New Books in Biography & Memoir
Episodes
Xolela Mangcu, “Biko: A Life” (Tauris, 2013)
25 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as t...
Neil McKenna, “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England” (Faber & Faber, 2013)
10 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degre...
Lawrence J. Friedman, “The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet” (Columbia UP, 2013)
02 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life....
Brian Jay Jones, “Jim Henson: The Biography” (Ballantine Books, 2013)
06 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesam...
Thurston Clarke, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President”
22 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke w...
Peter Savodnik, “The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union” (Basic Books, 2013)
21 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswa...
Mark R. Cheathem, “Andrew Jackson, Southerner” (Louisiana State University Press, 2013)
16 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What do most Americans know about Andrew Jackson, apart from that he’s on the $20 bill and that he apparently had great hair? Probably not much. May...
Jeremy Dauber, “The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem” (Schocken, 2013)
08 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Wor...
Elizabeth Winder, “Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953” (Harper, 2013)
18 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly p...
Steven Usitalo, “The Invention of Mikhail Lomonosov: A Russian National Myth” (Academic Studies Press, 2013)
13 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Mikhail Lomonosov is a well known Russian figure. As poet, geographer, and physicist, Lomonosov enjoyed access to the best resources that 18th century...
Sarah Churchwell, “Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby” (Virago, 2013)
19 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel....
Kees Boterbloem, “Moderniser of Russia: Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
07 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
As you can read in any Russian history textbook, a series of seventeenth-century tsars culminating in Peter the Great attempted to “modernize” Rus...
Reza Aslan, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” (Random House, 2013)
05 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Christians in the United States and around the world have varying images of Jesus, from one who turns the other cheek to one who brings the sword. Rez...
Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, “Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
10 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What is a celebrity? And how has the definition of celebrity changed over the course of American history? Those questions are central to Charlene M. B...
Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, “Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France” (LSU Press, 2013)
31 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random fac...
Robert Gerwarth, “Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich” (Yale UP, 2012)
24 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Few history books sell better than biographies of Nazi leaders. They attract anyone even tangentially interested in World War Two or Nazi Germany. ...
Amanda MacKenzie Stuart, “Empress of Fashion: Diana Vreeland, A Life”
26 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The title says it all: Diana Vreeland was, in fact, that Empress of Fashion, reigning over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Ar...
Logan Beirne, “Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency” (Encounter Books, 2013)
14 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
You sometimes see bumper stickers that say “What would Jesus do?” It’s a good question, at least for Christians. You don’t see bumper stickers...
Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life” (Paperback; Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
12 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What can be gained from another biography of Abraham Lincoln? A lot, it turns out. Michael Burlingame has been researching the life and times of Abrah...
Jonathan Rauch, “Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul” (The Atlantic Books, 2013)
07 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Nature or nurture? Inborn or learned? Genetic or extra-genetic? Humans are so complicated that in many cases we can’t really know what is “in us”...
Kathryn Livingston, “Lilly: Palm Beach, Tropical Glamour, and the Birth of a Fashion Legend” (Wiley, 2012)
02 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It’s rare that a person’s name comes to represent an object, but such is the case with Lilly Pulitzer. Just say ‘Lilly’ and it conjures images...
John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
20 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamen...
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, “Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted” (Simon & Schuster, 2013)
30 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Forty years after its debut, The Mary Tyler Moore Show remains one of the most beloved and successful television sitcoms of all time. But Jennifer Kei...
Lisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life”
01 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are avail...
Carl Rollyson, “Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews” (University Press of Mississippi, 2012)
15 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Dana Andrews was one of the major films stars of the 1940s, and yet he was never nominated for an Academy Award. The posterboy for the ‘male mask’...
Lois Rudnick, “The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan” (University of New Mexico Press, 2012)
29 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularl...
Chip Bishop, “The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop” (Lyons Press, 2011)
15 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the...
Bob Spitz, “Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child” (Knopf, 2012)
14 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages...
Jean Zimmerman, “Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
01 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The portrait is startling. Painted by John Singer Sargent, “Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes” depicts a woman dressed casually, almost masculinely,...
Cory MacLauchlin, “Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces” (Da Capo, 2012)
04 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, you can appreciate the challenge of putting the city’s joie de vivre into words.However, as a New Orleans...
Paul Gutjahr, “Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy” (Oxford UP, 2011)
11 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I was in Seminary I was assigned many theological tomes to read and one was especially difficult to get through. It was Systematic Theology by Ch...
Dave Oliphant, “KD: A Jazz Biography” (Wings Press, 2012)
10 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Texas poet/author/historian Dave Oliphant‘s KD: A Jazz Biography (Wings Press, 2012) is a poetic tribute to the life of Jazz trumpeter and one of th...
Kate Buford, “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe” (Bison Books, 2012)
01 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe d...
Anne Sebba, “That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)
17 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up...
Elizabeth Goldsmith, “The King’s Mistresses” (PublicAffairs, 2012)
29 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Maz...
Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especia...
Sally Bedell Smith, “Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch” (Random House, 2012)
01 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media att...
Gregory McNamee, “The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian” (University of Arizona Press, 2012)
23 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns c...
Kathryn Lofton, “Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon” (University of California Press, 2011)
17 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In December of 2011, Oprah Winfrey appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to talk about her new big plans and her inspirations for the future. Oprah replied, “...
Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr., “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind” (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011)
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind– be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and mercha...
Manning Marable, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Penguin, 2011)
01 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly 50 years after his death, Malcolm X remains a controversial figure. An 8th grade dropout (he ditched school when a white teacher told him it wa...
Paul Dickson, “Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick” (Walker & Company, 2012)
30 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Mention the name Bill Veeck to a baseball fan and what will likely come to mind is the back-and-white image of three-foot, seven-inch Eddie Gaedel at ...
Robert K. Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
23 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a...
Leslie Brody, “Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford” (Counterpoint Press, 2010)
16 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
For years, biographers have been fascinated by the Mitfords, a quiet aristocratic British family with six beautiful daughters, nearly all of them famo...
Karen Abbott, “American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee” (Random House, 2012)
02 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives–wherein the events of a subject’s life are tracked in the order that they occu...
William Kuhn, “Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books” (Anchor Books, 2011)
15 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly twenty years after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographers are not only continuing to tell her story but finding provocative new w...
Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism” (MIT Press, 2011)
07 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student,...
Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011)
01 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a v...
John Bloom, “There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010)
27 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: reve...
Mia Bay, “To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells” (Hill and Wang, 2009)
24 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
I can’t remember when I first saw one of those horrible photographs of a lynching, with crowds of white people, kids included, laughing and pointing...
Vincent Carretta, “Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage” (University of Georgia Press, 2011)
16 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Few people can claim to have created a literary genre… Phillis Wheatley did. By the time she was twenty, her name- taken from the slave ship that ca...
Amanda Smith, “Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson” (Knopf, 2011)
01 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.” That was the Medill family editorial policy and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson...
Adrian Burgos, Jr., “Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball” (Hill and Wang, 2011)
26 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The integration of baseball is most often cast in terms of black and white, but biographer Adrian Burgos, Jr.— a professor at the University of Illi...
Randy Roberts, “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man” (Yale UP, 2010)
17 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
“I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten ...
Jean H. Baker, “Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion” (Hill and Wang, 2011)
22 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social libera...
Stacy Schiff, “Cleopatra: A Life” (Back Bay Books, 2011)
07 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Aside from being aesthetically equated to Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra has not fared well in history. In her riveting biography Cleopatra: A Life (Back...
Frank Wcislo, “Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915” (Oxford UP, 2011)
02 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas...
Kitty Kelley, “Oprah: A Biography” (Three Rivers Press, 2011)
15 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
When she emerged triumphant in a legal battle with the Texas beef industry, Oprah Winfrey took to the steps of the Amarillo court house and declared: ...
Ronald Reng, “A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke” (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011)
11 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a...
Charles J. Shields, “And So It Goes. Kurt Vonnegut, A Life” (Henry Holt, 2011)
09 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The public image of Kurt Vonnegut is that of a crusty, irascible old man. Someone with whom one would want to drink, but never ever fall in love. The...
Rosamund Bartlett, “Tolstoy: A Russia Life” (Houghton Mifflin, 2011)
04 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be...
Alan Nadel, “August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle” (University of Iowa Press, 2010)
30 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Many scholars consider August Wilson to be the premier American playwright of the 20th Century. Alan Nadel is surely one of their number. In the early...
Jonathan Steinberg, “Bismarck: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2011)
24 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over...
Megan Marshall, “The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism” (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)
15 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast.] Author Megan Marshall has recently written a well-received biography ...
Carol Bundy, “The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64” (FSG, 2005)
08 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expan...
Benjamin Binstock, “Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice” (Routledge, 2009)
09 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I ha...
J. Arch Getty, “Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iron Fist” (Yale UP, 2008)
23 Feb 2011
Contributed by Lukas
When you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosec...
Catherine Epstein, “Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland” (Oxford UP, 2010)
27 Jan 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stali...
Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
03 Dec 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that m...
Abbott Gleason, “A Liberal Education” (TidePool Press, 2010)
28 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a ...
Aram Goudsouzian, “King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution” (University of California, 2010)
12 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But n...
Thomas Kessner, “The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation” (Oxford UP, 2010)
15 Sep 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably s...
Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)
17 Jun 2010
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill...
Nicholas Thompson, “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War” (Henry Holt, 2010)
18 Feb 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man–I want to...
Jennifer Burns, “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right” (Oxford UP, 2009)
09 Oct 2009
Contributed by Lukas
When I was in high school I had several friends who went to Wichita’s only prep school. They were nice guys, played D&D, andsaid they were “Libert...
Matthew Algeo, “Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip” (Chicago Review Press, 2009)
23 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Memorial day is coming up, and maybe you are going to take a little car trip. It might even be a “road trip,” one of the great American enterprise...
James Mann, “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War” (Viking, 2009)
20 Mar 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Ronald Reagan was a odd fellow. Nobody seems to know what to make of him. He started as a Democrat and then became a Republican. Then he broke ranks w...
Kees Boterbloem, “The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008)
26 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
When we speak of the “Age of Discovery,” we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. But...
Simon Morrison, “The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years” (Oxford UP, 2009)
20 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Pa...
Donald Worster, “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir” (Oxford UP, 2008)
05 Dec 2008
Contributed by Lukas
If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an ad...
Joyce Tyldesley, “Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt” (Basic Books, 2008)
05 Sep 2008
Contributed by Lukas
“Swords and Sandals” movies always amaze me. You know the ones I’m talking about: “Spartacus,” “Ben-Hur,” “Gladiator,” and the rest....
Timothy Snyder, “The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke” (Basic Books, 2008)
03 Jul 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Snyder has written a great book. It’s called The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (Basic, 2008). Of course it’s thoroughly ...
Colin Grant, “Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey” (Oxford UP, 2008)
13 Jun 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are happy to have Colin Grant on the show. Colin is that rare breed of writer who is also an excellent historian. Or is that “rare breed of...
Abigail Foerstner, “James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles” (University of Iowa Press, 2007)
27 Feb 2008
Contributed by Lukas
This week we feature an interview with Abigail Foerstner about her new book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (University of Iowa Press,...