Cash
The Autobiography
1997 · 320 pages
Cash tells it in his own voice: picking cotton in Dyess, Arkansas, the brother a saw killed at fifteen, the amphetamine decades, and the night he crawled into Nickajack Cave to die.
★ 4.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Kitchen Confidential
2000 · 312 pages
Bourdain cooked for two decades, then told everything: the drugs, the immigrant crews who hold restaurants up, why you never order fish on Monday. He made the line cook a figure Americans envied.
★ 4.7
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
1957 · 288 pages
Buying a house in the hill village of Bellapais, Durrell watched Cyprus slide from Mediterranean idyll into insurgency, and ended up speaking for the British government as his Greek friends turned against him.
★ 4.8
South from Granada
1957 · 320 pages
In 1920 an Englishman settled in the mountains south of Granada, in a village called Yegen. Brenan sets down its customs, its poverty and its gossip, an Andalusia the Civil War would erase.
★ 4.8
Full Tilt
Ireland to India with a Bicycle
1965 · 256 pages
Murphy left Dunkirk in the frozen January of 1963 on a bicycle named Roz and rode to Delhi, fighting off wolves in Yugoslavia and thieves in Iran, and setting it down without drama.
★ 4.9
My Family and Other Animals
1956 · 273 pages
On Corfu in the 1930s a boy hunts scorpions and owls while his mother and three grown siblings supply the chaos. Durrell describes every creature exactly and every relative without mercy.
★ 5.0
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A Memoir of Life and Death
1997 · 144 pages
A stroke left the editor of French Elle able to move one eyelid. Blinking while an assistant recited the alphabet, Bauby composed a memoir of appetite, his children, and the body holding him.
★ 5.0
This Boy's Life
A Memoir
1989 · 336 pages
Sent to a Cascade logging town to live with a violent stepfather, a boy who calls himself Jack lies and steals his way toward escape. Wolff renders his adolescence with merciless clarity.
★ 5.1
Between Meals
An Appetite for Paris
1962 · 185 pages
Sent to the Sorbonne in 1926, Liebling studied restaurants instead. Proust, he argues, simply lacked the appetite to eat properly. What follows is a young man's gluttonous education in Paris.
★ 5.3
A Man's Place
1983 · 90 pages
Ernaux's father ran a café and grocery in Normandy, terrified all his life of using the wrong word. Educated out of his class, she writes him in flat sentences that never condescend.
★ 5.4
West with the Night
1942 · 293 pages
Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.
★ 5.6
Sailing Alone Around the World
1900 · 273 pages
Slocum rebuilt an oyster sloop, left Boston in 1895, came back three years later the first person to circle the earth alone. He recounts it in the practical voice of a working sailor.
★ 5.7
The Woman Warrior
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
1976 · 209 pages
Kingston's aunt drowned herself in the family well, and no one may say her name. Out of that silence and the legend of a woman warrior, Kingston remade what American memoir could do.
★ 6.2
Goodbye, Darkness
A Memoir of the Pacific War
1980 · 416 pages
Returning decades later to the Pacific islands where he served as a Marine sergeant, Manchester sets the quiet beaches against what happened there. He was badly wounded on Okinawa and kept dreaming it.
★ 6.3
Fierce Attachments
A Memoir
1987 · 203 pages
Gornick walks Manhattan with her widowed mother, arguing the argument they have had since the Bronx tenement of her girlhood. Writing programs teach it as how a memoir is built.
★ 6.4
Annapurna
1951 · 256 pages
Herzog and Lachenal reached Annapurna's summit in June 1950, the first men atop an eight-thousand-meter peak. Frostbite cost Herzog every finger and toe during the descent. No mountaineering book has sold like it.
★ 6.4
Christ Stopped at Eboli
1945 · 288 pages
Banished by Mussolini to a village in the Italian south, a Turin doctor found peasants convinced Christ had stopped short of them. The book made postwar Italy confront a region it had abandoned.
★ 6.5
Arabian Sands
1959 · 400 pages
Thesiger crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter twice with Bedu companions, on a pint of water a day. He loved that life, knew oil money would end it, and wrote this as its elegy.
★ 6.5
Out of Africa
1937 · 399 pages
"I had a farm in Africa," Dinesen begins. Seventeen years below the Ngong Hills end in ruined coffee and a forced sale, and she tells it in prose that never asks for sympathy.
★ 6.5
Wind, Sand and Stars
1939 · 240 pages
Flying mail over the Sahara and Patagonia, Saint-Exupery writes about what the work did to the men who flew it. The pilot Guillaumet crashed in the Andes and walked out through the snow.
★ 6.6