Biography & Essays
Browse the life stories of those whom you admire most. Of course you will find more than just authorized biographies here! You'll also find memoirs, journals and though-provoking essays.
Subcategories in Biography & Essays
Top Sellers in Biography & Essays
Kitchen Confidential
by Bourdain Anthony
A New York City chef who is also a novelist recounts his experiences in the restaurant business, and exposes abuses of power, sexual promiscuity, drug use, and other secrets of life behind kitchen doors. Published in 2000 by Bloomsbury, Kitchen Confidential was Bourdain’s memoir and behind-the-scenes look at restaurant kitchens, a follow-up to his popular and shocking article published the April 19th 1999 edition of The New Yorker titled "Don't Eat Before Reading This." The book is both...
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A Short History Of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson follows his greatest challenge yet: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. From the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. The result is a profound, funny, and wonderfully clear and entertaining adventure into the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it.
The Boys In the Boat
by Daniel James Brown
The New York Times–bestselling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany Out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers,...
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Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.” Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly...
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Endurance
by Alfred Lansing
Ernest Shackleton defined heroism in 1915 when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in ice and then destroyed on its way to Antarctica. This tense week-by-week, month-by-month reconstruction charts the incredible journey undertaken by his crew of 27 men through 850 miles of the southern Atlantic's heaviest seas.
The Power Broker
by Robert A Caro
Robert Caro’s monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America’s City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the...
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The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
by Bill Watterson
Calvin and Hobbes is unquestionably one of the most popular comic strips of all time. The imaginative world of a boy and his real-only-to-him tiger was first syndicated in 1985 and appeared in more than 2,400 newspapers when Bill Watterson retired on January 1, 1996. The entire body of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons published in a truly noteworthy tribute to this singular cartoon in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Composed of three hardcover, four-color volumes in a sturdy slipcase, this New York Times...
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Truman
by David McCullough
The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting... Read more about this item
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting... Read more about this item
Trump
by Donald J ; Schwartz, Tony Trump
DONALD J. TRUMP is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting standards of excellence while expanding his interests in real estate, gaming, sports, and entertainment. Aside from The Apprentice, Trump and NBC are also partners in the ownership and broadcast rights for the three largest beauty competitions in the world.In New York City, the Trump signature is synonymous with the most prestigious addresses, including the renowned Trump Tower, the Trump International Hotel &...
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Open
by Andre Agassi
“From Andre Agassi, one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court, a beautiful, haunting autobiography.Agassi’s incredibly rigorous training begins when he is just a child. By the age of thirteen, he is banished to a Florida tennis camp that feels like a prison camp. Lonely, scared, a ninth-grade dropout, he rebels in ways that will soon make him a 1980s icon. He dyes his hair, pierces his ears, dresses like a punk rocker. By the time he...
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Dreams From My Father
by Barack Obama-
Published in 1995, 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 black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey--first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then...
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American Prometheus
by Kai; Sherwin, Martin J Bird
“WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • “The definitive biography” (Newsweek) of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his...
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At Home
by Bill Bryson
BILL BRYSON’s books include A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s Book of Troublesome Words, A Short History of Nearly Everything (which earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Bryson lives in England with his wife and children.
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson, presidente del Instituto Aspen, ha sido presidente de la CNN y director ejecutivo de la revista Time. Es autor de Einstein, su vida y su universo, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life y Kissinger: A Biography, y es coautor, con Evan Thomas, de The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. Vive con su esposa en Washington, D.C.
Biography & Essays Books & Ephemera
Steve Jobs
by Isaacson, Walter
Walter Isaacson, presidente del Instituto Aspen, ha sido presidente de la CNN y director ejecutivo de la revista Time. Es autor de Einstein, su vida y su universo, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life y Kissinger: A Biography, y es coautor, con Evan Thomas, de The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. Vive con su esposa en Washington, D.C.
Truman
by McCullough, David
The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting... Read more about this item
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting... Read more about this item
A Reporter's Life
by Cronkite, Walter
Walter Cronkite lives in New York City and on Martha's Vineyard.From the Hardcover edition.
Theodore Rex
by Morris, Edmund
Edmund Morris was born in Kenya and educated at the Prince of Wales School, Nairobi, and Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before emigrating to the United States in 1968. His biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1980. In 1985 he was appointed Ronald Reagan's authorized biographer. He has written extensively on travel and the arts for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York...
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Living History
by Clinton, Hillary Rodham
Living History is the autobiography of Secretary of State, former United States Senator from New York, and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, published in 2003. In December 2000, Simon & Schuster agreed to pay Clinton a reported $8 million advance for what became Living History — a near-record figure to an author for an advance at that time. Critics charged that the book deal, coming soon after her election to the U.S.
Churchill
by Gilbert, Martin
The definitive biography of Winston Churchill.This edition of the highly acclaimed one-volume CHURCHILL: A LIFE, is the story of adventure. It follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present, as are his tremendous qualities in peace and war, not least as an orator and as a man of vision. Martin Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both...
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Personal History
by Graham, Katharine
Personal History is the autobiography of Katharine Graham. It was published in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1998. The book received widespread critical acclaim for its candour in dealing with her husband's mental illness, and the challenges she faced in a male-dominated working environment.
Seinlanguage
by Seinfeld, Jerry
Seinlanguage is a 1993 book written by Jerry Seinfeld, chronicling his sitcom Seinfeld into a bestselling paperback. Seinlanguage was critically acclaimed and scored a spot on the New York Times Best Seller list
