The best biographies and memoirs from Next Chapter [March 2023]
Biographies and memoirs are a popular book genre that focuses on the life experiences and achievements of real people. Biographies are written by authors who research and document the life of a specific person, while memoirs are typically written by the person themselves and provide a first-hand account of their life story.
One of the main benefits of reading biographies and memoirs is the opportunity to learn from the experiences of others. These books provide insight into the struggles, successes, and lessons learned by people who have achieved great things or overcome significant obstacles. By reading about the lives of others, readers can gain inspiration and guidance for their own lives.
Additionally, biographies and memoirs can also offer a unique perspective on history and society. By reading about the lives of people from different times and places, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the world around them and the events that have shaped it. From famous politicians and business leaders to everyday people who have made a difference in their communities, biographies and memoirs offer a diverse range of stories and perspectives for readers to explore.
Below, we’ve collected some of our best biographies and memoirs as of March 2023. If you enjoy one of the books below, please don’t forget to leave the author a review! Don’t agree with our choices? Please leave a comment and let us know your favorite :)
Books featured on this page
Fishnets In The Far East: A Dancer’s Diary In Korea by Michele E. Northwood
A couple of days later, on the 4th April, Mr Sol banged on our door at ten o’clock in the morning, dragged us out of a fitful slumber and told us to go down to reception.
As we had not gone to bed until 4:45 am, we were not particularly pleased to be loaded into a Bongo van and driven to an unknown location. The vehicle came to an abrupt stop at the edge of a forest, where Mr Sol told us to get out. We begrudgingly trampled after him, three; disgruntled souls following this man into the depths of woodland without the slightest idea of where we were going, or why.
“Where the hell is he taking us?” I whispered.
“God only knows!” Sharon sighed.
“It’s a good job he’s so jovial,” Louise said. “If not, I guess it would be safe to assume that we are being taken into the woods to be shot and left to die. Our crime being that we were not the original girls on the fliers!”
The three of us burst into laughter, not just at Louise’s comment but also at the ridiculous situation in which we had found ourselves. Although, Louise voicing what we had all been thinking, left us all feeling uneasy and tinged with incertitude. Nevertheless, we blindly followed Mr Sol until the trees thinned out, and we found ourselves in the middle of a woodland clearing.
We were pleasantly surprised - and more than a little relieved - to find that all the band members and bouncers from the club were in the clearing too. Everyone was lounging around with nonchalant abandon, stretched out in recumbent positions on the grass or sitting on rocks which bordered a little stream.
We took in the stunning scenery, chastising ourselves for not bringing a camera. Behind the stream, a mountain range stretched before us, and the majestic height of the tall trees behind us created a scenic landscape to which a painter’s palette probably could not do justice. It was a beautiful sunny day; the sound of the stream and the birds singing in the trees were a welcomed surprise and helped us to relax almost immediately.
“Well, this was definitely worth getting up early for,” I voiced. The girls nodded in agreement.
The Road Behind Me by RjCook
It was 1968, a year after the "Summer of Love." Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had recently been murdered, the Vietnam War was the nightmare of most American males in their late teens, the Beatles were still together, and eight-track tapes were still in the future. I was a skinny sixteen-year-old, nothing much to look at, and with hair far too long according to every adult in my world. Insecurity was the order of the day for me. I was a barely skilled novice musician dreaming of rock stardom, having friends with the same aspirations and the same level of skill. We were trapped in the suburban world of a total vacuous New Jersey town nine miles west of New York City. With that city's noble skyline in our view, our summer days were spent in idle wandering from my house to their house and back again, listening to the latest vinyl records by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, Jefferson Airplane; far too many great bands to list. When not sitting around someone's record player, reading the album jackets while the music enveloped us, we occasionally would sidetrack to a local park until we were told to move on along by either boredom or the local law. It was around this time that Peggy left to live in California, a move I didn’t quite understand why but would become clearer to me in time to come. My initial emotion was one of envy, and I was the guy with the cool sister who went to live in California when it was considered a legendary land of hippies, Haight-Ashbury, and great music in the 1960’s.
We also found a playground just around the corner from where I lived that proved a convenient retreat that included girls our age working for the town's Parks Department, tending to children coloring, gluing Popsicle sticks, and working with construction paper. Normally, this would have been a mind-numbing way to spend an afternoon, but did I mention that girls our age worked there? That was cause enough to dispel any chance of boredom to a sixteen-year-old boy.
Sixteen-year-old boys, especially when I was that age, were so much less mature than any sixteen-year-old girls I knew. We exposed ourselves to ostentatious displays of bravado and showing-off that sometimes drew smiles, or even a laugh, but we still left the playground each day in a testosterone-filled companionship that had us convincing each other that, sure, I think she likes me, maybe I will ask her out; yeah, tomorrow I'll do it. Yet each night alone in our beds, masturbation was the order of the moment as we envisioned our hoped-to-be girlfriends in all the carnal imagery we could muster.
After The Interlude by Ellyn Peirson
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
All right, dear friend, within our shared understanding of many life matters, I'll begin to put forth some thoughts for our discussion on what we've tentatively approached... the meaning of life and death and where we go and what it's like once we've shed our bodies, our cocoons. I've been more fervent about all this since Margaret died.
If this life isn’t all there is, what's next? What dream follows this one? Or do we wake up from the deep sleep of this life into Life? I suspect this last possibility is close to what happens. I suspect that this physical world is the dream. You know—row, row, row your boat....
It's not that my thoughts don't frequently go "there." Where? There's the rub. Thoughts, insights, epiphanies can never be translated into words. We can try. We must try. We can come close, you see. And the development of the soul requires that we put this Beyond-Stuff into our best attempt at uttered, written or musical form. If we have someone to share the holy stuff with—wonderful! Sharing of this sort is, I think, a rare experience. You and I are blessed to have each other. Needless to say, time spent on the Beyond requires introspection and a certain discipline, both of which require time alone and both of which create a desire for more internality. The paradox here is that this time spent alone, in temporal terms, carries with it the mandate to share with some other temporal being or two. No easy feat! This again underscores the exceptionality of our relationship.
As far as I know, the only person ever to teach this topic from full consciousness was the one who left young and willingly—perhaps willfully. His purpose in yielding to torture, humiliation and death was, in part, to mark death, in a big, historic sense and moment, as a transition... another birth... a Return. He demonstrated the way and process of the coming from and the returning to the Kingdom of God. As always, words fail. It's not a Kingdom. I know that much. That's our dim vision speaking. And our lack of vocabulary and memory. He told us a great deal about the Return; however, we have a tendency to look to the records in a closed, "justify me" way for this world. We think that this focus on the here and now will be the way to Heaven, and we miss all that he said about why we're here and where we're going. Indeed, he went so far as to say that great preparation had been done, that there was a "place" for us and that he needed to leave to prepare that place. To be rather rudimentary, that's like us telling our kids they're always welcome at home. It's a return to where they first belonged.
Voltaire’s Garden: A Memoir Of Cobargo by Isobel Blackthorn
It was a one-hundred metre walk from my mother’s house to the annex, taking the shortcut through a farm gate and past the granite outcrop. The girls slept in the flat and spent most of their spare time in the annex, now cluttered with our possessions.
On entry to the annex, the door to the left led to the office caravan. On the opposite wall was the door to the bedroom caravan. Between those two doors we’d put one of our sofas. Mary’s piano sat against the bedroom caravan wall and on the other side was a tall bookshelf stuffed with books. Below the window in the west-facing wall we’d positioned an old gas cooker – the oven sat beside the gas rings – on a makeshift bench. There was enough room at the end of the bench for a small square chopping board. Below the window on the north-facing wall Greg had erected a low melamine bench which I used to collect the dirty dishes in plastic tubs. There was no running water in the annex. In its centre sat Greg’s old oak table on a thick woollen rug. There was little floor space remaining.
I soon found spare time to be with my children didn’t amount to much and I hardly saw them. The first Monday after we moved, they arrived at seven for breakfast and left half an hour later for the school bus. Looking out the annex window I watched them walk to the gate, Sarah small and blonde, Mary tall with long red hair. An unlikely pair, they barely looked like sisters. Uniformed head-to-toe in navy blue, backpacks bulging on their backs, for all their adolescent defiance ¬– they were fourteen now – they were still my babies. I was unexpectedly overwhelmed, my mind awash with memories of when they were young and cute, and I wanted to rush out and hug them. But I couldn’t give way to the maternal longing in my heart. I had work to do.
Tapestry Of My Mother’s Life by Malve Von Hassell
Christa spent the first hours of her life in a drawer.
I picture this drawer as slightly dusty and musty, lined with newspaper. It happened to be the top drawer of a dresser in a room in her grandfather’s house, presumably with a faint scent of lavender and stuffed with her grandfather’s fine linen handkerchiefs.
Christa was born in her maternal grandfather’s house in Muttrin, Pomerania. Her parents were staying there in between the military postings of Christa’s father.
On the day of Christa’s birth on December 21, 1923, there had been a snowstorm. When her mother’s labor pains set in, my grandfather dispatched Chauffeur Reimann to fetch the doctor. For reasons unknown, the chauffeur decided to drive to Stolp, the capital of the district, about sixteen miles away, instead of seeking the help of a doctor in a nearby village. On the way, he promptly got stuck in the snow. He trudged back to the house. After a hasty conference between my grandfather and my great-grandfather, August, the carriage driver, was instructed to harness the horses and drive to the nearest village doctor. Just like Chauffeur Reimann, August got stuck in the snow.
Meanwhile, the electricity had gone out as it often did when there was a thunderstorm or a snowstorm. Christa’s father had to assist the midwife, holding a dim oil lamp, and after Christa finally made her appearance, her mother fainted. Perhaps her blood pressure had dropped after she lost too much blood. In the general panic, they wrapped Christa in newspaper and placed her in the drawer. When the panic subsided and they remembered the baby, they found her content and quiet in her drawer.
There we have it: the best biographies and memoirs from Next Chapter in 03/2023. We hope you enjoy them - and if you do, please leave a comment below, or a review in Goodreads or your favorite store. It would mean a lot to us!
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