Books like A Chance in the World by Steve Pemberton

Jeannette Walls' memoir chronicles her turbulent childhood in a dysfunctional, itinerant family, detailing poverty, alcoholism, and homelessness across the United States as she seeks stability and personal growth.

Justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson recounts his battle against wrongful convictions, life‑sentence juvenile cases, and systemic bias while seeking reform of America’s criminal justice system.

A memoir of a woman who overcomes a strict survivalist Mormon upbringing in rural Idaho to pursue higher education, ultimately earning a PhD in history at Cambridge.

James McBride’s memoir chronicles his upbringing among twelve siblings in Brooklyn’s Red Hook, revealing his mother’s hidden Jewish heritage and their shared journey of race, identity, and faith.

In the Gulf‑swamp town of Leechfield, Texas, a group of oil workers called the Liars’ Club spin tall tales, while a young woman confronts her family’s hidden past, unmasking lies that threaten her sanity.

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

Includes material on "genocide survivors, witnesses to their own parents' murders, children raised in closets and cages, and victims of family violence ... explains what happens to the brain when a child is exposed to extreme stress, and he reveals how today's innovative treatments are helping ease children's pain, allowing to become healthy adults.

The Miracle traces 20th‑century Asia’s rapid rise to global economic power, exploring the bold decisions and key figures—entrepreneurs, policymakers, and technocrats—that drove transformation across nine countries.