Best biographies and memoirs of February 2024, as chosen by the Amazon Editors
The best biographies and memoirs of February offer a range of experiences: you can hit the club with Moshe Kasher or walk the gilded halls of finance with Carrie Sun and learn about Cambodian food and history with Chantha Nguon or the love story of two Civil Rights leaders. Each of these books offer crisp compelling stories that are equal parts entertaining and eye-opening.
Here are some of our favorites of the month, but be sure to look through our full list of the Best Biographies and Memoirs of February and the Amazon Editors’ Top 10 list.
This is the best kind of narrative nonfiction—so intimate, so profound and poetic, that it reads like a novel. Brent Cummings is a veteran who has returned home to Georgia, a place that now feels more foreign to him than the time he served in Iraq and Israel. He’s grappling with his purpose and privilege, and the devastating reality that America’s vow—be a good human, work hard, get rewarded—isn’t true for him, for his family, his neighbors, or for most people. This is a deeply relatable parable about the American Dream—its beautiful promise, its crushing failure, and that on-edge feeling of vastness in between—questioning whether you can hold on to the life you’ve worked—and sacrificed—to build. I devoured this bittersweet book—by a writer awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Genius grant—in several hours. It’s a quiet story about one man, and a sprawling tale about all of America—this stirring narrative will resonate with anyone who’s felt unmoored. —Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor
We didn’t just pick this memoir of “another kind of love story” because Valentine’s Day falls this month. We picked this memoir because Leslie Jamison has an uncanny ability to articulate the duality of love and affection, success and creativity with a singular directness. As her marriage falls apart, Jamison grapples with her new-found role as a mother—striving to somehow balance the impossible grief of heartbreak with the bursting love of parenthood, and writing. Full of brilliantly articulated moments of reflection—“which is maybe how love dies—thinking you know their answers”—Jamison trains her eye on her own actions and behavior, offering readers a way to see through their own relationships with partners, children, and work. A relatable and wise memoir that crackles with insight. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
If you’re a Billions fan, or just looking for the juicy innerworkings of the high-powered, opulent world of finance, look no further than Carrie Sun’s riveting memoir. After 14 rounds of interviews, ending an engagement, and dropping out of an MBA program, Carrie Sun lands a job that many dream of—the assistant to the billionaire founder of one the top performing hedge funds. She specifically chased an assistant job so that she can pursue her ambitions to become a writer. But—the world of elite finance has other plans for Sun. Working around the clock, Sun is forced to reckon with what success means, what she wants, and how far she’ll go to find it. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Subculture Vulture is an exuberantly wild and funny—and honest—account of addiction, drug-dealing, DJing, deaf culture, religious reckoning, and stand-up comedy that is as unique and vibrant as memoirs get. Hurtling from one crazy moment (a “boyking of Alcoholics Anonymous”) to the next (an American Sign Language interpreter), Moshe grounds his interludes in a kind of meditative humor that waxes between zinging cultural insights and intimate confessions. It’s a wild ride through subcultures that is a reminder of just how energetic living can be. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Memoirs of food and family can be so satisfying—a smell, a meal, or a cooking technique can conjure so much and so quickly (no wonder Proust’s madeleine sent him traipsing down memory lane), which is why we named Slow Noodles one of the best memoirs of the month. Chantha Nguon’s haunting memoir recounts “2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination,” and life as a Cambodian refugee who lost everything and everyone during Pol Pot’s genocide in the 1970s. And one of the things that carried her through was her mother’s cooking, which gives her not only sustenance but employment. Throughout the memoir are recipes from her mother’s kitchen—a detail that makes this memoir even more visceral. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid electrifies the story of two people fighting for each other and their family, while waging a battle for civil rights, in her historical biography of Myrlie and Medgar Evers. Before they were on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, they were two students falling in love. Medgar found inspiration in his father, a Black man who refused to bow to prejudice, and from his time in the military, where he served in WWII. We meet Myrlie as a bright, ambitious teenager, just 17 years old, attending Alcorn A&M College. This book shines in the intimate conversations Reid has with Myrlie, who continued advocating for equality after her husband’s assassination. “It was the very qualities that I most admired in Medgar that frightened me,” Myrlie tells Reid, humanizing their bravery, which was not without a hefty price—but changed the course of America. —Lindsay Powers, Amazon Editor
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