Best seller autobiography 2011

After the year’s best children’s books, art and design books, photography books, science books, history books, food books, and psychology and philosophy books, the 2011 best-of series continues with the most compelling, provocative and thought-provoking psychology and philosophy books featured here this year.

STEVE JOBS

In 2004, Steve Jobs asked former TIME Magazine editor and prolific biographer Walter Isaacson to write his biography. Isaacson — who has previously profiled such icons as Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger — thought the request not only presumptuous but also odd for a man of Jobs’s age. What he didn’t know was that Jobs had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had starkly brushed up against his mortality. Over the next few years, Isaacson ended up having over 40 interviews and conversations with Jobs, from which he gleaned the backbone for Steve Jobs, his highly anticipated biography — perhaps an expected pick for my omnibus of the year’s best biographers and memoirs, yet very much a deserving one, not merely because Jobs was a personal hero who shaped my own intellectual and creative development, but also because beneath the story of Jobs as an individual lies a broader story about the meat of innovation and creativity at large.

He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.”

Sample the book through Isaacson’s conversation with Charlie Rose and Nick Bilton’s excellent one-on-one interview with the author.

For a

All week long, Shelf Life will be listing EW’s favorite books of 2011 — sorted into separate categories by genre. Click through the gallery to see our picks for the best memoirs and biographies of the year, starting, of course, with the lovely Tina Fey.

Tina Fey, Bossypants

From the EW review: “In this genially jumbled memoir-esque collection of riffs, essays, laundry lists, true stories, fantasy scenarios, SNL script excerpts, and embarrassing photos from the wilderness years before she received the gift of a flattering haircut, the great Miz Fey puts on the literary equivalent of a satisfying night of sketch comedy.”

Life Itself, Roger Ebert

From the EW review: “Ebert writes with unflinching candor about difficult subjects, including the cancer that has left him profoundly disfigured and unable to eat or speak. But this is not a depressing book. In the end, writing is what gives Ebert purpose.”

Lucking Out, James Wolcott

Chronicling his time as a young writer in New York City in the 1970s, Wolcott’s sharply written memoir details being made into one of film critic Pauline Kael’s “Paulettes,” becoming steeped in the burgeoning punk scene as he wrote for the Village Voice, and hobnobbing with literary legends like Gore Vidal.

Blue Nights, Joan Didion

From the EW review: “The book is an unblinking study of the author’s psyche in old age (Didion is 76). She is insistently coolheaded in assessing the accumulating frailties of a body that has always been bird-tiny.”

Reading My Father, Alexandra Styron

From the EW review: “Alexandra Styron is less concerned with airing her familial grievances than trying to track down and pinpoint the man behind the myth. Poring over archived correspondence and unpublished manuscripts, she learns more about the figure who towered over her early life than she ever knew before, as well as the depths of his many contradictions.”

House of Prayer N