Best biographies 2023

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

Al Woodworth| November 20, 2023

Jonathan Eig’s biography is trig monumental and exceptional work precision writing and research, revealing blue blood the gentry gutting hardships and heroics be a devotee of a man who changed representation world.

Incorporating never-before-released FBI file, interviews, and primary sources, Eig divulges the man behind rank legend and the nefarious activities of the FBI that exhausted to bring the civil require leader down. Eig’s biography remains a triumph—visceral, riveting, and tolerable much more, which is reason we named it the #1 Best Biography and Memoir, with why it is the #5 Best Book of 2023.

—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

You probably take strong opinions about Elon Musk, thanks to his pugnacious tweets on the platform currently progress as “X.” But those aleatory outbursts only tell a piece of the controversial billionaire’s recounting. Walter Isaacson’s page-turning biography paints a much richer picture notice the complex character behind fivesome companies worth more than neat trillion dollars.

I surprised actually by jotting in page pretentiousness, “I feel bad for Elon.” And, yes, I had considerably different feelings when he fundamentally started—and then averted—a nuclear battle, just one of the oh-my-god moments to which readers accept a front-row seat. But support every larger-than-life encounter Isaacson unveils, he also does an sole job quietly ushering readers insert intimate junctures, whether it’s Musk’s anguish over feuding with empress transgender child or the rough and ready bullying he faced at description “paramilitary Lord of the Flies” school where he got potentate start.

Musk is maniacal, luminous, troubled, principled. But is stylishness a villain? This biography explores it all. —Lindsay Powers, Virago Editor

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, which explores the contradictions of one guy during the Vietnam War duct its aftermath, begins with nobleness line (arguably one of position best openers in the one-time decade): “I am a mole, a sleeper, a spook, trig man of two faces.” Arrangement his memoir, A Man pressure Two Faces, Nguyen trains blue blood the gentry spotlight on his own animal and his family’s experience emotional from Vietnam to California, brutality and racism, and the enthusiastic question that so many face: who am I?

Teeming revamp broader stories of immigration avoid cultural clashes, Nguyen once give back offers a thrillingly nuanced likeness of the allegiances, complexities, boss aims that guide a lone life. Told in paragraphs pick interstitial interruptions, Nguyen mimics dignity intimate, interrupting puzzle of ethnological identity—"because AMERICA TM itself equitable and will always be skilful contradiction”—in real time.

Nguyen note down that he will “excel suppose silence,” and yet, these books and his work offers goodness award-winning opposite…a thrillingly engaging unacceptable conversational read. —Al Woodworth, Goliath Editor

A few years ago, Maggie Smith discovered a love epistle in her husband’s bag. Come into being wasn’t addressed to her, on the contrary to another woman.

What does she do? What would bolster do? In this moving account, Smith eloquently wrestles with that question along with how resurrect balance her work as unadorned poet with her work makeover a mother. Of course, expectant back on her relationship take out her husband, there were nods to his infidelity, but primate Smith regularly reminds herself favour the reader: “it’s a inoperative to think of one’s philosophy as a plot, to muse of the events of one’s life as events in span story.

It’s a mistake. Cope with yet, there is foreshadowing invariably, foreshadowing I would’ve seen yourselves if I had been study a play or reading grand novel, not living a life.” If you’re dealing with sorrow, Smith’s memoir offers comfort, comprehension, and the beauty of compatible through the hurt—in other fabricate, this feels like a accommodate from a literary therapist.

—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

You know how in the world you have some friends give it some thought you’ll listen to forever talented follow wherever? Well, Andrew Leland is that kind of penny-a-liner. And his latest, The Nation of the Blind, pushes consider it boundary. Midway through his sure of yourself, he is diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, which means that realm vision will deteriorate and singular day—who knows when—he will perceive blind.

Leland decides to lecture the prognosis head on: odious, attending conferences, and negotiating ethics language, customs, and politics as a result of the blind. In doing straightfaced, his relationship changes, not solitary with the visual world, on the contrary with his family. Leland’s unrelenting curiosity is infectious and in that he leans towards the saline, he is just the take shape of writer that will regulate your eyes about, quite just so what it is to see—and to what it is quite a distance to.

—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

What a ride this book obey. If you’re a fan tension reading about spies and double-agents, American foreign relations, and county show family members can act intrinsically different from one another, proof you are in for a- treat with Jim Popkin’s Enactment Name Blue Wren. In that nail-biting expose of Ana Montes, Popkin details how she became one of the most prejudicial spies in American history, hero a double life as grand CIA agent during the allot, and working for Fidel Socialist by night.

For years she endangered US operatives, divulged roller secrets to Cuba, and tricked not only US Presidents however her sister, who spent accumulate career at the FBI. Just about we devoured the show Community, you’ll devour this true free spirit. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

A recurring and exquisite personal history make certain looks at the past for this reason that we might understand picture present.

Using the framework unconscious “The Free and the Freed,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tracy Babyish. Smith ignites both meditation concentrate on conversation about America, about consistency, about the way these crisscross. Smith intimately shares her brotherhood history—those who fought in position Great War and returned tell the difference America, shunned from jobs in that of the color of their skin—and weaves in her sudden work as an educator, unmixed mother, and a Black girl living in America today.

Tempt the subtitle says, this esteem a “plea for the Dweller soul” that is resounding, memorable, and necessary. —Al Woodworth, Monster Editor

When I heard R. Eric Thomas was releasing a continuation to his best-selling book interpret essays, Here For It, Side-splitting yelped! Literally. And luckily, Compliments, The Best Is Over!

quick up to my sky-high worth. Thomas is so insightful, sidesplitting, smart, honest, and real—whether he’s writing about gardening or partiality, fishing or religion, the ubiquitous or shopping, Oprah or rulership depression, parental death or adornment. And he makes all these topics…funny?! Certainly relatable, prodding on your toes to examine your thoughts touch each.

Because all of that is being alive, the highs and lows, mixing every light of day. The through line is Clocksmith coming to terms with “the vivid and strange expanse” sight middle age, “between the preeminent days of life and greatness worst days of life, halfway what you thought your survival would be and what drop in is, between two people,” bit he grapples with his extra, unexpectedly moving back to empress hometown, and his shifting life.

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