure?

June 30, 2023

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.

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The 24 Best Book Club Books for Your Next Group Read

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There are competing theories about how to pick the best book club book. When I nobly started a book club in my early 20s, I had grand ambitions of filling in the holes in my undergrad education. I think we started with Confessions of Zeno . Years later, I joined what had been dubbed the “high-low club,” a group that used the gathering as an excuse to read some of the mass-market fiction that was dominating the bestseller lists. I think the first book that group read was Fifty Shades of Grey. A decade later, that’s the group I still meet with every month, and it’s solidified allegiances with some people I now consider my closest friends.

There is really no answer to what makes the best book club book, so I asked a few trusted reader friends, including Kate Slotover, who is so obsessed with the matter that she started The Book Club Review Podcast , as well as my favorite local independent book-sellers, Briana Parker and Davi Marra of Brooklyn’s Lofty Pigeon Books . As Kate puts it, it all comes down to the reaction the book provokes: “What you want is a great read, but also, ideally, a book that generates lots of different opinions—then the fun is in the debate, and seeing if you can all meet in the middle.” Below, find some of our choices.

Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman

The protagonist of Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman is feeling impulsive and maybe a little stuck when she decides to post nudes online, leading to a relationship with another couple. But it's her obsessive questioning and chronicling of the dynamics of gender, sex, sexuality, and personality among the three of them (and her girlfriend) that will have you overthinking along with her, and looking for someone to talk it all over with, perhaps mining and divulging your own personal experiences and revelations along the way. Plus, it's pretty sexy. —Briana Parker, co-owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

The Bees by Laline Paull

The Bees: A Novel

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The Bees , Laline Paull’s compulsively readable novel set in a beehive, is a bit of a wildcard. I know it will divide people. It tells the story of Flora, a lowly sanitation worker bee, who uncovers a dark secret at the heart of her hive. The social hierarchy is unbending, but Flora knows she is destined for something greater, even though this puts her at odds with her superiors. There is no speech, everyone communicates by pheromones, and Tarantino-esque levels of danger and violence are never far away. Wildly inventive, written with great dramatic flair and ultimately a strong ecological message that will stay with you, your book club will either love it or loathe it, and you’ll have fun finding out which. —Kate Slotover, host of The Book Club Review podcast

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James is so uniquely devastating, it's ideal to have a support system in the form of a book club to read with. Exploring the particularly cruel form of slavery that existed on Jamaican sugar plantations, James brings up thorny issues of consent, desire, love, class, and power without resorting to clichés, presenting a story of such depth and humanity that you'll want to spend hours picking apart the nuances even as you recover emotionally from this wrenching read. —B.P.

Evicted by Matthew Desmond

After hearing the low-grade but long-running buzz about how amazing this book was, I “made” my book club read it. It falls into the category of something I would never pick up on my own, and needed a bit of peer pressure to complete. But I was so glad I did. For those of us who have never confronted the trauma of eviction, it can seem like one of those problems on the periphery. But by deeply embedding himself with his subjects, Desmond shows how thoroughly housing insecurity is entwined with all other corollary effects of poverty. If you don’t have a reliable place to call home (to send mail, to register for school, etc., etc.), it is almost impossible to obtain the modicum of stability that is necessary to begin to escape poverty. This is an incredibly sobering text that reads like a novel. It shook our book club, and years later I still think about it. — Chloe Schama

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Fleishman Is in Trouble

My book club read this book for one of (maybe the) last gatherings before the pandemic, and when I polled my books club members about their favorites, this one was nominated. (Full disclosure: We are a group of New York City women who undoubtedly share some zip codes with Brodesser-Akner’s characters.) This is one of those books that puts its finger very precisely and somewhat uncomfortably on the material concerns of a certain milieu. Did it cut close to home? It certainly made for a good discussion. —C.S.

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

Another can’t-fail book club choice is Free , Lea Ypi’s memoir of her childhood in Albania, a country ruled by the hardline Communist party and largely closed to the countries beyond its borders. Everything changed once Albania opened up to the West in the late 1980s, and Ypi was finally able to understand the truth behind lies she had been brought up with all her life. Today Ypi is a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and reading her story you understand why, for her, politics and economics could never be abstract—she shows the dramatic way in which they affected a whole nation of people, and some of the good that was lost along with the bad. It’s a fantastic book, vivid, relatable and surprisingly enjoyable, despite the fact that there is some heartbreaking material contained within. It will lead to rich discussions afterwards, I guarantee it. (Also-ran: Border by Kapka Kassabova.) —K.S.

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman

Help Wanted

Many a 20-something Brooklyn dweller saw themselves reflected in Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathanial P . That is likely not true of her second novel, which is set in a big box store, but has none of the voyeuristic distance that the premise might imply. This is a caper told with such sensitivity and nuance that it might just alter the way you think of the workplace novel. Set against the ruins (or triumphs?) of late-stage capitalism, Help Wanted gave my book club a huge amount to chew over in terms of—and this isn’t much of an overstatement!—what America is. All that, and it’s a great read that every member of my group finished. (While we have the best of intents, but I can’t recall the last time that happened.) —C.S.

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto

How I Won a Nobel Prize

Sometimes you read something new and immediately think how brilliant it would be for book club. How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto has all the hallmarks of a book that will set sparks flying, an of-the-moment campus novel that deftly explores moral relativism. The protagonist is Helen, a brilliant physicist working on superconductors, who is forced to move to a new academic institution brought into existence by a reclusive billionaire (his face smoothed away by wealth) that exists to provide a haven for academics and cultural figures who have been “canceled” elsewhere. Unwillingly along for the ride is Helen’s partner, Hew, who disapproves of the whole enterprise. Enjoy the fascinating and surprisingly accessible dive into theoretical physics, appreciate the accumulating tension of the psychological drama, and laugh out loud at the one-liners. (Also-ran: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, trans. Adrian Nathan West.) —K.S.

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read

The more serious you and your book club become about reading, the more hopeless you may end up feeling about all the books you will never, even with the best of intentions, have time for. How to Talk About Books you Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard will make you feel much better about this and, indeed, let you beautifully off the hook if you haven’t managed to finish your book club read in time. That’s ok, you can skim, flip through, read the end, or even just hold the book, unopened in your hands, all are fine with Bayard and he makes a compelling case for why you might be better able to discuss the book if you haven’t actually read it. Although Bayard’s credentials as a reader and academic are serious, his book is delightfully mischievous and funny. Give it a try and see if you agree with him or not. You might want to adopt his notation system for future reference: UB: book unknown to me; SB: book I have skimmed; HB: book I have heard about; and FB: book I have forgotten. —K.S.

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott should be required reading for every New Yorker, as it details, with extraordinary compassion and acuity, a side of the city not often written about or shown. In a monumental feat of immersive journalism, Andrea Elliott spends years  with a Black unhoused family, and the reader comes to know them like their own family. It's a book with the power to change the way you see the world, and what better way to experience that than with others in conversation. —Davi Marra, co-owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab vibrates with beautiful melancholy. In eighteenth-century France, Addie makes a Faustian bargain to live forever, but she is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. The book goes back and forth in time between the first desperate days of her curse and present-day New York where she's figured out how to push up against its limits and carve out a life—until one day, everything changes. Like the show Russian Doll, the book similarly sparks an intense interest to pick apart the nuances of the plot and the decisions of the main character and to consider what you'd do in her unique circumstances. —B.P.

Little Library cookbooks by Kate Young

A tangential thought: If you like to gather friends and serve food at your book club Kate Young’s fabulous series of Little Library cookbooks may be the literary inspiration you need. From a Sebastian-Flyte inspired picnic to a loving recreation of Babette’s Feast (minus the turtle), Young offers a go-to list of crowd pleasers drawing on her expertise as a cook and as a lifelong reader. Pick a recipe: try the Väserbottenostpaj (Swedish cheese tart) inspired by The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, read the text, share the meal, and discuss; the perfect recipe for book club. —K.S.

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

Loved and Missed

It’s no secret that I adore this book , but I promise I wasn’t just seeking new opportunities to plug it when I put it on this list. This nomination comes via my very own book club. When I asked the group chat what book from our readings stayed with them, this was the first response that came back. This delightful little novel (that is immense in its emotional scope) is the kind of quiet-seeming book that might pass you by. But our conversation ranged widely when we discussed it, and while everyone had quite a strong response, the reactions varied and brought up all kinds of questions about parenting, emotional inheritance, and familial responsibility. I have said it before, but this is a really stunning read. —C.S.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is one of those books where its history is just as interesting to discuss as its contents. A too-often-overlooked classic of Russian literature, it presented such a devastating send-up of the Soviet regime that it couldn’t be published until after the author’s death. It's also uproariously funny, original, and weird, so you feel both like you're reading capital L Literature but also having a grand old time. The devil and his entourage visit Moscow, and Soviet Russia and generations of readers were never the same again. —B.P.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Middlemarch

In the depths of COVID winter my best friend, her sister, her dad and I started a book club and kicked it off with Middlemarch . It changed my life! I read the book and listened to the audio book and fell in love with Dorothea and felt I’d moved to the Midlands for a couple of months. I bought the book in January 2021 and the manager at Shakespeare and Co. told me, masked, “I wish it was the middle of March, then we’d have a vaccine available.” Thanks to George Eliot, the next two months flew by and soon enough it was mid-March. —Chloe Malle

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

Book club can be just the nudge you need to read a classic from the past. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr is a slim little novel that was recommended to me by a friend who cited it as his all-time favorite read. It tells the story of Tom Birkin, a traumatized World War I veteran who takes a job in a tiny village in the North of England restoring a medieval mural in the parish church. Over the course of the summer, he comes to know the locals and one other interloper, a young archaeologist excavating a field. Not much happens as slowly, slowly the mural is revealed, and yet Carr’s prose is weaving its spell. At the end you will find yourself reflecting on the nature of time and lived experience and with any luck come away with something that you will carry in your heart for the rest of your days. But at the very least there’s plenty to be charmed by and discuss. Richard Osman says he’s never met a person who didn’t love it! If you buy the Penguin modern classic edition you get the double whammy of the perfect introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald. (Also-ran: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.) —K.S.

Random Family by Adrien Nicole LeBlanc

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

This was another book where the lore preceded my book club’s reading—and probably would have influenced it were the book anything less than a truly astounding tour de force. I first read it about 10 years after it came out, but two decades later, I am sure it still holds up as one of the most amazing feats of embedded journalism. (Davi’s excellent pick, above, Andrea Elliot’s amazing Invisible Child , is a definite heir to the approach.) Another work of non-fiction that is every bit as compelling as a novel, it was a harsh but rewarding read that left us with tons to talk about. —C.S.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the many deeply human stories to be told about the Irish Troubles. It reads like a thriller and culminates in the probable resolution of a decades-long mystery about the identity of the people who kidnapped and murdered a mother of 10 accused of passing sensitive information on to the British. It’s an extraordinary piece of journalism that raises as many questions as it answers, and therefore it’s the perfect pick for a nonfiction book club. —Davi Marra, co-owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama is an extraordinary thriller steeped in a genuine sense of mystery and suspense. Readers are rewarded with a fascinating deep dive into Japanese journalism and policing, all while an urgent procedural unfolds to locate a killer who may be related to a cold case that haunts the novel’s protagonists. Whether you picked up on or missed the clues which point to the unforgettable climax, you absolutely must talk to somebody else who read the book as soon as you finish. —D.M.

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv

Sometimes a book club is all about the text, and sometimes it’s all about what people are bringing to it. This book, which has plenty to discuss between its covers, fell into the latter category when my group discussed it. The book is, loosely, an examination of the mental health industry, and in the opening essay, Aviv, a New Yorker journalist, discloses her own experience being deemed the youngest anorexia patient in America at the age of six—a diagnosis that was partly about a certain kind of medicine, but also about labels and stories, as is so much of the class of care that falls under mental health. Read this one to question the way we interact, categorize, and deal with people whose neurology isn’t quite “normal,” and also to (maybe) learn things about your fellow book club members that you never knew. —C.S.

Super Infinite by Katherine Rundell

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Non-fiction can be great for book club, with the caveat that ideally you want a page-turner. (Our book club is still reeling from the time we attempted Adam Feinstein’s exhaustive biography of Pablo Neruda .) With this in mind I recommend Super Infinite , Katherine Rundell’s prize-winning biography of the poet John Donne. The lines of poetry themselves might not immediately light you up, but Rundell’s analysis will, and to read this book is to walk with her through time. (If you’ve ever read Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road —a book club classic, by the way—and wondered why she was so obsessed with Donne’s sermons, this will put that mystery to rest.) Super Infinite is a fantastic read and made for brilliant book club discussion. If you try it I’d encourage you to go a step further and get everyone to bring a poem they love to share. Trust me, good things will come of this. (Also-rans: The Poetry Pharmacy by William Sieghart, Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Pearl by Sian Hughes.) —K.S.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I ran my post-college book club like a little tyrant, and if it had lasted longer than two books I certainly would’ve made everyone read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Coming in at 400-plus pages, it appears intimidating, but Zevin’s vivid writing and gripping storytelling had me totally spellbound. Tomorrow seems like it was engineered to be a book club read—squabbling over the polarizing main characters, Sam and Sadie, is the perfect low-stakes book-club fodder. —Hannah Jackson

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian

One of the first books we ever read for the show was a fantastic book club read: The Vegetarian by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith). Winner of the 2016 International Booker Prize, this is a psychologically intense short novel structured in three parts. The protagonist, Yeong-Hye, is a young woman who decides she will stop eating meat, without reckoning on the lengths her family will go to in order to get her to conform to South Korean social norms. Beautifully written, surprisingly erotic and ultimately quite strange (but in a good way), this is a novel guaranteed to provoke questions. (A side-benefit of reading any Booker shortlisted novel is that you can avail yourself of the excellent reading guides and extra material on the Booker website, a boon to those who like to have plenty of background.) (Also-rans: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and Love by Hanne Orstavik.) —K.S.

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter

A Woman In the Polar Night

One of our favorite discoveries on the pod was A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (trans. Jane Degras). In 1934 Ritter joined her fur-trapper husband to spend the winter living in an isolated hut on Spitzbergen, a remote island north of Norway. She had hoped it would be an opportunity to “read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content” —and who doesn’t want to do that, but of course life rarely works out as we expect it to. Funny, dry and relatable, it’s impossible not to be charmed by Ritter, or to share her dismay in discovering that there will be another, previously unknown to her, man sharing their cramped living quarters. Read it for the sense of adventure, the beauty of the Arctic, and the profound appreciation of regeneration and rebirth once the sun returns. Discuss Ritter’s extraordinary talent, and collectively lament the fact that she never wrote another book. —K.S.

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The 21 most captivating biographies of all time

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• Biographies illuminate pivotal times and people in history. 
• The biography books on this list are heavily researched and fascinating stories.
• Want more books? Check out the best classics , historical fiction books , and new releases.

For centuries, books have allowed readers to be whisked away to magical lands, romantic beaches, and historical events. Biographies take readers through time to a single, remarkable life memorialized in gripping, dramatic, or emotional stories. They give us the rare opportunity to understand our heroes — or even just someone we would never otherwise know. 

To create this list, I chose biographies that were highly researched, entertainingly written, and offer a fully encompassing lens of a person whose story is important to know in 2021. 

The 21 best biographies of all time:

The biography of a beloved supreme court justice.

"Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg" by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $16.25

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a Supreme Court Justice and feminist icon who spent her life fighting for gender equality and civil rights in the legal system. This is an inspirational biography that follows her triumphs and struggles, dissents, and quotes, packaged with chapters titled after Notorious B.I.G. tracks — a nod to the many memes memorializing Ginsburg as an iconic dissident. 

The startlingly true biography of a previously unknown woman

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $8.06

Henrietta was a poor tobacco farmer, whose "immortal" cells have been used to develop the polio vaccine, study cancer, and even test the effects of an atomic bomb — despite being taken from her without her knowledge or consent. This biography traverses the unethical experiments on African Americans, the devastation of Henrietta Lacks' family, and the multimillion-dollar industry launched by the cells of a woman who lies somewhere in an unmarked grave.

The poignant biography of an atomic bomb survivor

"A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb" by Paul Glynn, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $16.51

Takashi Nagai was a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. A renowned scientist and spiritual man, Nagai continued to live in his ruined city after the attack, suffering from leukemia while physically and spiritually helping his community heal. Takashi Nagai's life was dedicated to selfless service and his story is a deeply moving one of suffering, forgiveness, and survival.

The highly researched biography of Malcolm X

"The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X" by Les Payne and Tamara Payne, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $18.99

Written by the investigative journalist Les Payne and finished by his daughter after his passing, Malcolm X's biography "The Dead are Arising" was written and researched over 30 years. This National Book Award and Pulitzer-winning biography uses vignettes to create an accurate, detailed, and gripping portrayal of the revolutionary minister and famous human rights activist. 

The remarkable biography of an Indigenous war leader

"The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History" by Joseph M. Marshall III, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $14.99 

Crazy Horse was a legendary Lakota war leader, most famous for his role in the Battle of the Little Bighorn where Indigenous people defeated Custer's cavalry. A descendant of Crazy Horse's community, Joseph M. Marshall III drew from research and oral traditions that have rarely been shared but offer a powerful and culturally rich story of this acclaimed Lakota hero.

The captivating biography about the cofounder of Apple

"Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $16.75

Steve Jobs is a cofounder of Apple whose inventiveness reimagined technology and creativity in the 21st century. Water Issacson draws from 40 interviews with Steve Jobs, as well as interviews with over 100 of his family members and friends to create an encompassing and fascinating portrait of such an influential man.

The shocking biography of a woman committed to an insane asylum

"The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear" by Kate Moore, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $22.49

This biography is about Elizabeth Packard, a woman who was committed to an asylum in 1860 by her husband for being an outspoken woman and wife. Her story illuminates the conditions inside the hospital and the sinister ways of caretakers, an unfortunately true history that reflects the abuses suffered by many women of the time.

The defining biography of a formerly enslaved man

"Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $12.79

50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States, Cudjo Lewis was captured, enslaved, and transported to the US. In 1931, the author spent three months with Cudjo learning the details of his life beginning in Africa, crossing the Middle Passage, and his years enslaved before the Civil War. This biography offers a first-hand account of this unspoken piece of painful history.

The biography of a famous Mexican painter

"Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo" by Hayden Herrera, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $24.89

Filled with a wealth of her life experiences, this biography of Frida Kahlo conveys her intelligence, strength, and artistry in a cohesive timeline. The book spans her childhood during the Mexican Revolution, the terrible accident that changed her life, and her passionate relationships, all while intertwining her paintings and their histories through her story.

The exciting biography of Susan Sontag

"Sontag: Her Life and Work" by Benjamin Moser, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $20.24

Susan Sontag was a 20th-century writer, essayist, and cultural icon with a dark reputation. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, archived works, and photographs, this biography extends across Sontag's entire life while reading like an emotional and exciting literary drama.

The biography that inspired a hit musical

"Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $11.04

The inspiration for the similarly titled Broadway musical, this comprehensive biography of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton aims to tell the story of his decisions, sacrifice, and patriotism that led to many political and economic effects we still see today. In this history, readers encounter Hamilton's childhood friends, his highly public affair, and his dreams of American prosperity. 

The award-winning biography of an artistically influential man

"The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke" by Jeffrey C Stewart, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $25.71

Alain Locke was a writer, artist, and theorist who is known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Outlining his personal and private life, Alain Locke's biography is a blooming image of his art, his influences, and the far-reaching ways he promoted African American artistic and literary creations.

The remarkable biography of Ida B. Wells

"Ida: A Sword Among Lions" by Paula J. Giddings, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $15.99

This award-winning biography of Ida B. Wells is adored for its ability to celebrate Ida's crusade of activism and simultaneously highlight the racially driven abuses legally suffered by Black women in America during her lifetime. Ida traveled the country, exposing and opposing lynchings by reporting on the horrific acts and telling the stories of victims' communities and families. 

The tumultuous biography that radiates queer hope

"The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk" by Randy Shilts, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $11.80

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected official in California who was assassinated after 11 months in office. Harvey's inspirational biography is set against the rise of LGBTQIA+ activism in the 1970s, telling not only Harvey Milk's story but that of hope and perseverance in the queer community. 

The biography of a determined young woman

"Obachan: A Young Girl's Struggle for Freedom in Twentieth-Century Japan" by Tani Hanes, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $9.99

Written by her granddaughter, this biography of Mitsuko Hanamura is an amazing journey of an extraordinary and strong young woman. In 1929, Mitsuko was sent away to live with relatives at 13 and, at 15, forced into labor to help her family pay their debts. Determined to gain an education as well as her independence, Mitsuko's story is inspirational and emotional as she perseveres against abuse. 

The biography of an undocumented mother

"The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story" by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $18.40

Born in Mexico and growing up undocumented in Arizona, Aida Hernandez was a teen mother who dreamed of moving to New York. After being deported and separated from her child, Aida found herself back in Mexico, fighting to return to the United States and reunite with her son. This suspenseful biography follows Aida through immigration courts and detention centers on her determined journey that illuminates the flaws of the United States' immigration and justice systems.

The astounding biography of an inspiring woman

"The Black Rose: The Dramatic Story of Madam C.J. Walker, America's First Black Female Millionaire" by Tananarive Due, available on Amazon for $19

Madam C.J. Walker is most well-known as the first Black female millionaire, though she was also a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and born to former slaves in Louisiana. Researched and outlined by famous writer Alex Haley before his death, the book was written by author Tananarive Due, who brings Haley's work to life in this fascinating biography of an outstanding American pioneer.

A biography of the long-buried memories of a Hiroshima survivor

"Surviving Hiroshima: A Young Woman's Story" by Anthony Drago and Douglas Wellman, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $15.59

When Kaleria Palichikoff was a child, her family fled Russia for the safety of Japan until the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima when she was 22 years old. Struggling to survive in the wake of unimaginable devastation, Kaleria set out to help victims and treat the effects of radiation. As one of the few English-speaking survivors, Kaleria was interviewed extensively by the US Army and was finally able to make a new life for herself in America after the war.

A shocking biography of survival during World War II

"Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival" by Laura Hillenbrand, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $8.69

During World War II, Louis Zamperini was a lieutenant bombardier who crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 1943. Struggling to stay alive, Zamperini pulled himself to a life raft where he would face great trials of starvation, sharks, and enemy aircraft. This biography creates an image of Louis from boyhood to his military service and depicts a historical account of atrocities during World War II.  

The comprehensive biography of an infamous leader

"Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $15.39

Mao was a Chinese leader, a founder of the People's Republic of China, and a nearly 30-year chairman of the Chinese Communist Party until his death in 1976. Known as a highly controversial figure who would stop at very little in his plight to rule the world, the author spent nearly 10 years painstakingly researching and uncovering the painful truths surrounding his political rule.

The emotional biography of a Syrian refugee

"A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival" by Melissa Fleming, available on Amazon and Bookshop from $15.33

When Syrian refugee Doaa met Bassem, they decided to flee Egypt for Europe, becoming two of thousands seeking refuge and making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. After four days at sea, their ship was attacked and sank, leaving Doaa struggling to survive with two small children clinging to her and only a small inflation device around her wrist. This is an emotional biography about Doaa's strength and her dangerous and deadly journey towards freedom.

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Best Book Club Books: Memoirs

Memoirs offer an incredible opportunity to immerse yourself in another life with the author as your guide. The true story of how someone overcomes incredible obstacles also allows you to wonder, What would I do?

For a good book club memoir discussion, choose a book that’s a bit outside of your group’s comfort zone. And if discussion questions aren’t provided with the book, ask each member to come with one or two of their own. These memoirs — stories of survival and even triumph — would all make excellent book club books.

Finding Freedom

By erin french.

Celebrated chef Erin French shares her moving story of overcoming obstacles and finding community in her bestselling memoir , Finding Freedom . From her formative years working the line at her dad’s diner to opening her own critically acclaimed restaurant The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine, French’s journey to the head of the table was anything but easy. Indeed, she endured addiction, hit multiple rock bottoms, and faced the challenges of single motherhood along the way. Told with candor and warmth — and enriched by French’s delectable food writing — Finding Freedom celebrates the life-affirming joys of family and finding your voice and the delicious connection between good food and great company.

While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence

By meg kissinger.

In While You Were Out, award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger movingly chronicles her relationship with her family and the mental health crises that they endured. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative journalism , Kissinger’s narrative guides us through moments of personal tragedy, love, resilience, and unexpected humor with an eye toward the future and changing the way we talk about mental health care in America. 

Being Henry: The Fonz...and Beyond

By henry winkler.

With self-deprecating humor and a healthy dose of Hollywood charm, Happy Days star Henry Winkler opens up about his life in this entertaining celebrity memoir. The Emmy Award–winning actor touches on everything from his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the daily grind of showbiz to dazzling anecdotes from the sets of Barry and Arrested Development, and, of course, his career-defining turn as the Fonz on Happy Days . Radiating sincerity and warmth, Being Henry teaches lessons on being truthful to yourself no matter the odds — something every reader can appreciate.

Unmasked: My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

By paul holes.

For true crime aficionados, Paul Holes needs no introduction. The seasoned cold case investigator has dedicated his life to the pursuit of evil and he has helped crack some of the most notorious cases in modern American history, from the kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard to the 20-year manhunt for the Golden State Killer. He’s proud of his work, putting away criminals and providing closure to survivors. But he’s also haunted by a troubling question about his career: What was the cost to his well-being and his family? In this bestselling true crime memoir , Holes looks back on the cases he’s investigated and opens up about the many sacrifices he’s made in pursuit of justice, from frayed personal relationships to missing out on the joys of fatherhood. Delivered with unflinching honesty, Unmasked is a powerful account that “grabs its reader in a stranglehold and proves more fascinating than fiction and darker than any noir narrative” ( Los Angeles Magazine ). 

Hollywood Park

By mikel jollett.

From being born into an infamous cult – to a childhood filled with poverty and addiction, Mikel Jollett struggled to find love and a sense of normalcy in world where nothing made sense. His incredible story is at once heartbreaking and inspiring, and it shows you that family loyalty and fierce determination can take you to places you only dreamed about.

Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares

By aarti namdev shahani.

In a way, NPR correspondent Aarti Shahani has lived the American dream. She and her family immigrated to New York City, she received a scholarship to a top Manhattan private school, and eventually she landed a successful career. But the Shahani family’s struggles equally define these years, especially when her old-world shopkeeper father inadvertently launders money for the Cali drug cartel. This immigrant story presents a look at a controversial topic that is not as black-and-white as some might think, which makes for a thought-provoking dialogue. Discussion questions are  here .

Birdgirl: Looking to the Skies in Search of a Better Future

By mya-rose craig.

From Mya-Rose Craig, the renowned birder and environmentalist who stands at the forefront of a new generation of environmental activists, Birdgirl combines science writing with advocacy and a touching tale of family love. Craig’s nature memoir interweaves her passion for bird-watching with the story of her mother’s mental health crisis, beautifully capturing the planet’s fragile grandeur while championing her mother’s journey and highlighting the restorative power of the natural world. Both thought-provoking and inspiring, Birdgirl is a deeply felt narrative about finding your calling and all the help you need along the way.

Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs

By jennifer finney boylan.

From  New York Times  bestseller and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan comes her newest memoir  Good Boy,  showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. Boylan contemplates her past in ways that prompt you to consider your own transformative times. An ode to dogs, identity, and finding love, the perfect thought-provoking read to share with friends or family.

When Harry Met Minnie

By martha teichner.

Calling all animal lovers: Grab your furry friend and plenty of tissues, and settle in for this touching memoir about love, loss, and soul-warming companionship. When Emmy Award–winning news correspondent Martha Teichner is asked if she’d consider adopting a dog in need, she happily agrees — after all, Harry, the dog in question, is a bull terrier, just like her dog, Minnie. The two canines quickly hit it off; they’re natural companions. And yet, a friendship also blossoms between Martha and Harry’s owner, Carole, a woman who’s dying of cancer caused by exposure to toxins from 9/11. When Harry Met Minnie is a modern-day fairy tale rich with chance encounters, fated friendships, and a bustling New York City backdrop. It’s also a stirring memoir about camaraderie, and how the souls that we meet, both human and canine, leave a lasting impression on our lives.

By LaDoris Hazzard Cordell

What do you do when the system you believe in is flawed? According to Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, you get in there and you fix it. In this eye-opening new memoir , Judge Cordell, the first African American woman to sit on the Superior Court of Northern California, offers an insider’s look at America’s criminal justice system , celebrating its strengths, highlighting its weaknesses, and tracing paths to more equitable judicial methods. Judge Cordell is well aware of the legal system’s shortcomings: shaky plea bargains, unchecked racial biases in law enforcement, and the troubling shift from rehabilitation to punishment are but a few of the weighty issues she tackles here. Nevertheless, Cordell is prepared to put in the work for positive change. In Her Honor, Cordell invites us into her chambers and shares her remarkable journey through the halls of justice, all while maintaining her conviction that the system can work — if we work on it.

Between the World and Me

By ta-nehisi coates.

In a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates seeks to teach one important lesson: how to be a black man in America. He recounts his rough childhood, the importance of black history, and the moment he learns that education and wealth can’t protect you from racism if you’re black. Coates doesn’t put much faith in the American Dream; instead he urges his son to build strong community ties and surround himself with the love he finds there. Discussion questions are  here .

Heavy: An American Memoir

By kiese laymon.

Laymon pulls no punches when describing the abuse he suffered as a child. He places blame squarely in two places: his mother, and America’s institutional racism and sexism. His mother’s strict insistence on good grades, his obesity, and his career struggles are the stressors that lead to him writing. In doing so, he uncovers generations of family abuse and condemns those who did nothing to stop it. It’s a harrowing but important read. Discussion questions are here .

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

By j.d. vance.

Growing up in a family of rust-belt have-nots has left Vance with some clear opinions on why some people make it in America and others don’t — specifically within the white working class. He shines a harsh light on the psychology of a region that champions the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” maxim, while simultaneously dishing out plenty of blame for their inability to do so. Discussion questions are  here .

Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

By heather harpham.

Harpham is thrilled by her new relationship with Brian until she gets pregnant … and Brian balks, leaving her alone and disillusioned. New-mom joy turns into a nightmare when baby Gracie grows suddenly, gravely ill. Brian returns, commits to helping Harpham and Gracie, and their relationship slowly resuscitates. How this fragile family grows strong is almost unbelievable, yet it’s true … and it has a happy ending. Discussion questions are  here .

The Light Years

By chris rush.

In the late 60s, at age 12, Rush is introduced to psychedelic drugs. From that moment, the counterculture of hippies and nomads becomes his family. Once a colorful decade of peace and love, the years soon dissolve into the 70s’ raw and violent hedonism. Rush survives his quest for meaning —– but just barely. Discussion questions are  here .

By Elie Wiesel

Wiesel’s Nobel-prize-winning memoir is more than just the story of his years as a prisoner at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. It’s also a study of faith, and how it gets redefined in the face of one of the worst crimes against humanity in modern history. Even if you’re among the millions who have read  Night , this story is worth a re-read at different points in your life. Discussion questions are  here .

By Michelle Obama

Obama is the first to admit that she would never have predicted her journey from Chicago’s working-class South Side to the White House. Her memoir is a fascinating peek behind a heavily-guarded curtain—from her concerns about how the Presidency affected her marriage and family, to the closing moments of her tenure as First Lady. These stories are riveting, and her honesty has made  Becoming  a book club favorite. Discussion questions are  here .

By Tara Westover

Education — the 13 or so years most Americans receive — was never a given for Westover. Raised in a remote survivalist camp in Idaho, her parents considered the public school system to be a waste of time. So when Westover ran away and started school at age 17, she had a lot to learn. And she did, eventually working her way into Harvard and Cambridge universities. After her incredible escape and global adventures, can she ever go home again? Discussion questions are  here .

The Year of Magical Thinking

By joan didion.

Magical thinking is how Didion describes the mental gymnastics required of her during the most challenging year of her life. Her daughter falls ill and is placed in a medically induced coma, and shortly thereafter her husband suddenly dies of a heart attack. Both of these events send her spiraling into a world of medical journals and existential crises, all beautifully and miraculously captured in this memoir.  Discussion questions are  here .

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider

By ishmael beah.

When he was 13 years old, Beah was recruited as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s government army. As he’s asked to perform increasingly violent acts, he shuts down emotionally. Childhood is reduced to a past dream; the war an inescapable nightmare … until one day, he’s shown the way out. Written at age 25, Beah’s story is shocking but so important to witness. Discussion questions are  here .

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

By stephanie land.

Being single and pregnant, Land learns, has an immediate impact on your ability to make a living. Working as a maid keeps her small family fed and clothed, and along the way she discovers surprising lessons about the upper class and what it means to be their servant. Discussion questions are  here .

Before Night Falls: A Memoir

By reinaldo arenas.

Arenas escapes poverty in rural Cuba to become one of the country’s most popular writers in exile. His rise to fame is treacherous, though. Once outed as a gay man, his writing is banned, he’s sent to prison, and he eventually flees his homeland. In New York, he faces the ultimate fight for his life: AIDS.  Before Night Falls  is considered his deathbed memoir.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

By loung ung.

In 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge ended five-year-old Ung’s childhood as she knew it. Her father worked in government, which put them all in immediate danger. Indeed, as the family attempted to escape Phnom Penh, they were separated. Two years later, Ung is a child soldier and her siblings are struggling to survive in various labor camps. Their sudden uprooting and slow, uncertain reunion makes for an intense read. Discussion questions are  here .

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‘The Chancellor’ Portrays Angela Merkel as a Droll Source of Sanity in a Mad World

By Dwight Garner

• Oct. 25, 2021
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel is famous for her plain but direct style. “I have no charisma,” she once complained to Tony Blair, “and I’m not good at communicating.”

She was wrong on both counts. Her anti-exuberance, in a world gone mad, has grown magnetic. As for communication, her droll mien — those imperceptible smiles, those subtly wrinkled eyebrows — speaks volumes.

When she shared daises with Donald J. Trump, she would roll her eyes toward him incredulously, as if he were belching up a series of detergent pods.

Merkel is a counterforce to ignorance and bluster, and the free world will miss her when she is gone. (She is stepping down this year after four terms.) She rose to become its de facto moral leader by displaying steel blended with a seemingly vanished trait: humility.

Kati Marton’s new biography, “The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel,” is a bit like Merkel herself: calm, dispassionate, not afraid to bore us. Many readers will find it a balm. It’s instructive to spend time in Merkel’s competent and humane company.

Marton is the author of nine previous books, including “True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy” (2016) and “Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America” (2009). She has been an NPR correspondent and was the ABC News bureau chief in Germany. She was married to the diplomat Richard Holbrooke , who in 1993 and 1994 was the United States ambassador to Germany.

It’s no simple task to write a biography of Merkel. She is famously private. She doesn’t use email and rarely texts. Even longtime staffers have never visited her unassuming private residence. There are no tell-all books. She ejects the indiscreet from her life.

Merkel didn’t talk to Marton for this book. When the author does get a quote out of someone close to Merkel, it’s often a banality, such as “she’s funny as hell” or “she loves to read.” But give Marton credit. She has doggedly retraced Merkel’s trail, and the story she brings is a good one.

Merkel, who was born in 1954, grew up in Soviet-controlled East Germany, eventually behind the Berlin Wall. Her father was a pastor who never quite approved of her. Standing out was dangerous in East Germany, so she learned not to do it.

She studied physics in college, she said, “because even East Germany wasn’t capable of suspending basic arithmetic and the rules of nature.” She married for the first time at 23. It didn’t last long. The marriage was in part a practicality, her former husband later suggested: Married students were more likely to get an apartment.

Merkel’s most important reading, during this period, was history. East Germans had been fed a false narrative about World War II. They were led to believe that East Germany had resisted Hitler. Jews were rarely mentioned.

The truth was a shock. Merkel grew to realize that Germany owned a permanent debt to Jews, and this conviction — her feeling for the mistreated — led her to the moral decision, in 2015, to accept hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees into her country.

Merkel drifted only slowly into politics. She chose a right-leaning party; she’d had enough of socialist experiments. She revered America. Among her heroes was George H.W. Bush, for helping Germany unify after the wall fell.

“I remember well when Angela came to our first meeting,” a contemporary recalled. “She was very reserved, very modest and looked younger than 35. She wore a shapeless corduroy skirt and sort of Jesus sandals. Her hair was cut in a Dutch boy bob.”

Within 15 years, after serving as minister of the environment under Helmut Kohl, she rose to become the first female chancellor of Germany.

Marton tracks the issues that matter to Merkel. She’s a trained physicist who phased out Germany’s nuclear energy program after the 2011 accident in Fukushima, Japan . We watch her struggle to hold the European Union together. We witness the evolution of her positions on immigration.

There are her close relationships with Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron; her staring contests with Vladimir Putin; her attempts to get through to Trump by wooing his daughter Ivanka.

Marton calls this book “a human rather than a political portrait,” and personal details do emerge. Merkel likes to stand up and make coffee for her guests in a kitchenette, using the informal occasion to ask questions and break the ice. She does her own grocery shopping. She’s a soccer fan and tends to curse only over missed goals. Her husband, a quantum chemist — they have no children together, though he has two grown sons from a previous marriage — stays out of the limelight.

There are hints of a more playful side. She is famous for her social stamina and, Blair once said, “likes to sit up late and have a lively time.” She is said to be a gifted mimic, especially of Putin. She has been known to tell off-color jokes about an aspect of Putin’s anatomy.

On occasion “The Chancellor” veers toward hagiography, but it steps quickly away again. Marton is a critical observer, especially of Merkel’s tendency not to articulate her deeper feelings, her frequent failure to win over hearts as well as minds.

German politicians, Merkel is aware, have reason to beware soaring oratory.

This book is a bedtime story of a queasy sort, or so it can seem. It’s as if Marton, via her subject, were tucking the old liberal order in and wishing it a good night, for tomorrow it may die.

Dwight Garner has been a daily book critic for The Times since 2008. His most recent book is “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany.”

The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel By Kati Marton Illustrated. 344 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30.

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Emma Roberts Has a Book Club — These Are Our Top 10 Favorite Titles

Discover the best picks from Bellatrist Book Club.

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The brainchild of Roberts, along with her best friend Karah Preiss, Belletrist initially launched 12 years ago and has since grown into a top contender in the celeb book club game. More than just a platform for literary enthusiasts, Belletrist blossomed into a vibrant community, celebrating the power of storytelling and fostering a love for reading among its members.

A bibliophile herself, Roberts regularly curates a diverse selection of gems that have captured the hearts and minds of readers worldwide. From compelling debut novels like Joan Didion's ' Slouching Towards Bethlehem ' to cherished classics like ' Rebecca ' by Daphne Du Maurier, the Belletrist book club offers an assortment of titles that span multiple genres — all of which embrace the power of literature to evoke empathy, ignite imaginations, and spark meaningful discussions. Read on to learn more about our top 10 picks from Emma Roberts’ book club.

Riverhead Books 'The Vanishing Half' by Brit Bennett

"Vanishing Half," written by Brit Bennett, is a thought-provoking novel that’s one of the best on the Belletrist book club list. A powerful read, it explores the lives of twin sisters who choose to live in different racial identities. Set in the 1960s and spanning decades, the book delves into themes of family, identity, and the consequences of secrets. This compelling novel is one you won’t soon forget.

Hachette 'Rebecca' by Daphne Du Maurier

You might recognize Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca from the Hitchcock movie or even the recent Netflix remake by the same name. It’s the haunting tale of a young woman who marries a wealthy widower and becomes entangled in the shadow of his deceased first wife, Rebecca. As secrets unravel, she discovers the dark and chilling truth about her husband's past and the mysterious Rebecca.

Knopf 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow' by Gabrielle Zevin

This novel from Gabrielle Zevin consistently tops the Amazon Charts of most-read fiction books. A highly-rated bestseller, it tells the story of two college friends who become creative partners who launch a hit video game. The book spans 30 years and examines identity, failure, and the need to connect.

Picador Modern Classics 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s iconic book “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is her first nonfiction work. Published in 1968, it’s now a classic that's been described as the “best prose written in this country.” It captures the nostalgia of that era, exploring subjects like John Wayne and Howard Hughes, along with her take on growing up in California.

HarperOne 'And Now I Spill the Family Secrets' by Margaret Kimball

"And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir” is a unique graphic novel that unravels the hidden tales of a complex family. Through poignant storytelling and visuals, it explores the intergenerational dynamics, long-held secrets, and the profound impact they have on individual lives. It’s a revealing and visually stunning journey into the depths of family history.

Scribner 'The Candy House' by Jennifer Egan

Another one of our favorites on Emma Roberts’ book club list, "Candy House," is a riveting novel that follows the lives of two sisters, exploring their bond, desires, and the consequences of their choices. Set against the backdrop of 1960s San Francisco, this tale navigates themes of love, betrayal, and the pursuit of happiness.

Henry Holt and Co. 'In the Shadow of the Mountain: A Memoir' by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

Another Belletrist Book Club title worth reading, “In The Shadow of the Mountain: A Memoir of Courage,” is an inspiring true story that chronicles the author's journey of survival and resilience. Along with an incredible account of what happened, the memoir explores themes of courage, hope, and the strength of the human spirit.

Back Bay Books 'How to Be Eaten' by Maria Adelmann

A winner of NPR 's Best Books of the Year, Emma Roberts is also a fan of “How to Be Eaten.” It’s a darkly comedic reimagining of classic fairytales set in a support group for trauma in modern-day New York City. It shines a light on how anti-feminist many classic fairytales were and spins these stories on their heads.

Grove Press 'Writers & Lovers' by Lily King

Both a New York Times Bestseller and an Editor’s Pick on Amazon, this popular novel from Lily King follows a struggling writer named Casey. She is blindsided by her mother’s death and heartbroken from a recent love affair. It’s a heartfelt exploration of art, desire, and self-discovery.

Penguin Books 'Orwell's Roses' by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit’s “Orwell’s Roses” reflects on George Orwell’s passion for gardening and how it illuminates his other interests as a writer and anti-fascist. This portrait is a fresh take on him as a person and political writer. It explores his passion for the natural world and how it helped to inform his work outside of the garden.

Katie McBroom is an award-winning content creator and freelance writer. Prior to contributing to Biography, she served as Content Editor for Google and Beauty Editor for Best Products. Her work has also appeared in publications including CNN, WWD, Business Insider, Forbes, and Men's Health, among others.

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