My Experiments with Truth

Gandhi's autobiography is one of the genuinely indispensable books of the twentieth century — not because it flatters its subject, but because it doesn't. The rigorously self-critical structure, organized as a series of moral experiments rather than triumphant narrative, gives it an authenticity that hagiographies can never match. Some early-twentieth-century attitudes are dated and his early writings on race are a legitimate scholarly concern, but the moral substance here has earned a century of global endorsement for good reason.