I enjoyed Ball Four by Jim Bouton and First Down and a Billion by Gene Klein, even though I’m not a sports fan and those are about baseball and football. I also liked No Job for a Lady: The Autobiography of M. Phyllis Lose, V.M.D., about one of the first women vets who treated large animals, and also the All Creatures Great and Small series by James Herriot.
Any other recommendations?
Two of my favorite books are autobiographies: Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain, and The Memoirs of Glukel of Hameln.
Testament of Youth is the story of Brittain’s years spent as a nurse in WWI as part of the Royal Army’s Voluntary Aid Detachment. It’s one of the most thorough and outstanding accounts of WWI, and also a young woman’s coming of age. I was 14 when I read it, so it made a huge impression on me.
The Memoirs of Glukel of Hameln is really unusual and fascinating: a Jewish woman living in a shtetl in central Europe in the late 16th and early 17th century wrote her memoirs for her children, so they would know their family’s story. Somehow, it survived, hand-copied several times by her descendants, and was first published in 1896. It was written in Yiddish, and first translated into English in 1963. There are very few accounts of common people of this time period, let alone Jews. It’s very important historically, but the woman who wrote it had no idea she was writing anything that anyone outside her family would ever read.
I liked Asimov’s In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt quite a lot, and Pohl’s The Way The Future Was. Also liked the Klein, Bouton and Herriot that you mention - and Torey Hayden’s books too.
In music,
If you want to read a gritty autobio of a drifter and low-rent thief, try You Can’t Win by Jack Black (the original from back in the day).
The Moon’s A Balloon and Bring On The Empty Horses by David Niven. Possibly a little dated by now, but still great fun.
Speak Memory by Nabokov and Goobye to All That by Robert Graves, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens and The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers (maybe the first one to use that gag).
Worst: Mein Kampf and Go Ask Alice
Of course more occur after hitting submit, but I’m limiting myself to Christ Stopped at Eboli, really.
Go Ask Alice isn’t really an autobiography, it’s a preachy bit of self righteousness disguised as a biography.
Asimov’s memoirs was a great read. Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg about her time in Russian prisons and labor camps during the Stalin Era was gut wrenching and poignant.
The autobiography of Lincoln Stefens – the first volume. One of my personally most influential books, but in my Dad’s college reader because of the beautiful evocation of a fabulous Californian (19th century) childhood.
Also "Surely your joking Mr Feynman", “7 Pillars of Wisdom” (Lawrence of Arabia)" and the “Autobiography of Benjiman Franklin”, but those are a bit blokey and probably don’t fit your demographic
All 4 are among the most readable books I own
Yeager by, well, Yeager.
Harpo Marx, Harpo Speaks.
Although I am no fan of Michael Crichton’s novels I really enjoyed his autobiography Travels. It is a book about events that were important to him and just ignores all the things you would expect to find in his autobiography. He glosses over all his well known achievements.
Recently I have listened to audiobooks of Steve Martins’s Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, John Lithgow’s Drama: An Actor’s Education, Kevin Pollack’s How I Slept My Way to the Middle: Secrets And Stories From Stage, Screen, And Interwebs and Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I really loved the audiobooks (all read by the authors) and I’m sure the text version would be good too.
Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins of Apollo 11 fame.
Steve Martin’s Born Standing up was excellent. He is so smart, articulate and clear and what a story.
For insight into epic movie making, I like Charlton Heston’s The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976 and In the Arena. But none compare to the various chapters of the memoirs of Harry Flashman.
Swing That Music by Louis Armstrong and Big Bill Blues by Bill Broonzy.
I thought Michael Palin’s diaries were very entertaining.
Excellent choice.
A couple of old favorites are Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes.
Another cozy, funny one is My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell. It’s about the years his family spent on the island of Corfu when he was a boy, just before WWII, where he was fascinated by all animals. Durrell grew up to be zookeeper and conservationist.
I was fascinated by Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller. It’s her memoir about growing up with crazy British parents in colonial Africa in the 1970’s-80’s, mostly in Zimbabwe in the middle of a civil war.
Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys, made into the movie October Sky, is a nice read.
I liked Riding Rockets, by Mike Mullane, about his years as a space shuttle astronaut. He is/was a self-professed sexist pig (he writes proudly about how ashamed of himself he should have been), but his details about the shuttle flights are great.
Folks have already mentioned “Riding Rockets” and “Carrying the Fire”. I’ve been on an astronaut bio kick lately and have recently read both of those. (The Collins for the second time.)
I’d like to mention “Rocket Man”, a bio of Pete Conrad, my favorite of the early astronauts. Third man on the mood, Conrad was a brass-balls smart-ass and, I could be wrong but I think that Peter Weller’s character in “Odyssey 5” was based on him.