Ten nonfiction must-reads: memoirs of person and place, personal essay, creative nonfiction, and biography. This titles in this list rank among the best nonfiction written in the past quarter century. The list is ordered alphabetically, not preferentially.
1. Angelas Ashes, Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt was born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. 
2. Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon
William Least Heat-Moon's journey into America began with little more than the need to put home behind him. At a turning point in his life, he packed up a van he called Ghost Dancing and escaped out of himself and into the country.
3. Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey lived for three seasons in the desert at Moab, Utah, and what he discovered about the land before him, the world around him, and the heart that beat within, is a fascinating, sometimes raucous, always personal account of a place that has already disappeared, but is worth remembering and living through again and again.4. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book applies Godel's seminal contribution to modern mathematics to the study of the human mind and the development of artificial intelligence.5. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee
In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published to enormous critical acclaim.6. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Universally acclaimed when it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has become a modern classic. More than any other book of its time, this collection captures the mood of 1960s America, especially the center of its counterculture, California.7. The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin traces his travels amongst nomadic Australian aborigines.8. The Art of Hunger, Paul Auster
In a section of interviews as well as in the revelatory The Red Notebook, Auster reflects on his own work: on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing; on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity.9. The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
When Matthiessen went to Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and, possibly, to glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard, he undertook his five-week trek as winter snows were sweeping into the high passes. This is a radiant and deeply moving account of a "true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart."10. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
The extraordinary story of a man's quest for truth. It will change the way you think and feel about your life. "Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon." -- Robert M. Pirsig