March’s Best Biographies & Memoirs

First: Sandra Day O’Connor, by Evan Thomas
While current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been in the zeitgeist for a while now, it’s worth remembering the pioneering efforts of Sandra Day O’Connor, who paved the way for RBG, serving as the court’s first female justice (not quite two centuries following the establishment of the institution). Her service came at the mid-point of a remarkable career that saw her go from a quiet life on a cattle ranch to Stanford Law at a time when women lawyers were still rare. She became the majority leader of the Arizona state senate and then a judge before joining the Supreme Court for several incredibly consequential decades in American jurisprudence and politics. In crafting this definitive biography, Thomas has made use of exclusive interviews and gained access to the Justice’s archives for the first time.

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, by Lynne Olson
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s story is one of the great untold stories of World War II. Alliance was the code name for a vast intelligence organization in occupied France, a 3,000-member strong spy network that survived longer and provided more intelligence than any other, including maps crucial to the British and American commanders planning D-Day. It was all lead by “Hedgehog,” a mother of two who lived on the run and escaped Nazi capture twice. Lynne Olson tells the story of an incredible woman’s valor during her country’s darkest days.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America’s First Cyber Spy, by Eric O’Neill
Eric O’Neill was only 26 when he was tasked with collecting evidence on his boss, a fellow FBI agents named Robert Hanssen. Short-tempered and with a fondness for handguns, Hanssen spied for the Soviet Union and then for Russia for over two decades, staying ahead of spy hunters and cybersecurity experts in the then-nascent field. O’Neill’s story is both intensely personal and broadly relevant: a saga of cyber-spycraft with lessons far too relevant to America’s present-day efforts to stay ahead of “the competition.”

Mostly Sunny: How I Learned to Keep Smiling Through the Rainiest Days, by Janice Dean
For notoriously upbeat Fox & Friends meteorologist Janice Dean, there’s a silver lining to be found in every cloud. Finding it has not always been easy, however—as she reveals in her honest new memoir. A multiple sclerosis diagnosis at the age of 37 had her believing that her life was over; a bad reaction to a cosmetic procedure, which she felt was necessary due to the relentless pressure she felt as a woman in the entertainment industry, could have ended her career altogether. The stories she tells in this new memoir—some upbeat, some funny, and some heartbreaking—have informed her life and career.

Karamo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing, and Hope, by Karamo Brown
Queer Eye‘s culture expert Karamo Brown came to the role amid a fascinating life story: the child of Jamaican and Cuban parents who grew up in the American south before attending the historically black university of Florida A&M, he trained as asocial worker and psychotherapist even as he gained fame as a reality TV star. He’s also a gay single dad who’s dealt with emotional abuse and drug addiction. All of that experience certainly brings an expansive definition of “culture” to his work on the popular Netflix series. In this new memoir, he reflects upon all of it—the lessons he’s learned and the ones he hopes to pass on.
Whose story inspires you?