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Originally Posted by CaptainYooh
Most autobiographies are lame. I can't recall a single good one, actually. Except for professional writers, most celebrities can't write and hire ghost writers to do their writing for them. Writing an autobiography is an exercise in vanity to begin with. Whenever someone really wants to write and publish one, you can bet there either are some personal scores and arguments they want to settle or they have been offered money to publish one due to public interest in their persona. In either case, it will be glossed, skewed and lame. Even people that are otherwise very intelligent and very well-respected can't write a good one. Harley Hotchkiss' book "Hat Trick: A Life in the Hockey Rink, Oil Patch and Community" is incredibly boring considering how great he was in real life. "Burke's Law: A Life in Hockey" is also cringe-worthy.
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I totally agree, most really suck. To me that just makes the good ones even better. Part of an autobiography is that you have to accept the inevitable self-serving nature, while hoping it just doesn't go overboard. That said I disagree that there aren't good ones. I really liked Burke's book, but the best autobiography to me is U.S. Grant's. It's not as good as the biography written by Chernow, but the autobiography is still great. I love getting a sense of what the writer was thinking, even if it is inherently biased. As long as it isn't over the top