New Books in Biography & Memoir

The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX. "Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent-including Michelle and myself-who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink."-President Barack Obama, on posthumously awarding Mink t...

Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war, to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community. In The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön: A Woman of Power and Privilege (U Washington...

Captain Richard E. Evans was an American B-17 "Flying Fortress" pilot. He flew 55 combat missions and during that time was also chosen to fly British Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery to wherever the General needed to be throughout North Africa and Italy. Evans and "Monty" traveled together during a particularly dangerous phase of the war. The Allied forces were just beginning to turn back the b...

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. The Macedonian king Alexander III is best remembered today for his many martial accomplishments and the empire he built from them. Yet as Fred S. Naiden details in Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life of Alexander the Great (Oxford University Press, 2018), this ignores what for his s...

George Washington is remembered for leading the Continental Army to victory, presiding over the Constitution, and forging a new nation, but few know the story of his involvement in the establishment of a capital city and how it nearly tore the United States apart. In George Washington's Final Battle: The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital City and a Nation (Georgetown UP, 2021), Dr. Robert P. Watson...

On Feb. 2, 2019, the skies over Maynardville, Tennessee, filled with the roar of four F/A-18F Super Hornets streaking overhead in close formation. In each aircraft were two young female flyers, executing the first all-woman Missing Man Formation flyover in Navy history in memory of Captain Rosemary Mariner — groundbreaking Navy jet pilot, inspiring commander, determined and dedicated leader — whos...

Together, bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert have written Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most-Read Woman (Seal Press, 2022), the first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you've never heard of. At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she'd lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in...

Franz Boas is remembered today as one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. In the United States, he is widely created with creating the modern field of anthropology or at least being one of the key people involved in its creation. And yet despite this fact, no biography of the life of Franz Boas has ever been written -- until now. In the first volume of what will be a two-...

The Democratic Socialists of America have exploded in the last few years, going from just a couple thousand members to close to a hundred thousand. This was from a combination of factors; two insurgent presidential campaigns by Bernie Sanders, a proto-fascistic movement coalescing around Donald Trump, the specter of climate change, a worldwide pandemic, general increasing economic inequality and a...

Phiroz Mehta, was a self-taught philosopher of religion who became the revered core figure of a universal religion and philosophy centred on concepts of existential freedom. Less well known than his contemporary and associate Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mehta nonetheless cultivated a significant following over some 25 years and influenced an early generation of yoga and meditation teachers and practitione...

President Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution of Indigenous people in American history, following the 1862 uprising of hungry Dakota in Minnesota and suspiciously speedy trials. He also issued the largest commutation of executions in American history for the same act. But there is much more to the story of Lincoln’s interactions and involvement, personal and political, with Native A...

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and p...

Corrections in Ink (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is an electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman's journey-from the ice rink, to addiction and a prison sentence, to the newsroom-emerging with a fierce determination to expose the broken system she experienced. An elite, competitive figure skater growing up, Keri Blakinger poured herself into the sport, even competing at nationals. But when...

A Hollywood screenwriting and movie-making icon, Ernest Lehman penned some of the most memorable scenes to ever grace the silver screen. Hailed by Vanity Fair as “perhaps the greatest screenwriter in history,” Lehman's work on films such as North by Northwest, The King and I, Sabrina, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music helped define a generation of movie making. But while his talent took cent...

As we emerge from a period of government-mandated lockdowns and as threats to free speech multiply, we would be wise to re-engage with the work of a seminal thinker on the subjects of liberty, freedom and nondomination. We can do so most effectively by reading Completely Free: The Moral and Political Vision of John Stuart Mill (Princeton UP, 2022) by John Peter DiIulio. Mill (1806–73), for all his...

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville...

What story begins in a bedroom in suburban New Jersey in the early '60s, unfolds on some of the country's largest stages, and then ranges across the globe, demonstrating over and over again how Rock and Roll has the power to change the world for the better? This story. The first true heartbeat of Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir (Hachette Books, 2022) is the moment when Stevie Van Zandt trades in...

As the 1974 school year began, Wayne Woodward was a beloved high school teacher in a rural Texas town. By the following spring, he was embroiled in a local political firestorm that would ultimately cost him his job. Woodward's sin was, in his own words, naively trying to found a chapter of the ACLU in his Hereford, Texas community. In You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, A Texas Town, and the R...

In Nocturnal Admissions: Behind the Scenes at Tunnel, Limelight, Avalon, and Other Legendary Nightclubs (Santa Monica Press, 2022), nightclub director Steve Adelman reflects on his years working in some of the world's most popular nightclubs. In his memoir, Adelman reflects on his work in in New York City in the nightclub heyday of the late 1980s and 1990s, at the Roxy, Limelight, Tunnel, and Pall...

"The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them." So writes Chris Belcher, who appeared destined for a life of conventional femininity after she took first place in an infant beauty contest--a minor glory that can follow you around a working-class town of 1,600 people...

To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham (ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series / NUS Press, 2022) is a particularly vivid biography of a remarkable individual, an Indonesian historian and public intellectual who was both a public figure and a multi-minority member, being Dutch educated, Indonesian Chinese, gay, alcoholic, irreligious and hedonist, in a conservative society. This is the first...

A violent ex-con forces his son to commit crimes in this unforgettable memoir about family and survival. Growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation, David Crow and his three siblings idolized their dad, a self-taught Cherokee who loved to tell his children about his World War II feats. But as time passed, David discovered the other side of Thurston Crow, the ex-con with his own code of ethics tha...

Empress Eugenie: A Footnote History, 1826-1920 (Grosvenor House, 2022) is the story of the glamorous French Empress who escaped from a vengeful mob in 1870 and spent the next fifty years in exile in England. With a broad brush approach to the political events, it shows her life and times from a different angle, exploring subjects often relegated to mere footnotes. Aided by the increased digitaliza...

Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtne...

R.B. More (1903–1972) was a leader in Babasaheb Ambedkar’s movement, a trade unionist and a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). More’s life, narrated in his words and those of his son Satyendra More, illuminates the conflict between the promise of Marxist emancipation and the hard reality of the hierarchies of caste. His radicalism challenged both the limits of the politics of caste...