Total Recall

Schwarzenegger’s sprawling memoir tracks an almost implausible life: a boy from postwar Austria who willed himself into becoming the world’s greatest bodybuilder, then Hollywood’s biggest action star, then Governor of California. He’s candid about ambition, discipline, marriage, and the personal failures that cost him. Told with humour and an outsider’s eye for America, it’s a big, entertaining account of relentless self-invention, and the fullest telling of his story.