Bill Gates: These 5 books are the ‘best memoirs I've read'—including 1 by an author who 'changed the course of my life'

CNBC

22-05-2025

Bill Gates recommends spending your summer reading five of the best memoirs he's ever encountered.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder's Summer 2025 list of book recommendations is an eclectic collection of memoirs featuring personal insights and anecdotes from a rock star, a journalist, a comedian, a historian and the first-ever female CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Gates has some very recent familiarity with the genre, having published his first memoir, "Source Code," in February. For him, writing a personal memoir represented a difficult new challenge, so he relied on his own favorite books from the genre to determine "what I could draw on from the best memoirs I've read," he wrote on Thursday while announcing the list.
"I feel like I'm always learning, but I really go into serious learning mode when I'm starting out on a new project," wrote Gates.
Now, Gates is offering up the list of his favorite memoirs as potential inspiration for other people. All five were published by published by Penguin Random House, which also published "Source Code," or one of its imprints.
"I hope you can find something that interests you on this list," Gates wrote. "Memoirs are a good reminder that people have countless interesting stories to tell about their lives."
Here are the five books Gates recommends cracking open during your free time this summer:
Katharine Graham was the longtime publisher of The Washington Post, taking the reins of her family's media conglomerate in 1963 after the death of her father and her husband's suicide. Her memoir, published in 1997, reveals her own initial wariness at the idea of taking the helm, especially "at a time when few women were in leadership positions like that," Gates notes.
By the time she died, in 2001, Graham had grown her company's revenue by more than $1 billion, according to The Washington Post. "This thoughtful memoir is a good reminder that great leaders can come from unexpected places," Gates wrote.
Gates first met Graham in July 1991, on the same day he also first met longtime friend Warren Buffett, he wrote. Graham's legacy includes "standing up to President Nixon to protect the paper's reporting on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, negotiating the end to a pressman's strike, and much more," Gates noted.
In 1997, Nicholas Kristoff wrote a New York Times article on children dying from diarrhea and other ailments in poor countries — due to a lack of clean drinking water — that "changed the course of my life," wrote Gates.
The article helped inspire the Gates Foundation's philanthropic work to improve global health, Gates has said. Now, he recommends Kristof's 2024 memoir, which covers the 40-year career of the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
"[Kristof's] reported from more than 150 countries, covering war, poverty, health, and human rights," Gates wrote. "In this terrific memoir, Nick writes about how he stays optimistic about the world despite everything he's seen."
Tara Westover's bestselling memoir originally appeared on Gates' list of the best books he read in 2018, the year it was published. In the book, Westover recounted her childhood as the youngest of seven children raised in a family of fundamentalist Mormon survivalists in rural Idaho.
Westover wrote about suffering physical abuse at the hands of a sibling, and being mostly cut off from outside society due to her parents' strict religious beliefs. She eventually broke free from her family to attend college, ultimately earning a PhD in intellectual history from The University of Cambridge's Trinity College.
Her harrowing memoir is inspiring and, in some ways, broadly relatable, according to Gates.
"At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking your parents know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations," he wrote. "Tara beautifully captures that process of self-discovery in this unforgettable memoir."
This 2016 memoir from the comedian and former host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" recounts Trevor Noah's childhood growing up biracial in South Africa's apartheid regime, which had outlawed interracial relationships like his parents'.
Gates repeated the praise he first wrote about Noah's book, for the billionaire's 2017 summer reading list: "As a longtime fan of 'The Daily Show,'" Gates wrote at the time, "I loved reading this memoir about how its host honed his outsider approach to comedy over a lifetime of never quite fitting in."
Gates called the U2 frontman's book "the best memoir by a rock star I actually know" in 2022. The Dublin-born Bono, whose given name is Paul Hewson, wrote about his path to becoming a rock star despite his parents basically ignoring his musical talents at a young age.
Their indifference "made him try even harder to get their attention," Gates wrote.
The rocker "shows a lot of vulnerability in this surprisingly open memoir," noted Gates, adding that he was inspired to follow suit: "It was a great model for how I could be open about my own challenges in 'Source Code.'"
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