Lives Worth Reading: Biographies That Actually Captivate

Anne Frank did not write a biography — she wrote a diary, and she never knew it would be read. That's what makes it extraordinary. It's the most unguarded, intimate first-person account of what it meant to be young, Jewish, and hiding during the Holocaust. The gap between the wit and ambition of the voice and what we know happened is one of literature's most unbearable ironies.

Mandela's autobiography — written partly in secret on Robben Island — is the account of a life that contained more history than most nations. From Transkei village to the anti-apartheid underground, from 27 years in prison to the presidency of a new South Africa: it's a story so improbable that if it were fiction you'd find it unbelievable. Mandela's moral reasoning about violence, forgiveness, and dignity is worth a book on its own.

Dictated to Alex Haley in the months before his assassination, Malcolm X's autobiography is one of the most important American documents of the 20th century — a record of a mind that never stopped questioning its own conclusions. From Omaha to Boston street life to the Nation of Islam to Mecca and his final evolution toward universal humanism: it reads as a life in motion, never calcified, always surprising.

Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up mixed-race in apartheid South Africa — where his very existence was technically illegal — is the funniest serious book you'll read this decade. Noah has the comedian's gift for finding the absurd inside the awful, but he doesn't use it to distance himself from the weight of what he's describing. His portrait of his mother is one of the great mother-portraits in memoir literature.

Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family that didn't register her birth, never sent her to school, and used her as labour in a junkyard. She taught herself enough to pass the ACT and won a scholarship to Brigham Young, then a PhD from Cambridge. Her memoir is not a revenge narrative — it's a deeply painful, deeply honest examination of what education does to a person and what it costs.

Walls's memoir about growing up with two profoundly unconventional parents — a brilliant, alcoholic father who was full of visionary plans he never completed, and an artistic mother who prioritised her own freedom over her children's basic needs — is one of the most gripping and morally complex family portraits in memoir. Walls writes with love and clear eyes simultaneously, which is extremely hard to do.

The first of Angelou's seven autobiographical volumes, covering her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas through early adulthood, is one of the most important works of American literature. Its portrait of racial violence, sexual trauma, and the resilience of identity is told with a prose style so rich that it transcends its own genre. It has been banned repeatedly, which tells you everything about why it matters.

Isaacson's second transformative biography draws on the notebooks — 7,200 surviving pages of observations, sketches, questions, and calculations — to reconstruct the mind of history's greatest polymath. What emerges is a portrait not of superhuman genius but of ferocious curiosity deliberately cultivated: Leonardo's great gift was that he refused to stop asking questions everyone else had stopped asking.

In 1951, cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks — a Black woman being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins — without her knowledge or consent. Those cells, the HeLa line, became the foundation of modern cell biology and contributed to the polio vaccine, cancer research, and in vitro fertilisation. Skloot's account of the science and the family left behind is the most important book about medical ethics and racial injustice in American medicine.

Anne Frank did not write a biography — she wrote a diary, and she never knew it would be read. That's what makes it extraordinary. It's the most unguarded, intimate first-person account of what it meant to be young, Jewish, and hiding during the Holocaust. The gap between the wit and ambition of the voice and what we know happened is one of literature's most unbearable ironies.

Mandela's autobiography — written partly in secret on Robben Island — is the account of a life that contained more history than most nations. From Transkei village to the anti-apartheid underground, from 27 years in prison to the presidency of a new South Africa: it's a story so improbable that if it were fiction you'd find it unbelievable. Mandela's moral reasoning about violence, forgiveness, and dignity is worth a book on its own.

Dictated to Alex Haley in the months before his assassination, Malcolm X's autobiography is one of the most important American documents of the 20th century — a record of a mind that never stopped questioning its own conclusions. From Omaha to Boston street life to the Nation of Islam to Mecca and his final evolution toward universal humanism: it reads as a life in motion, never calcified, always surprising.

Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up mixed-race in apartheid South Africa — where his very existence was technically illegal — is the funniest serious book you'll read this decade. Noah has the comedian's gift for finding the absurd inside the awful, but he doesn't use it to distance himself from the weight of what he's describing. His portrait of his mother is one of the great mother-portraits in memoir literature.

Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family that didn't register her birth, never sent her to school, and used her as labour in a junkyard. She taught herself enough to pass the ACT and won a scholarship to Brigham Young, then a PhD from Cambridge. Her memoir is not a revenge narrative — it's a deeply painful, deeply honest examination of what education does to a person and what it costs.

Walls's memoir about growing up with two profoundly unconventional parents — a brilliant, alcoholic father who was full of visionary plans he never completed, and an artistic mother who prioritised her own freedom over her children's basic needs — is one of the most gripping and morally complex family portraits in memoir. Walls writes with love and clear eyes simultaneously, which is extremely hard to do.

The first of Angelou's seven autobiographical volumes, covering her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas through early adulthood, is one of the most important works of American literature. Its portrait of racial violence, sexual trauma, and the resilience of identity is told with a prose style so rich that it transcends its own genre. It has been banned repeatedly, which tells you everything about why it matters.

Isaacson's second transformative biography draws on the notebooks — 7,200 surviving pages of observations, sketches, questions, and calculations — to reconstruct the mind of history's greatest polymath. What emerges is a portrait not of superhuman genius but of ferocious curiosity deliberately cultivated: Leonardo's great gift was that he refused to stop asking questions everyone else had stopped asking.

In 1951, cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks — a Black woman being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins — without her knowledge or consent. Those cells, the HeLa line, became the foundation of modern cell biology and contributed to the polio vaccine, cancer research, and in vitro fertilisation. Skloot's account of the science and the family left behind is the most important book about medical ethics and racial injustice in American medicine.