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 authorBorn 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
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.
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
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.
Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart
James R. Doty · 276 pages
The author relates how a chance encounter in a magic shop with a woman who taught him exercises to ease his sufferings and manifest his greatest desires gave him a glimpse of the relationship between the brain and the heart, and drove him to explore the neuroscience of compassion and altruism.
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
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.
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
My Journey : Transforming Dreams into Actions
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam · 160 pages
Inspirational stories from the life of the author.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer · 294 pages
William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger, and a place where hope and opportunity were hard to find. But William had read about windmills in a book called Using Energy, and he dreamed of building one that would bring electricity and water to his village and change his life and the lives of tho
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
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
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
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
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jean-Dominique Bauby · 141 pages
The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes the rare stroke to the brain stem that left his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body.
Bossypants
Tina Fey · 277 pages
Tina Fey’s new book *Bossypants* is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation. Some of the funnie
Bud, Not Buddy
Christopher Paul Curtis · 249 pages
It's 1936, in Flint, Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud's got a few things going for him: 1. He has his own suitcase filled with his own important, secret things. 2. He's the author of Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself. 3. His momma never told him who his father was, but
The Water is Wide
Pat Conroy · 260 pages
"A young white teacher goes to an island off the coast of South Carolina to teach a group of functionally illiterate black children. Yamacraw Island is backward and primitive, a world for the most part left untouched by the 20th century....By ignoring the textbooks and concentrating on meaningful situations and dialogue...he begins to make headway. He also, unfortunately arouses the ire of the pow
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
Michael Lewis · 345 pages
Follows one young man from his impoverished childhood with a crack-addicted mother, through his discovery of the sport of football, to his rise to become one of the most successful, highly-paid players in the NFL.
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.
The Hospital by the River
Catherine Hamlin, John Little · 320 pages