I highly recommend these two:
Veeck as in Wreck by baseball team owner/promoter Bill Veeck, and basketball great Bill Russell’s Second Wind: Memoirs of Opinionated Man. Both are very interesting and informative, even if you don’t like sports particularly.
Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day is a very well-written, and remarkably candid, account of his years “embedded” with a Chicago crack gang while he wrote his dissertation on the underground economy of Chicago housing projects. Fascinating stuff - though I will say that the book convinced me that Venkatesh is sort of a terrible human being:
On one occasion in particular, he sits in the car while “his” gang boss and a subordinate go out to beat a low-level dealer. He doesn’t call the police, or otherwise try to stop the beating. That may make a sort of sense for an anthropolgist in some isolated village somewhere - but in a country with functioning laws, I would submit that moral men have a duty to try and stop that sort of thing. At least to place a call to the police.
To that, I’ll add Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing, which has much memoir/autobio material within it.
Also, it’s been updated with the simpler title of My Years with Ayn Rand, but I recommend Nathaniel Branden’s Judgment Night.
Also Fred Pohl’s The Way the Future Was, a contender for best title ever, and a great read. Pohl was one of the Futirians, a group of Science Fiction writers and fans.
The Brass Ring by Bill Mauldin, which chronicles his development as a cartoonist, a soldier and a skeptic.
Ron Jeremy’s autobiography was quite entertaining.
And I’ll second Mick Foley’s book as well.
I just finished reading Ozzy Osbourne’s book I Am Ozzy, it was excellent! Lots of great stories and you can’t help but be touched by Ozzy’s love of his family. The entire book I felt like I was sitting in a pub listening to Ozzy talk about his crazy life. Great read.
I will second Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, have always loved him and the book is engaging.
One of my favorites is In The Arena by Charlton Heston. What an interesting life that man led! Highly recommend this one.
[The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley](The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley) was one of those books I’d have never read if it wasn’t a school assignment but it was really good.
I’ll third Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. He is, semi-surprisingly, an outstanding writer.
My two very favorite autobiographies:
The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Coorain-Jill-Kathryn-Conway/dp/0749398949/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1 Girl from Australian outback grows up to be an American University president.
and
West with the Night by Beryl Markham http://www.amazon.com/West-Night-Beryl-Markham/dp/0865471185/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267726749&sr=1-1 Expatriate in Kenya. 1st person to fly non-stop West across the Atlantic
I really love Asimov’s autobiographies.
You might like Richard Feynman’s books, which are collections of essays, many of which are autobiographical.
Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys is based on Hickam’s real experiences, and is a good read.
I never had the chance to read Asimov’s two volumes of autobiography, but his last memoir, I, Asimov, is a wonderful book. I’ve read it twice and I expect I’ll read it again someday.
Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs are also wonderful. I have them in a nine volume edition and have read the first four volumes. They do get a bit tiring read in a row, so I read one a year. I’m about to read the fifth one now. This man’s life has to be read to be believed, he did so much and was so many different things. Although not an atheist he wasn’t particularly religious, he was definitely liberal and, for his time, very science-minded. (He almost became a priest when very young and the stories he tells about the clergy of his time have to be read to be believed. It all ended badly because of a woman, obviously.)
Probably not what you wanted, but Montaigne’s Essays are incredible. He’s one of the very best writers I’ve ever read and probably the wisest. Although not an autobiography the essays are incredibly personal and revealing. He writes: “I am myself the matter of my book” and “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics and my physics.” After I was done reading the essays for the first time I felt I knew the man better than I’ve ever known anybody. He wasn’t an atheist, nor was he very science-minded, but religion wasn’t too important to him and he was very liberal, in a conservative, 16th century kind of way.
Also, I’ve recently read Edmund White’s My Lives and thought it very good.
Carl Sagan didn’t write an autobiography per-se, but he references his own life and experiences repeatedly in several of his books includingThe Demon Haunted World and Billions & Billions(which he wrote after being diagnosed with the illness that would ultimately kill him, which he discusses in the book). Both books would be on my “deserted island/spare copies to loan out” lists.
Gore Vidal has written two autobiographies- Palimpsest and Point-to-Point Navigation. He’s not science-minded so much but he’s atheist and liberal in droves and a good- if often very bitchy- writer. He’s also written many autobiographical essays, some of which are on line. If you’re not that familiar with him he’s known everybody:
-Grandson of a blind U.S. Senator in the 1920s-1930s so he witnessed the politics of that era first hand as his grandfather’s seeing eye boy
-Son of Gene Vidal, a leader in the field of aeronautics (and who had an affair with Amelia Earhart and is portrayed in the recent biopic)- Vidal flew a plane solo when he was 9 (though I don’t think he was a pilot as an adult)
-Son of Nina Gore Vidal Auschinschloss, a woman who married into an extremely wealthy D.C. family (giving Vidal an insider/outsider view of very rich and powerful society)
-Related by marriage (kinda sorta) to Jackie Bouvier (when Vidal’s mother divorced her second husband he married Jackie’s mom, making Jackie and Lee stepsiblings to Vidal’s half siblings) thus knew her before she married JFK
-Good friend of JFK (though an enemy of RFK)
-Wunderkind author in the 1940s and 1950s who wrote some of the first mainstream “gay” novels (though he cannot stand being labeled as gay)
-Hollywood screenwriter who claims to have written the screenplay for BEN HUR (though Charlton Heston denied it) and to have peppered it with homoeroticism
-Close friends with Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward, Tennessee Williams, and a zillion other literary and movie figures; archenemies with Truman Capote, Anais Nin, Charlton Heston and other literary and movie figures
Anyway, often over-the-top, but always worth reading.
The only autobiography I’d ever read is Stephen Fry’s. He said on Craig Ferguson’s show the other day that he’s writing a “sequel” BTW.
After Fry’s, I read Dawn French’s autobiography Dear Fatty. I’m a fan of French’s and I really liked hearing about her interesting life before and after becoming a star. I actually didn’t read it, I heard it on audiobook. French herself did not want to read it, as there are some very rough parts (namely, her father committed suicide when Dawn was a teen) but the person they got to read it sounds almost exactly like her. The book is written as a series of letters to people in her life: her mom, her dad, her brother, Jen Saunders (nicknamed “Fatty”), her husband, her exes, her crushes, etc.
Anyway, Dear Fatty is not some ground-breaking insight into the life of a modern renaissance woman but, as you know, she runs in the same circles as Stephen Fry so you might enjoy her tale as well.
I second this one. While he wasn’t an atheist obviously (though he had been, or at least agnostic), the book is (in addition to being a great time-place memoir of black life in NYC before/during WW2) very much focused on critical thinking and self education. MX’s fallout with the Black Muslims and second major conversion (from the N.O.I. to mainstream Sunni Islam) occurred while he and Haley were writing it, which is interesting at times as well as you can tell where he’s made some adjustments to previous statements. Be sure to read Haley’s preface.
Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz also wrote an interesting memoir- Growing Up X. It’s more interesting as a slice of life piece than anything else, but it is interesting: she was the daughter of the most famous black separatist in America, but she barely remembered him (in fact she admits the few memories she did have may have just been suggestion- she was not quite 3 when he died) and she grew up in a predominantly white upper middle class suburb of NYC with white friends and teachers. She learned more about her father’s legacy in college than she did from her family (her mother Betty was very busy in the years after her husband’s death completing her education, being single parent to 5 daughters [two unborn when their father was killed], and beginning her career and obviously had a lot of pain where her murdered husband was concerned), so the book is much about growing up in the impossibly large shadow of a larger than life father you never knew and who had you lived in his heyday would have had next to nothing in common with.
I quite enjoyed Andre Agassi’s “Open.” I think even non-tennis fans would enjoy it.
The Confessions of St. Augustine.
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The Autobiography of Anthony Trollope.
Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, by William Cabell Bruce
The Education of Henry Adams.
The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats.
The Americanization of Edward Bok.
Michael I. Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor.
The Autobiography of William Allen White.
Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory.
this reminds me of another military autobiography. Mauldin inherited a cast-off suit from an uncle because it had been hung out to dry in the New Mexican sunshine, which stained it purple on the exposed side. This only made Mauldin want a suit than before, so he joined ROTC for the free uniform. (once the war started, it didn’t seem so “free” in retrospect.)
Similarly, Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle tells of how he joined ROTC, not for a free suit, but because cadets were excused from gym; and he would be spared the embarassment of being the overweight kid with the tiny dick in the locker room. ROTC cadets, since they were high school kids with no tanks or planes, were all funnelled into the dirty, dangerous infanty, where Fussell grimly looked back on his original motivation.
My al-time favorite war memoir is Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, from his upper-class English childhood to his days as a junior officer in WWI.
The virtual back-to-back biographies of Sir Richard Francis Burton by Byron Farwell and Fawn Brodie make for an interesting contrast of a fascinating person.
I apologize. I missed the “auto” in the title. In that case, I suggest reading the life-long serial autobiography of Sir Richard Francis Burton as expressed in all his published works bar the translations.