The classic story of Anne Frank recounts the thoughts, fears, and dreams of a teenage Jewish girl during World War II, while she hides from the Nazis in an attic with her family. The diary is both deeply personal and profoundly universal.

Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, provides an entertaining look at the process of “thin-slicing,” or the way in which we make split second decisions.

Larson’s account of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 focuses on the fair’s ambitious architect, Daniel H. Burnham, and Henry H. Holmes, the serial killer who used the fair ensnare his many victims.

Son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, Obama chronicles his travels from New York to Kansas to Hawaii and finally to Kenya on a journey to discover his roots and understand what it means to be a black American.

In the aftermath of a painful divorce, Gilbert sets out on a year of travel, spending four months in three countries with the goal of exploring pleasure and devotion, while discovering herself along the way.

On June 8, 1917, a fire broke out in a North Butte Mining Company shaft in Butte, Montana. It would become the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history.

“Every restaurant is a theater,” writes Gourmet editor in chief Ruth Reichl in a memoir chronicling her experience as restaurant critic for The New York Times. As restaurants began rolling out the red carpet whenever she walked in the door, Reichl took to donning disguises and assuming new personalities in order to accurately capture a restaurant’s experience – an experience quite different from that of the critics.

Follow National Public Radio correspondent Eric Weiner on a journey around the world to discover not only what makes people happy, but where people proclaim to be the happiest. Will Weiner, a self-proclaimed grump, find the “key” to happiness?

As an adult, Walls hid her past from everyone she knew for over two decades. In this memoir, she recalls growing up in a nonconformist family that traveled like nomads in the Southwest, moved to a rotting shack in rural West Virginia, and continually forced the four Walls children to be completely self-sufficient.

In this memoir, Rodriguez discusses his coming of age as a Mexican-American and the experience of being a “minority student,” from the day he entered school knowing only 50 words of English, through the completion of his M.A. at Columbia University.

The first of Angelou’s six-volume memoirs, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings chronicles Maya’s childhood from a terrible experience that left her mute for five years through her coming of age, work as the first black female street car conductor in San Francisco, struggle for civil rights and up to the birth of her son.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southerner who died of cancer and was buried in an unmarked grave, yet a sample of her cells would become a cornerstone of scientific research. Skloot’s decade-long investigation into the origin of the “HeLa” cells uncovers the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Hirsi Ali’s memoir describes her childhood and coming of age in a strict Muslim family in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya. She survives civil war, female mutilation, and an arranged marriage before escaping to the Netherlands, where she earns a degree in political science. Her outspoken work on a reform of Islam has put her life in danger and brought her into the spotlight of today’s political arena.

Filled with humor, folktales, and keen observations, Mark Twain’s early non-fiction account of the steamboat era on the Mississippi would later become an inspiration for his novel Huckleberry Finn.

At the age of 12, civil war in Sierra Leone separates hip-hop loving Beah from his family and forces him into the government army, where he becomes addicted to drugs and capable of murder. Eventually Beah is brought to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, but the war catches up with him there and he flees to the United States.

At the age of 13, Hoffman emigrated with her parents from Poland to Canada. Hoffman describes the immigrant experience and the trials of living in a foreign culture.

When Joseph Needham, Cambridge scientist and freethinking intellectual, fell in love with a Chinese student, he began a lifelong love affair with both the girl and her country. Journeying to the farthest reaches of China during WWII, he unlocked the mysteries of how this empire discovered printing, explosives, suspension bridges, and even toilet paper before the rest of the world.

Dubbed “Garrison Keillor’s evil twin” in a Publisher’s Weekly review, Sedaris brings together a collection of hilarious and sometimes poignant essays about his unconventional and unusual family, experience as a performance artist, move to Paris, attempts to learn the French language, and much more.

Journalist Charles J. Shields drew upon over 600 interviews plus correspondence and the personal papers of Truman Capote to write this inside look at the life of Harper Lee. This is the first biography ever written about the elusive author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In 1948 Julia Child set sail for France with her diplomat husband, embarking on a life long love affair with food that turned her into one of the most famous names in the cooking world. Lively, humorous, and filled with delectable descriptions of food.

This memoir details the author’s experience growing up as an Indian in both Indian and non-Indian communities. Writing in a style that draws heavily on traditional Indian stories and story-telling techniques for effect, Momaday explores what it means to identify himself as a part of an Indian community in today’s world.

In this bestseller, Michael Pollan poses the question: What should we have for dinner? The result is an investigation of industrial and organic food chains in the United States and an exploration of the impact of our food choices.

This graphic novel is Satrapi’s memoir about growing up during the Islamic Revolution. The novel follows Satrapi from age 10 to age 14, documenting everyday life in Tehran and her family’s personal struggles.

When rules at the University of Tehran became too restrictive, English professor Azar Nafisi decides to hold secret classes on Western literature for seven women in her home.

In a witty, journalistic style, Quammen chronicles twenty-one years of Darwin’s life, from the day Darwin returned from his Beagle voyage to the day he unleashed his theory of evolution upon the world. The authorinvestigates why it took Darwin twenty-one years to publish his theory.

Mortenson’s sequel to Three Cups of Tea begins where the earlier narrative ended, following Mortenson on his continued dramatic and often dangerous effort to establish ties, build schools, and promotes peace in remote, politically and geographically unstable regions.

A beautifully written true story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder that follows the incredible journey of a medical student who escapes civil war in Burundi to arrive in New York with no English or contacts, but goes on to graduate from Columbia University and devote his life to healing.

In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Goodwin investigates Abraham Lincoln and the leading members of his cabinet, providing fresh insights into the famed president’s personality and politics.

"Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me.” In this memoir chronicling his coming of age and path to self discovery, Moehringer recounts his search for a father figure, his experiences with heartache and disillusionment, and the bar that was his refuge through it all.

Ivan Doig’s memoir about growing up in rural Montana was a finalist for the National Book Award and was chosen as the 2006 One Book Montana selection by the Montana Center for the Book and the Montana Humanities Council.

Greg Mortenson, former mountain-climbing bum, founds an organization to build schools in Central Asia after being nursed back to health by Pakistani villagers.

Perry, author and volunteer firefighter in the small town of New Auburn, WI, began the year with two goals: growing his own food and fixing up his 1951 International Harvester pickup truck. Along the way, he experiences mishaps and missteps, observes the humor in every day small town life, and ends up falling in love.

When Tony Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) realizes he has no idea what happened between Columbus’s 1492 voyage and the founding of Jamestown in 1607, he sets off on an adventure to retrace sites of first contact. An interesting mix of history and travelogue.

The author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air investigates the tragic story of Pat Tillman, the NFL star who turned down a multimillion-dollar contract to join the army after 9/11.  Tillman was killed by friendly fire in 2004 and made into a poster child of heroism as part of a government cover-up that Krakauer brings to light in this page-turner.

John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath chronicles the American flight from the great dust bowl of the 1930s, but what happened to the people who stayed behind? Egan traveled the Dust Bowl region, collecting oral histories to discover why people chose to stay and what happened to those that did.

In this memoir, Didion reflects on her 40 year marriage and describes on how she survived the year after her husband of died of a heart attack while their daughter was in a coma.

In The Zookeeper’s Wife, best-selling author Diane Ackerman uncovers the remarkable true story of Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who hid hundreds of Jews and Polish resisters in their Warsaw zoo during World War II.