Biography and memoir reviews: authoritative accounts of real lives, from historical figures to contemporary voices.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in South African prisons — 18 of them on Robben Island, a former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town where political prisoners broke rock in a limestone quarry and were denied sunglasses despite the glare that damaged their eyes. He became president of South Africa in 1994. Long…
Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when the Hungarian gendarmerie rounded up the Jews of Sighet, his Transylvanian hometown, and loaded them onto cattle cars. He arrived at Birkenau in the spring of 1944. He survived Auschwitz and Buna. He arrived at Buchenwald after the death march from Buna in January 1945. He was liberated…
Mary Karr grew up in a small Texas oil town called Leechfield in the 1960s, in a family that was chaotic, sometimes violent, and held together by bonds that didn’t quite resemble anything a social worker would recognize. Her father was a roughneck who drank and told stories; her mother was brilliant, volatile, and periodically…
In 1967, Patti Smith arrived in New York City with four dollars and nowhere to stay. Robert Mapplethorpe arrived separately, equally broke, equally driven by something he couldn’t yet name. They found each other in Brooklyn, became lovers, became collaborators, became each other’s most essential witnesses through the years that followed — the Chelsea Hotel…
Hope Jahren has spent her career studying plants — their chemistry, their growth, their extraordinary persistence in environments that should make survival impossible. Lab Girl is her memoir, but it is more accurately a book about two things running in parallel: the scientific life she has built and the biology she studies. The chapters about…
