Lawrence Weschler's profile of an artist (or con artist), Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999)

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, edited by Leonard Marcus (1998)

John M. Hull's memoir Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (1990)

Douglas Wolk's appreciation of James's Brown's album, Live at the Apollo, part of the 33 1/3 series (2004)

Jo Ann Beard's collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth (1999)

Mary McCarthy's memoir Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

Frederick and Steven Barthelme's memoir of gambling, writing, and family, Double Down

Marshall Frady's political profile Wallace (1968)

John McPhee's account of a 1968 U.S. Open tennis semifinal, Levels of the Game (1969)

Charlotte Gill's memoir of tree-planting in British Columbia, Eating Dirt (2011)

W. Stanley Moss's memoir of the kidnapping of a Nazi general in World War II, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950)

Rinker Buck's memoir of his teenage flight across the United States, Flight of Passage (1997)

Teffi's memoir of the traveling through Russia during the Revolution, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (1931)

John Berger and Jean Mohr's illustrated profile of an English country doctor, A Fortunate Man (1967)

Kao Kalia Yang's memoir of her family in Laos, Thailand, and the United States, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (2008)

Sidney Lumet's filmmaking memoir, Making Movies (1995)

Mary Austin's nature vignettes from the California desert, The Land of Little Rain (1903)

Thomas Geoghegan’s memoir of his life as a labor lawyer, Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back (1991)

David W. Maurer’s guide to the lore and lingo of the underworld, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man (1940)

Natalia Ginzburg’s book of essays, The Little Virtues (1962)

Hector Abad’s memoir of his father, Oblivion (2006)

Iris Origo’s War in the Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944 (1947)

Marion Winik’s collection of elegies, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (2008)

Sooyong Park’s nature memoir, The Great Soul of Siberia: In Search of the Elusive Siberian Tiger

Hettie Jones’s memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones

Brian Fagan’s environmental history, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1650

Charles Sprawson memoir and cultural history of swimming, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero

Jamaica Kincaid’s collection of New Yorker “Talk of the Town” vignettes, Talk Stories

Kate Summerscale’s Victorian true-crime history, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

Rick Bass’s geologist’s memoir, Oil Notes (1989)

Frances Faviell’s memoir of the London Blitz, A Chelsea Concerto

Nan Shepherd’s nature memoir, The Living Mountain

C.L.R. James’s history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins

Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir Childhood

Kenneth Brower’s profile of Freeman and George Dyson, The Starship and the Canoe

Bill Barich’s racetrack memoir, Laughing in the Hills

Aminatta Forna’s memoir of her childhood in Sierra Leone and Scotland, The Devil That Danced on the Water

Roy Andries De Groot’s book of travel and recipes, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth

N. Scott Momaday’s ancestral and personal memoir, The Names

Marina Jarre’s memoir of an outsider’s life in Latvia and Italy, Distant Fathers

Sanora Babb’s memoir of growing up in eastern Colorado, An Owl on Every Post

Moss Hart’s Broadway memoir, Act One

Ella K. Maillart’s memoir of traveling by car from Switzerland to Afghanistan, The Cruel Way

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s memoir of traveling by car from Switzerland to Afghanistan, All the Roads Are Open

Norman Levine’s memoir of travelling across Canada, Canada Made Me

Pauli Murray’s family history, Proud Shoes

Leila Guerriero’s profile of an Argentinian dancer, A Simple Story

William W. Warner’s appreciation of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and those who pursue it, Beautiful Swimmers

Gillian Rose’s memoir of love and death, Love’s Work

Mike Royko’s biography of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, Boss

Ellen Ullman’s memoir of software development, Close to the Machine

John Langston Gwaltney's oral history of African Americans, Drylongso

Diana Athill’s memoir of early love and artistic discovery, Instead of a Letter

Rockwell Kent’s memoir of a sailing adventure to Greenland, N by E

Edmund Gosse's memoir of his Victorian fundamentalist upbringing, Father and Son

Christiane Ritter's memoir of a year spent on an Arctic island, A Woman in the Polar Night

Leah Hager Cohen's book of reporting and memoir about a school for the deaf in New York City, Train Go Sorry

Joe Hutto’s memoir of raising a brood of wild turkeys in the Florida panhandle, Illumination in the Flatwoods

Frederic Morton’s history of a deliriously pivotal year in the politics and culture of the late Habsburg Empire, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889

Mary Oppen’s memoir of a shared, independent life of art, adventure, and activism, Meaning a Life