New Books in Biography & Memoir
Episodes
Howard Gardner, "A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory" (MIT Press, 2022)
23 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenon--a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as by educators, this...
Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)
23 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski was a household name not just in Poland, but across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as well. Yet this complex and...
William Ian Miller, "Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life (Oxford UP, 2020), William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences...
Slobodan Perovic, "From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation...
John Luther Adams, "Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska" (FSG, 2020)
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
John Luther Adams's Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a profound, funny, and enlightening memoir from ...
Carol A. Lipscomb, "The Lady Makes Boots: Enid Justin & the Nocona Boot Company" (Texas Tech UP, 2021)
21 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1925, Enid Justin--daughter of H. J. Justin, founder of legendary Justin Boots--announced to her family that she was going to start h...
Tehmton S. Mistry, "The 24th Mile: An Indian Doctor's Heroism in War-torn Burma" (HarperCollins, 2021)
21 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The story of India and Indians in World War II has been overshadowed by other historical events of the 1940s, a busy decade that included such histori...
Paul Van Der Velde, "Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-Colonialist Jacob Haafner" (NUS Press, 2020)
20 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jacob Gotfried Haafner (1754–1809) was one of the most popular European travel writers of the early nineteenth century, writing in the Romantic mode...
Joshua Prager, "The Family Roe: An American Story" (W. W. Norton, 2021)
20 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947-2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fra...
Jerry Z. Muller, "Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes" (Princeton UP, 2022)
20 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Genius or Charlatan? This is the story of Jacob Taubes, the controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-centu...
Sarah Irving et al., "'The House of the Priest': A Palestinian Life (1885-1954)" (Brill, 2022)
17 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
'The House of the Priest': A Palestinian Life (1885-1954) (Brill, 2022) presents and discusses the hitherto unpublished and untranslated memoirs of ...
James Joyce and Catherine Flynn (ed.), "The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays...
Mary Sarah Bilder, "Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution" (U Virginia Press, 2022)
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (U Virginia Press, 2022), Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s...
Charles Elton, "Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision" (Abrams Press, 2022)
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision (Abrams Press, 2022) is the first biography of critically acclaimed then critically...
Wanda M. Corn, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern" (Prestel Publishing, 2017)
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Wanda M. Corn's book Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern (Prestel Publishing, 2017) explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism,...
Geoffrey Kurtz, "Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2014)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered...
Bryan D. Palmer, "James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928" (U Illinois Press, 2010)
08 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The history of revolutionary politics is rich enough that it includes the full spectrum of inspiration and tragedy. Those with revolutionary aspiratio...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
08 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it...
Paul Galvez, "Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting" (Yale UP, 2022)
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and ...
Marc Raboy, "Looking for Alicia: The Unfinished Life of an Argentinian Rebel" (Oxford UP, 2022)
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The life and legacy of a young Argentinian woman whose disappearance in 1976 haunts those she left behind It started with a coincidence--when Marc Ra...
Richard Stamz and Patrick A. Roberts, "Give 'em Soul, Richard!: Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in Chicago" (U Illinois Press, 2010)
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Give 'em Soul, Richard!: Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in Chicago (U Illinois Press, 2010) is the remarkable story of a remarkable man. Richard S...
Colleen Wessel-McCoy, "Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr's Poor People's Campaign" (Fortress Academic, 2021)
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looked over into the promised land and tried to discern how we would get there, he called the poor to le...
Ray Argyle, "Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake" (McFarland, 2021)
31 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake (McFarland, 2021), by Ray Argyle is the first modern biography of the founder of Secu...
Chris Wade, "The Films of James Woods" (Wisdom Twins Books, 2022)
30 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
James Woods is one of the most versatile and captivating actors in American film history. From his breakthrough performance as Greg Powell in The Onio...
Carlos Acevedo, "The Duke: The Life and Lies of Tommy Morrison" (Hamilcar, 2022)
30 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1990s, Tommy Morrison, a young roughneck from Jay, Oklahoma, burst onto the boxing scene to become one of the most controversial fighters...
Ehud Olmert, "Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel" (Brookings Institution, 2022) Part 2 of 2
27 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
NB: This is part 2 of a two part interview with Ehud Olert. Part 1 is here. Written almost entirely from inside a prison cell, Searching for Peace: ...
John Markoff, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand" (Penguin, 2022)
24 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental moveme...
Elizabeth Boyle, "Fierce Appetites: Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in my Present and in the Writings of the Past" (Sandycove, 2022)
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Fierce Appetites: Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in my Present and in the Writings of the Past (Sandy Cove, 2022), Dr. Elizabeth Boyle weave...
Peter McFarlane with Doreen Manuel, "Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement" (Between the Lines, 2020)
22 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Between the Lines Books, 2020) details the life of George Man...
Annabella Pitkin, "Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
20 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on ...
Jeanne Baker Guy, "You'll Never Find Us: A Memoir" (She Writes Press, 2021)
20 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1977, Jeanne’s German nationalist ex-husband, Klaus, tells her he’s gotten a new job and wants to take their three-year-old daughter and six-ye...
Charters Wynn, "The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880-1936" (Brill, 2022)
18 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Charters Wynn's book The Moderate Bolshevik: Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880-1936 (Brill, 2022)is English-language biography o...
Alvin Eng, "Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond" (Fordham UP, 2022)
16 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond (Fordham UP, 2022) is a memoir that decodes and proces...
Ariela Freedman, "Lea" (Linda Leith Publishing, 2022)
10 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lea Roback was a feminist and labor activist who was raised in a large Jewish family in Quebec, Canada. In the novel Lea (Linda Leith Publishing, 20...
Glenda E. Gilmore, "Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South" (UNC Press, 2022)
10 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South (UNC Press, 2022), Glenda Gilmore meticulously documents...
Mark Henick, "So-Called Normal: A Memoir of Family, Depression and Resilience" (HarperCollins, 2021)
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When Mark Henick was a teenager in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, he was overwhelmed by depression and anxiety that led to a series of increasingly dangero...
Gary B. Fogel, "Sky Rider: Park Van Tassel and the Rise of Ballooning in the West" (U New Mexico Press, 2021)
06 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With a reputation as the hot-air balloon capital of the world and the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the southwestern desert ci...
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, "Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan" (U California Press, 2022)
05 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
2019 marked the five-hundred year anniversary of the launch of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world–a milestone marked by commemorative sa...
Ehud Olmert, "Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel" (Brookings Institution, 2022)
05 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Written almost entirely from inside a prison cell, Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel (Brookings Institution, 2022) is the compelling memoir of...
Lea Ypi, "Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History" (Norton, 2021)
05 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Sta...
Stanley Bill, "Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity" (Oxford UP, 2021)
04 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021), Cambridge professor Stanley Bill offer...
Michael Mackenzie, "Otto Dix and the First World War: Grotesque Humor, Camaraderie and Remembrance" (Peter Lang, 2019)
03 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Otto Dix fought in the First World War for the better part of four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. Marked b...
Maia Weinstock, "Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus" (MIT Press, 2022)
29 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus (MIT Press, 2022) follows Mildred Dresselhaus (or Millie, as everyone c...
Ellen S. More, "The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health" (NYU Press, 2022)
29 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mid-century America had a problem talking about sex. Dr. Mary Calderone first diagnosed this condition and, in 1964, led the uphill battle to de-stigm...
Nancy Barile, "I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises-And-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion" (Bazillion Points, 2021)
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nancy Barile shares her love of hardcore punk in her new memoir, I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises and All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion (Bazil...
Amadou Hampâté Bâ, "Amkoullel: The Fula Boy" (Duke UP, 2021)
26 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns.” We’ve all heard this phrase, or some version of it, but not all of us know who uttered it. It ...
Priyambada Sarkar, "Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore" (Oxford UP, 2021)
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What does a Bengali intellectual and poet have in common with a British-Austrian logician and philosopher? In Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wit...
Mary Childs, "The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All" (Flatiron Books, 2021)
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the host of NPR's Planet Money, the deeply-investigated story of how one visionary, dogged investor changed American finance forever. Before Bil...
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill" (Norton, 2021)
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill is generally considered one of the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, if not the greatest of all, revered for ...
George Warner, "The Words of the Imams: Al-Shaykh Al-Saduq and the Development of Twelver Shi'i Hadith Literature" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
18 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ibn Babawayh – also known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq – was a prominent Twelver Shi'i scholar of hadith. Writing within the first century after the vani...
Book Talk 51: Ardythe Ashley on Oscar Wilde
18 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his hea...
Rossa Ó Muireartaigh, "The Zen Buddhist Philosophy of D. T. Suzuki: Strengths, Foibles, Intrigues, and Precision" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
15 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) reached global fame for his writings on Zen Buddhism. In this introduction to his theories of self, knowledge, and the world, ...
Jeffrey Saks and Shalom Carmy, "Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel" (Pickwick Publications, 2021)
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the citi...
Takeshi Morisato, "Tanabe Hajime and the Kyoto School: Self, World, and Knowledge" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This introduction to Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), the critical successor of the “father of contemporary Japanese philosophy” Nishida Kitaro (1870–...
James C. Klagge, "Wittgenstein's Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry" (MIT Press, 2021)
12 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“One should really only do philosophy as poetry.” What could Ludwig Wittgenstein have meant by this? What was the context for this odd remark? In ...
Jason M. Baxter, "The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind" (InterVarsity, 2022)
12 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Many readers know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for ...
Yveline Alexis, "Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (Rutgers University Press, 2021), by Yveline Alexis is the first US study of the poli...
Matthew Wilson, "Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) is about the life and times of Richard ...
Alice Jardine, "At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most cel...
Kate Clifford Larson, "Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer" (Oxford UP, 2021)
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. S...
Adrian Shubert, "The Sword of Luchana: Baldomero Espartero and the Making of Modern Spain, 1793–1879" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I spoke to Prof. Adrian Shubert, professor of History at York University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada about his book on the ninet...
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of S...
David Hajdu and John Carey, "A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge" (Columbia UP, 2021)
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Too often, vaudeville is seen from the perspective of its decline: it is the corny, messy art form that predated the book musical, or that gave us Cha...
Robert Morstein-Marx, "Julius Caesar and the Roman People" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
04 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against t...
Richard K. Rein, "American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life" (Island Press, 2022)
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashin...
Scott Kugle, "Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean" (UNC Press, 2021)
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and is available as an open-ac...
Swami Medhananda, "Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism" (Oxford UP, 2022)
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Vivekananda, Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford UP, 2022) argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed nove...
Elle Dowd, "Baptized in Tear Gas: From White Moderate to Abolitionist" (Broadleaf, 2021)
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this raw and thought-provoking memoir, Dowd brings us on her journey though the Ferguson uprising into abolition. For years Elle Dowd considered he...
Rickson Gracie and Peter Maguire, "Breathe: A Life in Flow" (Dey Street, 2021)
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Rickson Gracie is one of the most fascinating professional athletes in the world. It is not hyperbole to call him a "living legend". A scion of a fam...
Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt, "Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E. T. Kingsley" (U British Columbia Press, 2021)
23 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
People with disabilities have always struggled to make ends meet. Finding a job you can actually do, a housing situation you can afford that meets you...
On the Zen Odyssey of Ruth and Sokei-an Sasaki
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Janica Towne Anderson (author of Zen Odyssey) is a master falconer and has been a student and teacher of esoteric traditions for fifty years. She has...
Tinatin Japaridze, "Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism" (Lexington Books, 2022)
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Tinatin Japaridze about her book Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism (Lexington Books, 2022). In this timely...
Dan Grunfeld, "By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream" (Triumph Books, 2022)
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them...
Stephen B. Heard, "The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed." (Princeton UP, 2022)
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Stephen Heard, Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick. We talk about his book The Scientist’s Guide to...
John W. I. Lee, "The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert" (Oxford UP, 2022)
21 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical s...
Brian J. Peterson, "Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa" (Indiana UP, 2021)
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa (Indiana University Press, 2021) by Brian J. Peterson is a thoroughly researched biography of Thom...
E. James West, "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (U of Illinois Press, 2020)
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) reveals the previously hidden i...
Sandy Gall, "Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud" (Haus Publishing, 2021)
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On September 9th, 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud—called one of the greatest guerilla leaders in history, alongside names like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh,...
Lily E. Hirsch, "Weird Al: Seriously" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Funny music is often dismissed as light and irrelevant, but Weird Al Yankovic’s fourteen successful studio albums prove there is more going on than...
Carole Emberton, "To Walk about in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner" (Norton, 2022)
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding...
René V. Arcilla, "Wim Wenders's Road Movie Philosophy: Education Without Learning" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What is education? Most of the time, we have little patience for this question because we take the answer to be obvious: we identify education with sc...
Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, "To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the Audacity of Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant about her book To Live More Abundantly: Black Collegiate Women, Howard University, and the Audacity of ...
Friederike Assandri, "The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying: Daoism, Buddhism, and the Laozi in the Tang Dynasty" (Oxford UP, 2021)
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This book presents for the first time in English a complete translation of the Expository Commentary to the Daode jing, written by the Daoist monk ...
Brett Kahr, "Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis" (Confer Books, 2022)
11 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In his latest book Freud's Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis (Confer Books, 2021), Professor Brett Kahr has used his re...
Michael Gorra, "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War" (Liveright Publishing, 2020)
11 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
William Faulkner, one of America's most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such ...
Randall Horton, "Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
10 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays (Northwestern UP, 2022) chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight ...
Dana Stevens, "Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century" (Simon and Schuster, 2022)
09 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Not a whisper. / Never laughter. / Buster, thank you / for disaster.” So wrote graduate student Dana Stevens, who would go on to become Slate’...
Joshua Myers, "Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition" (Polity, 2021)
09 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century, whose work...
Bill V. Mullen, "James Baldwin: Living in Fire" (Pluto Press, 2019)
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press, 2019), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the per...
Sherry Scott, "Playhouses: Sexuality and Fundamentalism" (Black Rose Writing, 2022)
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Queer Voices of the South I talk to Dr. Sherry Scott about her new book Playhouses: Sexuality and Fundamentalism, released in Feb...
Lynn Garafola, "La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern" (Oxford UP, 2022)
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lynn Garafola's La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern (Oxford UP, 2022) is both readable and rigorous, a rare combination. As a historian and emi...
Racheli Haliva, "Isaac Polqar: A Jewish Philosopher or a Philosopher and a Jew? (Walter de Gruyter, 2020)
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
To date, scholars have skilfully discussed aspects of Polqar’s thought, and yet none of the existing studies offers a comprehensive examination that...
Richard W. Etulain, "Thunder in the West: The Life and Legends of Billy the Kid" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Henry McCarty, aka William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, is one of the most well known figures from the American West. His short life made an outsize...
Celia Stahr, "Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist" (St. Martin's Press, 2020)
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San...
James Lapine, "Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created 'Sunday in the Park with George'" (FSG, 2021)
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
James Lapine's Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George" (FSG, 2021) is a fascinating behind the ...
Susan Chase Edgecomb, "Clearing in the West: Navigating the Journey Through Loss, Grief and Healing" (2021)
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The untimely losses of her brother, her father, and her husband, make this author uniquely qualified to help support you through your loss and grief. ...
Chase Burton, "Nicole Rafter" (Routledge, 2021)
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nicole Rafter (Routledge, 2021) is a critical summary and exegesis of the work of Nicole Rafter, who was a leading scholar of the history of biologi...
Olivia Milburn, "The Empress in the Pepper Chamber: Zhao Feiyan in History and Fiction" (U Washington Press, 2021)
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Zhao Feiyan (45-1 BCE), the second empress appointed by Emperor Cheng of the Han dynasty (207 BCE-220 CE), was born in slavery and trained in the perf...
Erica Brown, "Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile" (Maggid, 2020)
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Biblical Book of Esther reads like a classic fable, a drama of actors who are recognizable archetypes. There is Esther, the beautiful orphan who b...
Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right,...