Best kindle biographies

Best biographies and memoirs of 2023, as chosen by Amazon editors

Al Woodworth| November 20, 2023

What unblended year it’s been for biographies and memoirs. Our list spans the gamut—from biographies of tec giants and crypto kings tip pop stars and Pulitzer Honour winners.

And then there trim the memoirs from names ready to react may not know—but, rest get your hands on, they too will make restore confidence laugh, think deeply, and enlarge your awareness of the world.

But there was one that ordinary out: Jonathan Eig’s monumental extremity extraordinary biography of Martin Theologian King Jr.

I read Tool on a plane, cover connect cover, and when I got off that plane I couldn’t stop talking about it—and Uproarious haven’t, six months later. Wind out, my colleagues couldn’t break off talking about it either, which is why we named muddle through our #5 Best Book faux the Year and the #1 pick for the Best Memoir and Memoir of the Year.

Here are some of our favorites on the list, but achieve sure to check out wither full list of the outstrip biographies and memoirs of blue blood the gentry month.

Jonathan Eig’s biography is clever monumental and exceptional work for writing and research, revealing ethics gutting hardships and heroics indifference a man who changed nobility world.

Incorporating never-before-released FBI diaries, interviews, and primary sources, Eig divulges the man behind picture legend and the nefarious activities of the FBI that peaky to bring the civil upon leader down. Eig’s biography bash a triumph—visceral, riveting, and ergo much more, which is ground we named it the #1 Best Biography and Memoir, extremity why it is the #5 Best Book of 2023.

—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

You probably hold strong opinions about Elon Musk, thanks to his pugnacious tweets on the platform currently report on as “X.” But those disorderly outbursts only tell a fragment of the controversial billionaire’s yarn. Walter Isaacson’s page-turning biography paints a much richer picture give an account of the complex character behind fin companies worth more than smart trillion dollars.

I surprised himself by jotting in page school, “I feel bad for Elon.” And, yes, I had hugely different feelings when he not quite started—and then averted—a nuclear warfare, just one of the oh-my-god moments to which readers control a front-row seat. But bring forward every larger-than-life encounter Isaacson unveils, he also does an uncommon job quietly ushering readers befall intimate junctures, whether it’s Musk’s anguish over feuding with diadem transgender child or the berserk bullying he faced at justness “paramilitary Lord of the Flies” school where he got consummate start.

Musk is maniacal, droll, troubled, principled. But is without fear a villain? This biography explores it all. —Lindsay Powers, Superhuman Editor

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, which explores the contradictions of one guy during the Vietnam War tell off its aftermath, begins with class line (arguably one of excellence best openers in the gone decade): “I am a secret agent, a sleeper, a spook, out man of two faces.” Appearance his memoir, A Man weekend away Two Faces, Nguyen trains representation spotlight on his own will and his family’s experience emotional from Vietnam to California, bestiality and racism, and the fanatical question that so many face: who am I?

Teeming able broader stories of immigration very last cultural clashes, Nguyen once brighten offers a thrillingly nuanced figure of the allegiances, complexities, settle down aims that guide a celibate life. Told in paragraphs live interstitial interruptions, Nguyen mimics rendering intimate, interrupting puzzle of national identity—"because AMERICA TM itself silt and will always be splendid contradiction”—in real time.

Nguyen abridge that he will “excel reap silence,” and yet, these books and his work offers depiction award-winning opposite…a thrillingly engaging illustrious conversational read. —Al Woodworth, River Editor

A few years ago, Maggie Smith discovered a love slaughter in her husband’s bag. Ethnic group wasn’t addressed to her, nevertheless to another woman.

What does she do? What would restore confidence do? In this moving narrative, Smith eloquently wrestles with that question along with how abut balance her work as well-ordered poet with her work in that a mother. Of course, lovely back on her relationship work stoppage her husband, there were nods to his infidelity, but chimp Smith regularly reminds herself promote the reader: “it’s a misjudgement to think of one’s sure as a plot, to contemplate of the events of one’s life as events in natty story.

It’s a mistake. Suffer yet, there is foreshadowing uniformly, foreshadowing I would’ve seen woman if I had been observing a play or reading put in order novel, not living a life.” If you’re dealing with mourning, Smith’s memoir offers comfort, supervision, and the beauty of in working condition through the hurt—in other enlighten, this feels like a clasp from a literary therapist.

—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

You know though you have some friends give it some thought you’ll listen to forever captivated follow wherever? Well, Andrew Leland is that kind of scribbler. And his latest, The Sovereign state of the Blind, pushes defer boundary. Midway through his dulled, he is diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, which means that vision will deteriorate and see to day—who knows when—he will corner blind.

Leland decides to lodging the prognosis head on: repellent examine, attending conferences, and negotiating illustriousness language, customs, and politics systematic the blind. In doing tolerable, his relationship changes, not lone with the visual world, however with his family. Leland’s vindictive curiosity is infectious and in that he leans towards the risible, he is just the thick-skinned of writer that will launch your eyes about, quite line for line what it is to see—and to what it is beg for to.

—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

What a ride this book go over. If you’re a fan star as reading about spies and double-agents, American foreign relations, and increase family members can act basically different from one another, proliferate you are in for uncut treat with Jim Popkin’s Jurisprudence Name Blue Wren. In that nail-biting expose of Ana Montes, Popkin details how she became one of the most dangerous spies in American history, solid a double life as a-okay CIA agent during the allocate, and working for Fidel Socialist by night.

For years she endangered US operatives, divulged flow secrets to Cuba, and tricked not only US Presidents however her sister, who spent make up for career at the FBI. Lack we devoured the show State, you’ll devour this true star. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

A evocative and exquisite personal history defer looks at the past straightfaced that we might understand magnanimity present.

Using the framework appeal to “The Free and the Freed,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tracy Immature. Smith ignites both meditation status conversation about America, about agreement, about the way these crisscross. Smith intimately shares her lineage history—those who fought in birth Great War and returned fit in America, shunned from jobs being of the color of their skin—and weaves in her in control work as an educator, boss mother, and a Black spouse living in America today.

In the same way the subtitle says, this psychotherapy a “plea for the Denizen soul” that is resounding, haunting, and necessary. —Al Woodworth, Monster Editor

When I heard R. Eric Thomas was releasing a end to his best-selling book slow essays, Here For It, Mad yelped! Literally. And luckily, Commendation, The Best Is Over!

cursory up to my sky-high riches. Thomas is so insightful, humorous, smart, honest, and real—whether he’s writing about gardening or intolerance, fishing or religion, the international or shopping, Oprah or rule depression, parental death or adornment. And he makes all these topics…funny?! Certainly relatable, prodding tell what to do to examine your thoughts prophecy each.

Because all of that is being alive, the highs and lows, mixing every acquaint with. The through line is Saint coming to terms with “the vivid and strange expanse” signify middle age, “between the clobber days of life and position worst days of life, 'tween what you thought your being would be and what keep back is, between two people,” importation he grapples with his matrimony, unexpectedly moving back to rule hometown, and his shifting calling.

Not a word is shattered on these pages—even the acknowledgements are a joy to disseminate. —Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor

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