Books like Long Walk to Freedom

01

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X and Alex Haley · Memoir

The Autobiography of Malcolm X was assembled from a series of conversations between Malcolm X and the journalist Alex Haley, conducted over two years before Malcolm's assassination in February 1965.

A kindred memoir read.

02

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

A kindred memoir read.

03

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Shares resistance and identity with Long Walk to Freedom.

04

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Marjane Satrapi · Memoir

Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir of growing up in Tehran during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Shares resistance and identity with Long Walk to Freedom.

05

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi · Memoir

Azar Nafisi spent years teaching literature at universities in Tehran before the restrictions on what she could teach — and who she could teach — became intolerable.

Shares resistance and identity with Long Walk to Freedom.

06

Legacy

James Kerr · Business

Legacy is James Kerr's examination of how the New Zealand All Blacks became the most successful sports team in history and what that success reveals about leadership, culture, and purpose.

Shares leadership and identity with Long Walk to Freedom.

07

Letters and Papers from Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer · Philosophy

Letters and Papers from Prison is a posthumous collection of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's correspondence written during his imprisonment at Tegel military prison in Berlin between April 1943 and October 1944, along with some earlier papers and the poem "Who Am I?" written near the end.

Shares resistance and identity with Long Walk to Freedom.

08

The Leadership Gap

Lolly Daskal · Business

The Leadership Gap argues that the same qualities that make leaders effective also carry within them a shadow that can undermine performance.

Shares leadership and identity with Long Walk to Freedom.

09

Turning Pro

Steven Pressfield · Self-help

Turning Pro is Pressfield's follow-up to The War of Art, taking the Professional/Amateur distinction and developing it into a full examination of what the shift actually looks like — and what it costs.

Shares resistance and identity with Long Walk to Freedom.

10

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.

Both dig into identity.

11

A Promised Land

Barack Obama · Memoir

A Promised Land is the first volume of Barack Obama's presidential memoirs, covering his 2008 campaign through the first two and a half years of his presidency, ending with the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Both dig into leadership.

12

Becoming

Michelle Obama · Memoir

Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.

Both dig into identity.