From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.
A boy in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, drawn by a survivor; the manga on the bomb.
John Lewis's civil rights years, from Nashville lunch counters to Selma, in three books.
Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.
Mandela's autobiography from the Transkei to Robben Island to the presidency.
T. E. Lawrence's own account of the Arab Revolt.
Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.
Three daughters of China: a warlord's concubine, a communist official and the author, through Mao's century.
Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.
Annie Ernaux's life from 1941 to 2006 as a collective French memory in the third person; her Nobel.
Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.
Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.
Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.
Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.
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