Recommended Biographie & Autobiographie Audiobooks

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Angela's Ashes describes his coming of age as a teacher, storyteller, and writer, a personal journey during which he spent fifteen years finding his voice in the classroom...

Includes the senator's speech from the 2004 Democratic National Convention! In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a...

An analysis of Abraham Lincoln's political talents identifies the character strengths and abilities that enabled his successful election, in an account that also describes how he used the same abilities to rally former opponents in winning the Civil...

“I found a pattern in my behavior that had been repeating itself for years, decades even. Bad choices were my specialty, and if something honest and decent came along, I would shun it or run the other way.”With striking...

This investigative report on the secret CIA operations during the 1980s Russia-Afghanistan war tells of the billion-dollar-a-year effort to arm, supply, and train the Afghan resistance, and to maintain relations in the region--all centered on an...

Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood,' writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. 'Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.' Welcome, then, to the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood....

A memoir of the Gulf War by a front-line infantry Marine recounts his struggles with the conflict on the front lines, his girlfriend's infidelity, his battles with fear and suicide, his brushes with death, and his identity as a soldier and an...

Alan Alda's autobiography travels a path less taken. Instead of a sensationalist, name-dropping page-turner, Alda writes about his life as a memory play, an exercise in recollecting his childhood, his parents (dad Robert was a veteran on stage, film,...

From one of our most interesting literary figures – former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of Among the Thugs – a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a...

In this tough, candid memoir, Anthony Bourdain, who has been a chef at several well-known restaurants, takes the reader backstage to reveal the secrets of restaurant kitchens--some of them not so appetizing, most of them hilarious, all of them...

When the oldest of Kate Braestrup's four children was ten years old, her husband, a Maine state trooper, was killed in a car accident. Stunned and grieving, she decided to pursue her husband's dream of becoming a...

A top-ranked woman poker player presents an insider's view of the World Series of Poker, in a personal account that describes her academic achievements, impulsive entry into the world of gambling, and insights into strategic tournament play.

Clay Aiken's interest in music began early with the usual round of local amateur productions in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. However, second place in the final of the popular TV talent show AMERICAN IDOL, together with his fresh-faced...

Two Lives weaves together two extraordinary stories that comprise one astonishing love affair: that of Vikram's great-uncle Shanti, brought up in India and sent in the 1930s to Berlin to study dentistry, and that of his great-aunt Henny, whose...

Here is the astonishing true story of Ruth Harkness, the Manhattan bohemian socialite who, against all but impossible odds, trekked to Tibet in 1936 to capture the most mysterious animal of the day: a bear that had for countless centuries lived in...

Frank McCourt, the author of ANGELA’S ASHES and ’TIS, wraps up his trilogy of memoirs with this account of the 30 years he spent teaching in New York public high schools, from his rocky beginning as a young man teaching English in a...

A riveting, heart-wrenching memoir of Maziar Bahari's brutal interrogation in Iran's most notorious prison, offering insight into Iran's turbulent recent past and uncertain future.

A leading historian of the American Revolution offers an incisive portrait of the complex, often contradictory figure of Benjamin Franklin, a man who was at once the quintessential American and a cosmolitan lover of Europe, a one-time loyalist turned...

In this investigative report, a New York cop reveals how he infiltrated organized crime and exposed an extortion scheme that targeted the corporate world. Rick Cowan spent five years undercover, and his efforts provided solid evidence showing the...

Exhilarating, thought-provoking interviews from the Peabody Award-winning public radio show. 'Fresh Air with Terry Gross,' the award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Each...

When his dysfunctional family sent Augusten Burroughs away to be raised in the home of his mother’s therapist, he became part of an even more dysfunctional and unusual family dynamic. In this bestseller, which has become a classic of the...

Born into enormous privilege as well as burdened by gut-wrenching family tragedy, Christopher Kennedy Lawford now shares his life story, offering a rare glimpse into the private worlds of both Washington politics and the Hollywood elite. ...

On the heels of his acclaimed memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, beloved actor and bestselling author Alan Alda has written Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, an insightful and funny look at some of the impossible questions he’s...

Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, and Home Town. He has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the “master of the non-fiction...

Rock critic Rob Sheffield, an editor at Rolling Stone, uses 15 mix tapes to help structure his lively, funny, and surprisingly touching ode to the 1990s, rock music, and his punk-rock wife who died suddenly five years into their marriage.

In this final volume of the beloved American saga that began with All Over but the Shoutin' and continued with Ava's Man, Rick Bragg closes his circle of family stories with an unforgettable tale about fathers and sons inspired by his own...

Karen Armstrong spent seven years in a convent (which she described in a previous memoir) and, when she left, was at a loss as to what to do with her life. In THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, she writes about her difficulties, as she first picked up a couple of...

[A] brutally frank, hard-hitting portrait of the film business....Astin comes across as a complex personality--courageous, impulsive, loving, abrasive--and these contradictory qualities make him an arresting centerpiece for a Hollywood story.