New Books in Biography & Memoir

From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation and fame. They were fully aware that their efforts would shape the course of his career; they also knew that they would profit from helping him. With Galileo’s Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025),...

John Beyer is the founder and owner of Men on the Move, one of the East Coast's premier moving and self-storage companies. While although John's journey to the top of the moving game has brought him incredible success, the ride up was a bumpy one. From the dark stairwells of LeFrak City, to the Manhattan discos of 1970s, to the dive bars of Long Island and the truck cabs of a man on the move, Beye...

'In the five years that I tacked incessantly between Delhi, Venice and Istanbul, two questions plagued me: How do we lose what we lose? Why do we love whom we love?' In this collection of essays written over 25 years, Ananya Vajpeyi recounts her experience of 13 cities across India and the world, engaging with them as layered spaces where history, memory and meaning converge. Through elegantly cra...

Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphere of strict gender segregation, rigorous religious education, and nearly all-consuming ritual practices. Trained to be a Lubavitch emissary, he traveled around the world doing Jewish outreach to help usher in the messianic redemption. However, after...

Wednesday, February 18—Called “the greatest American diary of the nineteenth century,” the journal of the patrician New York City lawyer George Templeton Strong stands as a remarkable documentary record of the Civil War and a captivating literary accomplishment in its own right. Unfolding like an epic historical novel, Strong’s precise and colorful account plunges readers into the midst of an unpr...

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American politic...

I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter's Memoir (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) is a young woman’s search for connection with her estranged father, her family’s past, and the Palestinian homeland she can never visit Mai Serhan lives in Cairo and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her family was expelled in 1948. She is twenty-four years old when one morning she...

In Man in a Hurry: Murray MacLehose and Colonial Autonomy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024), Ray Yep explores the latest available archival materials and re-examines MacLehose’s pivotal governorship in Hong Kong (1971–1982). MacLehose arrived in the challenging 1970s, when there were expectations for social reforms, uneasiness in the relationship between Hong Kong and London, and the 1997 factor...

My guest today is Carla Kaplan, the author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (Harper, 2025). In Troublemaker, Kaplan tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death. This biography brings her astonishing self-transformation to lif...

A superstar in both football and track and field Sol Butler pioneered the parlaying of sports fame into business prosperity. In Sol Butler: An Olympian's Odyssey through Jim Crow America (U Illinois Press, 2026) Brian Hallstoos tells the story of a Black athlete’s canny use of mainstream middle-class values and relationships with white society to transcend the athletic, economic, and social barri...

Cindy Schweich Handler’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Redbook, The Huffington Post, and a host of other national publications. She is a former editor and writer for the USA Today Network. A German Jew’s Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany (McFarland, 2025) is based on primary sources such as Fritz’s contemporaneous World War I dia...

The story of The Cure: a tall tale of a truly unique British band. The Cure's story is a fantastical pop fable, but their trajectory has not been one of unbroken success. Along the way, their uneven, uneasy pop odyssey has taken in fierce intra-band tensions and fall-outs, numerous line-up changes and even a bitter court case that saw original group members feuding over payments and ownership of t...

Jane Armstrong Tucker was a Boston stenographer scrabbling to get by as a single woman in the Gilded Age, until she was offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Madeleine Pollard was a Kentuckian with humble roots who had used charisma to work her way into the parlors of the Washington, DC, elite. Tucker hid behind an alias―Agnes Parker―but Pollard had a secret, too. Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale o...

Karen Bermann grew up in the mad orbit of her father, Fritz, the rebellious child of a Viennese Orthodox Jewish family who fled Europe alone as an adolescent in the late 1930s. An irreverent, comic, rageful man with three names, who spoke three languages, lived on three continents, and always kept his papers in order, Fritz lived a life shaped by survival. In this memoir, told in alternating voice...

In 1706, Edinburgh was on the brink of a popular uprising. Men and women took to the streets to protest the planned union with England, fearing the end of Scottish sovereignty. But unbeknownst to the mob, a spy was in their midst—the English writer Daniel Defoe, now bankrupt and thrice pilloried, had turned a government agent. In A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End...

Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG, 2025) the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, t...

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men an...

Highly promising basketball player Chris Washburn was selected third overall in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Golden State Warriors. But a chance encounter with famed basketball player Len Bias introduced him to crack cocaine. Soon, the overwhelming temptations of fame, fortune, and drugs derailed his promising career. And by 1989, after failing his third drug test, Chris was banned from the NBA. His...

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 contradictory figure – a socialist and a nationalist, a clandestine agitator and a legendary military strategist, protector of Jews and other national minorities on Polish soil who was nonetheless often accused of imperialism – has eluded serious biog...

The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism. A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre (AK Press, 2025) is a political biography of one of the most important revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican f...

When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Ru...

Throughout US history, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris—have given successfully recognized bids for the office of president of the United States. In A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris(UP of Mississippi) author Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson uses womanist rhetorical criticism to analyze the presidential a...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sunny Dhillon about his book, Hide & Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). In 2018, Sunny Dhillon resigned as a journalist with the Globe and Mail. His blog post announcing his departure went unexpectedly viral. It was a decision that had been long brewing and Dhillon posted the piece with the hope that it would lead to...

Janet Kintner survived a difficult father and several assaults, but she didn’t let any of it stop her from pursuing law school as one of three women at the University of Arizona. And she didn’t let anything stop her from pursuing justice for her clients as a new lawyer, regardless of their ability to pay, their gender, race or religion. Despite learning that men dominated the legal system, she bec...

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of globa...