Biography & Memoir

For most of his life, music critic Tim Page felt like an outsider. Restless and isolated, he was uneasy around others. Finally, when he was 45, Page was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

Max Cleland served in Vietnam — where he lost both legs and his right arm — before being elected to the U.S. Senate. His new memoir is Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove.

Unitarian minister Forrest Church believed that the knowledge that we must die makes us question what life means. Church, who died Sept. 24, 2009 after a long battle with cancer of the esophagus, was the author of Love and Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow.

Book editor Jonathan Karp worked closely with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in the final year of the senator's life, getting to know the man behind the public persona, sifting through a half century of papers and finding out Kennedy's deepest feelings about family controversies, successes and tragedies

Critic Milo Miles reviews The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics. It's Dennis Kitchen and Paul Buhle's illustrated biography of influential artist and writer Harvey Kurtzman, the inventor of MAD Magazine.

Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, finishing faster than any of the five men who had done it before. Young Woman and the Sea shows how Ederle's fame grew, then evaporated.

In a 1996 interview, the late memoirist shares richly detailed memories of his Limerick childhood and his adult life in the United States.

In time for the 110th anniversary of the author's birth, Ernest Hemingway's posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, has been restored — or rather, as Maureen Corrigan would have it, "remixed."

Iranian-American author and human rights activist Roya Hakakian talks about growing up Jewish in post-revolutionary Iran.

Former defense secretary Robert McNamara died Monday. In a 1995 interview with Terry Gross, McNamara reflects on Vietnam and admits his serious doubts about US policy and the decision-making that escalated the war.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' pays tribute to his father in his Memoir.

In 2008, Dr. Maria Siemionow and a team of doctors made history when they performed the first near-total face transplant in the United States. Siemionow writes about the procedure in the memoir Face to Face.

Actress Cloris Leachman, best known as nosy neighbor Phyllis on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, has penned her autobiography, Cloris, with husband George Englund. Leachman recently competed on Dancing with the Stars, and appears in the new film Inglorious Basterds.

When Rocco Mediate, a low-ranking journeyman golfer, challenged Tiger Woods to a sudden-death playoff at the 2008 U.S. Open, it became the subject of the new book Are You Kidding Me?

In his new memoir Lost Boy, Brent Jeffs talks about growing up in the polygamist FLDS chuch, his expulsion from the community, and his sexual-abuse lawsuit against his controversial uncle Warren Jeffs.

Four years ago, novelist Ayelet Waldman sparked a controversy — and wound up on Oprah to defend herself — when she wrote in an essay that she loved her husband more than her children.

In her new memoir, When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win: Reflections on Looking in the Mirror, stand-up comedian and Seinfeld writer Carol Leifer recounts her experiences working as a comedian.

Kirstin Downey's biography of FDR's Labor Secretary Frances Perkins paints an inspiring and substantive portrait of the woman who ushered in the 40-hour work week.

From Broadway to Sesame Street, Kristen Chenoweth has tackled a wide range of roles, genres and media. Now, she tells her own story in her autobiography, A Little Bit Wicked.