If you liked
Books like Gorin no sho
Loved Gorin no sho by Miyamoto Musashi? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from biography & memoir, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
As told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography follows Malcolm's journey from a troubled childhood in Michigan through criminal activity, prison, conversion to Islam and transformation into one of America's most electrifying and controversial political figures — ending with his shift toward a more universal view of human rights before his assassination in 1965.
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2
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the American South and in California — the racism, the trauma and the gradual emergence of her voice through literature. One of the most widely assigned and most challenged memoirs in American education, it announces one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
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3
The Diary of a Young Girl
A teenage girl's diary while hiding from the Nazis; one of the most important and human documents of the century.
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4
Black Boy
Richard Wright's autobiographical account of his childhood and youth in the Jim Crow South — the hunger, the violence, the white employer who takes him to a library, the reading that opens a world while making life in Mississippi impossible. One of the great American memoirs and one of the founding texts of the 20th-century Black literary tradition.
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5
Schindler's Ark
The documented story of Oskar Schindler — a German industrialist, bon vivant and opportunist who used his Kraków factory to save over 1,200 Polish Jews from extermination, spending his entire wartime fortune bribing SS officers. Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel-as-biography draws on interviews with Schindler's Jews and presents an unlikely hero who was also flawed, unfaithful and self-serving.
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6
The World of Yesterday
Written in Brazilian exile weeks before his suicide in 1942, Zweig's memoir reconstructs the cosmopolitan, culturally rich Vienna of his youth and the Europe he loved — before two world wars dismantled it completely. One of the great elegies for a lost world, and one of the most clear-eyed accounts of how civilisation can be destroyed by forces that seemed, until they weren't, impossible.
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7
A Small Place
A long, fierce essay addressed directly to the European tourist arriving in Antigua, Kincaid's essay is one of the most powerful pieces of postcolonial writing in English — about the relationship between tourism and colonialism, about the corruption that replaced British colonial rule, and about what it means to live in a place that others only visit.
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8
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his adolescence in 1950s America — moving with his mother from town to town, enduring a cruel stepfather named Dwight, petty criminality and an elaborate scheme to escape to a school he has no right to attend. A foundational American memoir and a study in the complicated relationship between the person you were and the writer you became.
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9
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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10
The Year of Magical Thinking
A clear-eyed account of grief after the sudden loss of a husband; precise and unsparing.