The Best Non-Fiction, Memoir, History, and Science Books from Our Top 250

#4 Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Originally published: 2013

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she brings them together beautifully.

#20 A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Originally published: 1980

National Book Award Finalist

Zinn, a historian, political scientist, and World War II veteran, reframes American history away from presidents and other traditional political figures, focusing instead on workers, enslaved people, Indigenous communities, immigrants, women, and political dissenters. Frequently updated and revised, it remains one of the most widely read and debated history books of the last half-century.

#22 The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Originally published: 1947

Written while she and her family hid from Nazi persecution in Amsterdam, Anne’s diary captures the fear, frustration, hope, and ordinary teenage interior life of a girl whose voice became one of the most enduring of the Holocaust.

#34 Night by Elie Wiesel

Originally published: 1958

Wiesel's spare and devastating memoir recounts his experience as a teenager deported with his family to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Originally published in 1958 as the French memoir La Nuit, Night was adapted from Wiesel's earlier Yiddish memoir (1956) before being translated into English.

#40 Nobody's Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

Originally published: 2025

Winner of Book of the Year and Narrative Book of the Year at the 2026 British Book Awards

Difficult, direct, and timely, Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir recounts her experiences of abuse, survival, and the long fight to be heard after being victimized by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

#51 Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Originally published: 2000

Before Anthony Bourdain became one of television's most recognizable travelers, Kitchen Confidential introduced readers to his sharp, irreverent voice. Expanded from his New Yorker essay, this memoir took readers behind the swinging doors of restaurant kitchens.

#78 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Originally published: 1969

Angelou's first memoir follows her childhood in the Jim Crow South, tracing trauma, racism, family, silence, and the lifesaving power of language. It is one of the books that helped establish memoir as both literary art and witness.

#81 Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Originally published: 2014

Surgeon Atul Gawande asks what medicine is for when a life is near its end. Through research, patient stories, and his own family experience, Being Mortal became a modern classic for readers trying to think more clearly and compassionately about aging, care, and death.

#85 The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Originally published: 2005

Walls' memoir about growing up with brilliant, unstable, and often neglectful parents became a book club phenomenon for good reason. Her clear-eyed storytelling refuses the simplicity of villainy, instead creating a complex portrait of family love that is as painful as it is hard to put down.

#89 The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, with John Sherrill and Elizabeth Sherrill

Originally published: 1971

The story of Corrie ten Boom and her family's work hiding Jewish refugees in Nazi-occupied Holland has become a lasting testimony of courage and faith. It follows resistance, imprisonment, grief, and the stubborn hope that can survive even in the darkest places.

#94 On Writing by Stephen King

Originally published: 2000

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Nonfiction

Part memoir, part craft book, this is King at his most generous and practical. He tells the story of becoming a writer, surviving a near-fatal accident, and doing the daily work, giving readers one of the most beloved books about writing from someone who knows the job.

#114 I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Originally published: 2022

ThriftBooks Staff Pick for Best Book of the Year 2022

McCurdy's memoir arrived with a title no one could ignore and a story that made clear why she chose it. Funny and brutal, it examines childhood fame, abuse, eating disorders, grief, and the complicated freedom of telling the truth after years of performance.

#115 Educated by Tara Westover

Originally published: 2018

Raised in an isolated Idaho family and denied a formal education, Tara Westover eventually made her way to college and, later, to Cambridge and Harvard. Educated is a memoir about family, resilience, memory, and the difficult process of forging an identity beyond the world that shaped her.

#124 On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Originally published: 2017

In this slim guide, historian Timothy Snyder turns lessons from twentieth-century authoritarianism into twenty lessons for the present. At just over 100 pages, it's a concise introduction to Snyder's ideas about democracy, authoritarianism, and civic responsibility.

#127 The Elements of Style by E.B. White, William Strunk Jr.

Originally published: 1920

This small but mighty writing manual has guided generations of students, teachers, and writers. Strunk's original guide was later revised and expanded by E.B. White, giving this compact classic its enduring place on desks everywhere.

#130 Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

Originally published: 1995

Loewen examined popular American history textbooks and challenged the flattened, sanitized versions of the past they often presented. The result is a corrective history book that asks readers not just what they learned, but why they learned it that way.

#132 The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Originally published: 2010

Alexander's influential work argues that mass incarceration functions as a system of racial control in the United States. Few modern works of legal and social criticism have entered public conversation as forcefully or shaped so many discussions about justice, policing, and civil rights.

#137 Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Originally published: 2020

Wilkerson looks beyond familiar language about race and class to examine caste as an organizing force in American life. Linking the United States, India, and Nazi Germany, she gives readers a large and unsettling framework for understanding hierarchy.

#141 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Originally published: 2011

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman takes readers through the two systems that shape how we think: one fast and intuitive, the other slower and more deliberate. It is a cornerstone of popular psychology and behavioral economics.

#148 The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, Alex Haley

Originally published: 1965

Told to Alex Haley, this autobiography traces Malcolm X's life from childhood to prison to his emergence as one of the most significant and debated leaders of the twentieth century. It is personal history, political testimony, and one of the defining American autobiographies.

#163 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Originally published: 2010

Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were taken without her knowledge and became one of the most important tools in modern medicine. The book combines science writing, biography, and family history to ask urgent questions about consent, race, and medical ethics.

#166 Assata by Assata Shakur

Originally published: 1987

Assata Shakur's autobiography tells her story in her own words, from childhood and activism to prison and political exile. It remains a widely read work of Black radical thought, personal testimony, and political history.

#169 Maus by Art Spiegelman

Originally published: 1986

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize Special Award

Spiegelman's graphic memoir depicts his father's survival of the Holocaust while also exploring memory, inheritance, and the strained relationship between father and son. By using comics to tell this history, Maus changed what many readers understood the form could do.

#189 Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Originally published: 1962

National Book Award Finalist

Carson's warning about pesticides and environmental damage helped launch the modern environmental movement. Silent Spring is one of those rare books whose influence extends far beyond the page, changing public conversation and policy alike.

#198 Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Originally published: 2015

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction

Written as a letter to his son, Coates' work considers what it means to live in a Black body in America. It is intimate, searching, and formally powerful, part memoir and part address to the country itself.

#220 The Wager by David Grann

Originally published: 2023

Grann turns a shipwreck, mutiny, and murder accusation into a gripping work of narrative history. With survivors telling competing stories about what happened, The Wager becomes not just a sea adventure, but a book about truth under pressure.

#225 Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

Originally published: 2010

Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Nonfiction

Gwynne's history of the Comanche, the rise and fall of their power, and the life of Quanah Parker is researched with the momentum of a page-turner. It is one of the modern West histories that readers return to for its scope and force.

#244 The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, et al.

Originally published: 1788

Written to argue for ratification of the U.S. Constitution, these essays remain foundational to American political thought. They are not exactly light reading, but they are still read because the questions they raise about government, power, and liberty never really went away.

#248 The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Originally published: 1949

Campbell's study of comparative mythology popularized the idea of the monomyth, or hero's journey, and shaped the way generations of readers, writers, and filmmakers think about story. Whether you agree with every framework or not, its influence is undeniable.

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