Autobiography Books

One of the greatest prodigies of his era, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was studying arithmetic and Greek by the age of three, as part of an astonishingly intense education at his father’s hand. Intellectually brilliant, fearless and profound, he became a leading Victorian liberal thinker, whose works – including On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women and this Autobiography – are among the crowning achievements of the age. A moving account of an extraordinary life, this great autobiography reveals a man of deep integrity, constantly searching for truth.

Regarded as the most influential and widely read thinker on modern organizations and their management, Peter Drucker has also established himself as an unorthodox and independent analyst of politics, the economy, and society. A man of impressive scope and expertise, he has paved significant inroads in a number of key areas, sharing his knowledge and keen insight on everything from the plight of the employee and the effects of technology to the vicissitudes of the markets and the future of the new world order. Adventures of a Bystander is Drucker’s rich collection of autobiographical stories and vignettes, in which this legendary figure paints a portrait of his remarkable life, and of the larger historical realities of his time.

Bernard M. Baruch – one of the most remarkable men of our time – was an office boy at nineteen, a Wall Street partner at twenty-five, and a millionaire before he was thirty-five. For some men this success would mark the climax of a career; for Baruch it was only the beginning of a still greater one. Bernard Baruch has been a trusted counselor of Presidents, an adviser on social and economic reforms, a statesman who has worked with two political parties and won the respect of both. In this, the first volume of his memoirs, Mr. Baruch analyzes his personal philosophy and shows how it helped him solve the many problems that confronted him in his public life as chairman of the War Industries Board during World War I and as United States representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.

Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870-1965) was an American financier, stock investor, philanthropist, statesman, and political consultant. After his success in business, he devoted his time toward advising U.S. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt on economic matters and became a philanthropist. This remarkable book is the second and final volume of his memoirs. He tells of his role as an advisor to Woodrow Wilson in the shaping of the Treaty of Versailles. He discusses with candor the prominent personalities of that time – Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Coolidge, Hoover, Winston Churchill, F.D.R., Truman and Eisenhower.

Born in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, the eighty-five years of Eric Hobsbawm’s life are backdropped by an endless litany of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. He has led a remarkably fulfilling and long life; historian and intellectual, fluent in five languages, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, until it dissolved itself, and writer of countless volumes of history. He has personally witnessed some of the critical events of our century from Hitler’s rise to power in Berlin to the fall of the Berlin wall. His autobiography is one passionate cosmopolitan Jew’s account of his travels through that past which is another country, where they do things differently, and how it became the world we now live in.

This autobiography was immediately hailed as a masterpiece upon publication and has even been called the greatest nonfiction book ever written. Henry Adams, whose great-grandfather and grandfather were both U.S. presidents, fills his story with one unforgettably brilliant observation after another. Filled with uncommon wisdom, this book also serves as a thoughtful history of 19th-century America.

The richly adventurous memoirs of one of the most dazzling public figures to dominate the American scene over the last decades. John Kenneth Galbraith who was born in 1908, is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and a past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the distinguished author of thirty-one books spanning three decades, including The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

Graham’s book is populated with a cast of fascinating characters, from 50 years of presidents (and their wives) to Steichen, Brancusi, Felix Frankfurter, Warren Buffett (her great advisor and protector), Robert McNamara, George Schultz (her regular tennis partner), and, of course, the great names from the Post: Woodward, Bernstein, and Graham’s editor partner, Ben Bradlee. She writes of them and of the most dramatic moments of her stewardship of the Post (including the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressmen’s strike) with acuity, humor, and good judgment. Her book is about learning by doing, about growing and growing up, about Washington, and about a woman liberated by both circumstance and her own great strengths.

Hoover’s “Memoirs” constitute his political statement. The third volume in the series, forthright and devastatingly critical of the New Deal, is the culmination of that statement. Its analysis of the Great Depression—the beginnings during the Hoover Administration and the eight frantic years of the New Deal power from 1932-1940—provides enlightening perspectives for the national problems that followed and persist up to today. Hoover argues that the Great Depression was largely the responsibility of the Federal Reserve, which acted against his protest; that the bank panic of 1933 was the most unnecessary panic in history; that Roosevelt’s actions as President-elect tended to precipitate that panic and his refusal to cooperate had an adverse effect upon critical foreign problems. A different perspective on the Great Depression from one of the most important political actor of the events.