Kimber: “Memoirs? Biogs? Is that like when that Barbra lady sings about misty water-colored memories? Like in the movie with Robert Corvette?”
Mom: “The movie is The Way We Were, Kimster. And the actor is Robert Redford.”
Kimber: “You drive what you want and I’ll drive what I want… Wait. Where was I? Oh yeah. Memoirs and Biogs. Guess we better start with some definitions:”
- A memoir is usually a collection of memories written by the person themselves. It’s the story of a specific time, theme, or experience in a person’s life.
- A biography presents chronological events from the life of a specific person. It’s the story of someone’s life told by someone else.
- An autobiography is a person telling their own life story.
Got that? Great. Cuz we’re gonna color outside the lines a bit. Bring you some of All of the Above, under the general-ish category of Memoir/Biogs. (We’re using the terms a bit loosely. So don’t blow a gasket, okay?)
These are all strong stories by or about Real Peeps. All feature sturdy writing, nimble pacing, and a transcendent/inspiring theme that touch on something like personal fortitude, sacrifice, or overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.
Note that we’re only including books we’ve actually read. We’re just funny that way. So some may be familiar. Some you may have never heard of. Let’s dive in (in no particular order).
20+ Mesmerizing Memoirs/Biogs To Read Before You Die:
1. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
By Jung Chang
A gripping tale of nightmarish cruelty and an uplifting story of survival. Published two years after the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, this harrowing memoir arrived at the perfect time to satisfy a readership hungry for insight into life under the Chinese Communist party.
2. Out of Africa
By Isak Dinesen
Dripping with evocative imagery and eloquence, this beautifully written memoir is by the Danish author Karen Blixen. It recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen lived in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. Isak Dinesen is Blixen’s pen name.
3. Letters from Attu: The True Story of Etta Jones, Alaska Pioneer and Japanese POW
By Mary Breu
Etta Jones wasn’t a World War II soldier or a war time spy. She was a school teacher whose life changed forever on that Sunday morning in June 1942 when the Japanese military invaded Attu Island and Etta became a prisoner of war.
Etta spent 39 months in Japanese POW sites located in Yokohama and Totsuka. She was the first female Caucasian taken prisoner by a foreign enemy on the North American Continent since the War of 1812. She was also the first American female released by the Japanese at the end of World War II.
4. The Diary of Anne Frank
By Anne Frank
Don’t make me explain this.
5. Joni: An Unforgettable Story
By Joni Eareckson Tada
On a hot July afternoon, Joni Eareckson Tada’s life was dramatically altered by a dive into shallow water. It broke her neck. She became a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. In the 45 years since the release of this book – which has more than five million copies in print in more than 40 languages – Joni’s struggle to find hope has resonated with millions of readers around the world.
The hard-earned truths she shares in this special edition reveal the power of God’s love to transform, as well as the triumph of faith over pain and suffering.
6. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
By Annie Dillard
We loved this book! Okay, so it’s a stretch in the “memoir/biog” category. It’s actually nonfiction narrative. But it’s terrific-o!
Told in the first person, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek details Dillard’s explorations near her home, and various contemplations on nature and life. The title refers to a creek in Virginia‘s Blue Ridge Mountains. Dillard began Pilgrim in the spring of 1973, using her personal journals as inspiration. Separated into four sections that signify each of the seasons, the narrative takes place over the period of one year.
7. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
By Laura Hillenbrand
Olympic runner Louis Zamperini was just twenty-six when his US Army bomber crashed and burned in the Pacific, leaving him and two other men afloat on a raft for forty-seven days. They were captured by the Japanese and survived torture and deprivation as POWs by the thinnest of margins.
In this gripping biography, Laura Hillenbrand tracks Zamperini’s story from beginning to end, including how he became a Christian and later found the courage to forgive his tormentors.
8. Night
By Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece is a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. Night is more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.. It is shattering.
9. Run Baby Run
By Nicky Cruz
As one of 18 children born to witchcraft-practicing parents from Puerto Rico, bloodshed and mayhem were common occurrences in Nicky’s early life. He suffered severe physical and mental abuse at their hands, leaving home at age 15 .
By age 16 Nicky was a member of the notorious Brooklyn street gang, the Mau Maus. He soon became their president, ruling the streets as warlord of one of the most feared and dreaded gangs in New York.
No one could reach Cruz – until he met a skinny street-preacher named David Wilkerson. David showed Nicky something Cruz had never known: Relentless love. Nicky beat Wilkerson up, spit on him and threatened his life. But the love of God remained stronger than any adversary Nicky had ever encountered.
10. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
By Betty Smith
We’re gonna color outside the lines a bit here in order to include this semi-autobiographical novel. Because we love it! The manuscript started as a non-fiction piece titled They Lived in Brooklyn but was reclassified as a novel with the title we now know and became hugely popular from the very first printing.
11. Peace Child
By Don Richardson
In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among headhunters and cannibals, who valued treachery through fattening victims with friendship before the slaughter.
12. Becoming Elisabeth Elliot
By Ellen Vaughn
Elisabeth Elliot was a young missionary in Ecuador when members of a violent Amazonian tribe savagely speared her husband Jim and his four colleagues. Later, Elisabeth took her toddler daughter, snakebite kit, Bible, and journal . . . and lived in the jungle with the Stone-Age people who killed her husband. Compelled by her friendship and forgiveness, many came to faith in Jesus.
Elliot went on to write dozens of books, host a long-running radio show, and speak at conferences worldwide. She was a pillar of coherent, committed faith; a beloved and sometimes controversial icon. In this authorized biography, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, bestselling author Ellen Vaughn uses Elisabeth’s private, unpublished journals, and candid interviews with her family and friends, to paint the adventures and misadventures God used to shape one of the most influential women in modern church history. It’s the true story of a surprisingly relatable, hilarious, and radical woman utterly submitted to doing God’s will, no matter how high the cost.
13. All Creatures Great and Small
By James Herriot
Don’t make me explain this either.
14. Farewell to Manzanar
By Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
A memoir published in 1973 by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. The book describes the experiences of Jeanne Wakatsuki and her family before, during, and following their relocation to the Manzanar internment camp due to the United States government’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
15. Into the Wild
By Jon Krakauer
In 1992 Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the Denali wilderness. Five months later, McCandless was found emaciated and deceased in his shelter. What happened? How did he die?
In compelling and pellucid prose, Krakauer follows McCandless back to the beginning of his trek and attempts to find some answers. Along the way the author examines what McCandless was looking for, and whether he fully understood the dangers ahead.
16. Marley & Me
By John Grogan
You knew this was coming, right?
The Big Softy (Hi, Mom) loves this book! She loves it so much, she grabs every tissue box in the house every time we read it, if ya know what I mean. Her Momness watched the movie twice. And decided she just can’t do it again. Something about a weak heart?
Anyway, this book will take you on an emotional roller coaster through the ups and downs of The Best Buddy on the Planet. (Kimber: It’s good for lots of extra treats and belly rubs, too! If ya know what I mean.)
17. The Hiding Place
By Corrie ten Boom
Amazon
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler’s concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the twentieth century.
In World War II Corrie and her family risked their lives to help Jews and underground workers escape from the Nazis. They were betrayed, arrested, and wound up in a Nazi death camp where Corrie lost her entire family. Only Corrie survived to tell the world that “There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.”
18. Tuesdays with Morrie
By Mitch Albom
Writer Mitch Albom’s recounting of his weekly visits to an old college professor in the last months of the teacher’s life drive home the importance of listening to the wisdom of our elders. Give this one to your high schoolers for a lesson that will stick with them forever.
19. Not Without My Daughter: The Harrowing True Story of a Mother’s Courage
By Betty Mahmoody
In August 1984, Michigan housewife Betty Mahmoody accompanied her husband to his native Iran for a two-week vacation. To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Moslem faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans are despised. Their only hope for escape lay in a dangerous underground that would not take her child…
20. The Joy Luck Club
By Amy Tan
Technically, this isn’t a memoir. But it reads like one.
It’s a story about four Chinese women and their four daughters.
In 1949 the women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money.
Forty years later, mothers and daughters try to unravel and understand their intertwining lives as four women and their daughters reveal their secrets. An absorbing, compelling read.
21. Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship With a Remarkable Man
By William Shatner
It may push the “memoir” boundary a bit. But we’d be remiss if we left this one out. It was a huge surprise. As in, “fascinating.”
This book is kind of a two-fer. It’s both a biography of Nimoy and a story of a half century of friendship between Shatner and Nimoy, both on and off screen. Touching and compelling, Leonard is a uniquely heartfelt book written by one legendary actor in celebration of another. Besides. Who knew Shatner has such a wicked sense of humor?
Pages & Paws 