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🧲 Books like this

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Wings of Fire: An Autobiography

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam · 180 pages

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, the son of a little-educated boat-owner in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, had an unparalleled career as a defence scientist, culminating in the highest civilian award of India, the Bharat Ratna. As chief of the country’s defence research and development programme, Kalam demonstrated the great potential for dynamism and innovation that existed in seemingly moribund res

Scientist ProtagonistAutobiographyHopefulWorking-Class Protagonist
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The Pursuit of Happyness

Chris Gardner · 367 pages

The astounding yet true rags-to-riches saga of a homeless father who raised and cared for his son on the mean streets of San Francisco and went on to become a crown prince of Wall StreetAt the age of twenty, Milwaukee native Chris Gardner, just out of the Navy, arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. Considered a prodigy in scientific research, he surprised everyone and

HopefulAutobiographyUpliftingFinding Purpose
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Mao's Last Dancer

Li Cunxin · 444 pages

A poor child living in poverty is chosen out of millions of children to attend Madame Mao's dancing ballet. His life drastically shifted from living in poverty to studying dance.

Finding PurposeAutobiographyUpliftingHopeful
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The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch · 224 pages

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

UpliftingFinding PurposeHopefulMemoir & Biography
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An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

Chris Hadfield · 309 pages

"Chris Hadfield was selected by the Canadian Space Agency to be an astronaut in 1992. He was Chief of Robotics at the Johnson Space Center in Houston from 2003-2006, and in March 2013, he became the first Canadian Commander of the International Space Station where, while conducting a record-setting number of scientific experiments and overseeing an emergency spacewalk, he gained worldwide acclaim

Finding PurposeUpliftingHopefulAutobiography
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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

Finding PurposeUpliftingHopefulAutobiography
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Joni: An Unforgettable Story

Joni Eareckson Tada, Joe Musser · 224 pages

Autobiography of Joni Eareckson, who at 17 was left a quadriplegic as a result of a diving accident, and who today as an accomplished artist drawing with a pen held in her teeth, describes her struggles and her abiding faith in Christ.

Finding PurposeHopefulUpliftingAutobiography
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Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

HopefulAutobiographyUpliftingWorking-Class Protagonist
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Tuesdays with Morrie

Mitch Albom · 192 pages

Tuesdays with Morrie is a memoir by American author Mitch Albom about a series of visits Albom made to his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, as Schwartz gradually dies of ALS. The book topped the New York Times Non-Fiction Best-Sellers List for 23 combined weeks in 2000, and remained on the New York Times best-selling list for more than four years after. In 2006, Tuesdays with Morrie was

Finding PurposeUpliftingHopefulAutobiography
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The Story of My Life

Helen Keller · 240 pages

UpliftingHopefulFinding PurposeAutobiography
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Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption

Katie J. Davis, Beth Clark · 264 pages

What would cause an eighteen-year-old old senior class president and homecoming queen from Nashville, Tennessee, to disobey and disappoint her parents by forgoing college, break her little brother’s heart, lose all but a handful of her friends (because the rest of them think she has gone off the deep end), and break up with the love of her life, all so she could move to Uganda, where she knew only

Finding PurposeUpliftingHopefulAutobiography
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My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme · 344 pages

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the coun

Finding PurposeUpliftingAutobiographyHopeful
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Scientist ProtagonistFinding PurposeAutobiographyUplifting
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Becoming

Michelle Obama · 432 pages

In this adaptation of her autobiography for younger readers, Michelle Obama presents an account of her life, and, in telling of her own personal evolution, stresses the need for people to realize that no one is perfect, that the process of "becoming" is what really matters.

AutobiographyUpliftingHopefulWorking-Class Protagonist
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Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

Ben Carson, Cecil Murphey · 224 pages

Ben Carson, M.D., works medical miracles. Today, he's one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in the world. In Gifted Hands, he tells of his inspiring odyssey from his childhood in inner-city Detroit to his position as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital at age 33.

Finding PurposeUpliftingAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

Conor Grennan · 308 pages

Little Princes is the epic story of Conor Grennan’s battle to save the lost children of Nepal and how he found himself in the process. Part Three Cups of Tea, part Into Thin Air, Grennan’s remarkable memoir is at once gripping and inspirational, and it carries us deep into an exotic world that most readers know little about.

Finding PurposeUpliftingAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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#GIRLBOSS

Sophia Amoruso · 248 pages

HopefulAutobiographyWorking-Class ProtagonistMemoir & Biography
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Ghost Boy

Martin Pistorius, Megan Lloyd Davies · 288 pages

UpliftingHopefulAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity

Izzeldin Abuelaish · 239 pages

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish - now known simply as "the Gaza doctor" captured hearts and headlines around the world in the aftermath of horrific tragedy: on January 16, 2009, Israeli shells hit his home in the Gaza Strip, killing three of his daughters and a niece. By turns inspiring and heartbreaking, hopeful and horrifying, this is Abuelaish's account of a Gazan life in all its struggle and pain. A Pa

HopefulUpliftingAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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Yes, Chef

Marcus Samuelsson · 327 pages

"It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Mar

Finding PurposeAutobiographyUpliftingMemoir & Biography
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Rocket Boys

Homer Hickam · 386 pages

Finding PurposeAutobiographyWorking-Class ProtagonistMemoir & Biography
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When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi · 256 pages

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve me

Finding PurposeAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

John Grogan · 368 pages

The heartwarming and unforgettablestory of a family in the making and thewondrously neurotic dog who taughtthem what really matters in lifeJohn and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.Marley quickly grew int

UpliftingAutobiographyHopefulMemoir & Biography
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Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · 638 pages

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly recreates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader

HopefulUpliftingAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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