Biography and memoir reviews: authoritative accounts of real lives, from historical figures to contemporary voices.
Jeff Young’s Wild Twin is a memoir that resists nearly every convention of the form. It is not chronological. It is not confessional. It does not build toward a tidy epiphany or a redemptive arc. Instead, it moves like memory itself: in fragments, in loops, in sudden leaps between decades and cities that feel less…
Jennifer Teege did not know, until she was in her late thirties, that her grandfather was Amon Göth — the SS commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp, the man depicted in Schindler’s List as a monster who shot prisoners from his villa balcony for sport. The discovery, made when she stumbled upon a library book…
Heart Berries: A Memoir, published by Counterpoint Press in 2018, is the kind of book that arrives without much warning and changes what you thought a memoir could do. Terese Marie Mailhot wrote it while receiving treatment for PTSD and bipolar disorder at a psychiatric facility, drafting it first as letters to her therapist, then…
Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin by Kenneth Womack is a compelling and meticulously researched biography that reveals the full measure of one of popular music’s most consequential figures. About the Book Kenneth Womack’s biography of George Martin—the producer, arranger, and fifth Beatle whose work shaped the sound of the most influential…
The 1916 Irish Rebellion by Hilary Pyle is a stunning visual and narrative account of the Easter Rising that transformed Ireland forever — a meticulously researched and gorgeously produced volume that brings one of the pivotal moments in modern history to vivid, unforgettable life. About the Book Published to coincide with the centenary of the…
William Still kept records when keeping records was dangerous. As a free Black man working in Philadelphia in the 1850s, he maintained meticulous documentation of nearly one thousand freedom seekers who passed through the city on their way north, gathering names, physical descriptions, family histories, and the stories of escape that the individuals entrusted to…
A 2024 National Jewish Book Award winner, Warsaw Testament collects the real-time wartime testimony of Rokhl Auerbach, one of three surviving members of the Oyneg Shabes archive. Translated by Samuel Kassow, it is an irreplaceable primary document of the Warsaw Ghetto’s interior life.
Genre editor for Biography reviews.
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…
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