New Books in Biography & Memoir

Sandfuture (MIT Press, 2021) is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years...

History is told, it is said, by the victors. And so it is in regard to Richard Nixon. We all know how his presidency ended. What too few of us recall or bother to learn is how it started. In his new The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider's Perspective on Nixon's Surprising Social Policy (UP of Kansas, 2021), John Roy Price details how in Nixon's first few years in office, the President ardently t...

What can southern Black joy teach us about agency? What role does refusal have in liberation? What more might there be to root work than resistance? In The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism (Northwestern UP, 2021), Lindsey Stewart explores Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race to develop a politics of joy that owes much to indifference, ref...

Counting Dreams: The Life and Writings of the Loyalist Nun Nomura Bōtō (Cornell UP, 2021) tells the story of Nomura Bōtō, a Buddhist nun, writer, poet, and activist who joined the movement to oppose the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore imperial rule. Banished for her political activities, Bōtō was imprisoned on a remote island until her comrades rescued her in a dramatic jailbreak, spiriting her awa...

Settle back for a wild ride through a Southern lesbian's life of soul-searching, rule-breaking, and truth-telling. This belle's kind of coming out was not what her traditional Mississippi family expected. How does she recover from family estrangement in the midst of her career as a psychotherapist? How does she find lasting love and a family-of-choice? From her last boyfriend suggesting she become...

Rabbi Judah the Prince transformed the Mishnah into a text, and now Dov Zakheim, culling from a fascinating array of sources, has brought to life the story and historical times of Judah the Prince, offering us a portrait of one of the seminal figures of early Judaism. Join us as we talk with Dov Zakheim about his recent work, The Prince and The Emperors: The Life and Times of Rabbi Judah the Princ...

Kant, Applied is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Onora O’Neill, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. After intriguing insights into Onora O’Neill’s path to becoming a Kant scholar, this wide-ranging conversation explores how Kant’s philosophy is relevant for many thorny issues in our contem...

In this episode I chatted with Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai, two scholars of film, about their new anthology The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul out with Rutgers University Press, 2021. As a child Rithy Panh survived the Khmer Rouge regime yet lost his immediate family during those awful years. He was fortunate enough to emigrate to France where he studied film and became a prolific di...

Everyone has heard of Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia's opposition to Putin's rule. But what do we really know of him? Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? (Oxford, 2021) provides the first detailed description of Navalny's history and trajectory. Most importantly, Ben Noble, Morvan Lallouet, and Jan Matti Dollbaum turn the one-dimensional, cartoon-like image of Navalny in the West into...

Phil Rosenzweig's Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men (Fordham Press, 2021) is the first biography of a great television writer, and the story of his magnum opus In early 1957, a low-budget black and white movie opened across the country. Consisting of little more than a dozen men arguing in a dingy room, it was a failure at the box office and soon faded from view. Today, 12 Angry Men is...

What is a memoir? What makes a memoir both nonfictional and literary? What are the memoirist’s moral obligations to the people they write about besides themselves, and to their potential readers? And is the writing of a memoir just indulging in narcissism, or revenge?  In Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Helena De Bres examines the philosophical issues t...

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller,...

Ranea Lenor Hanson's Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress (U Minnesota Press, 2021) weaves a narrative that captures life on the water, diverse classrooms, and the unique experiences from learning to cop with type-1 diabetes: constantly monitoring blood sugar and managing insulin levels. A mix of personal reflection and meditative vignettes, Watershed reflects how our bodies can beco...

The first full-length biography of America's most celebrated novelist of the Great Depression to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck endure: his capacity for empathy. Pulitzer Prize finalist William Souder explores Steinbeck’s long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatne...

Amilcar Cabral was one of the most significant African nationalists of his generation. Born in the Cape Verde Islands, Cabral led the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in its fight against Portuguese rule. In addition to helping found the party and then lead it, he also became a leading theoretician of revolutionary struggle and Marxism. Cabral shaped the larger i...

Though trained as a medical doctor, chemist Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for "pure food"—food free of both adulterants and preservatives. A strong proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, still the basis of food safety legislation in the United States, Wiley gained fame for what became known as the Poison Squad experiments—a series of tests in which, to learn...

In this episode I am in conversation with artist and author Vanilla Beer about her 2019 book Stafford Beer: The Father of Management Cybernetics. While he got is start in the academic world, it was in industry where Stafford Beer made is most recognized contributions. Beer is best known for being the first systems thinker to apply cybernetics to management; it is from this work that he developed h...

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership an...

This podcast interviews Kusumita Pedersen on the first book-length study of the thought of Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007) and his teaching of a dynamic spirituality of integral transformation. The Philosophy of Sri Chinmoy: Love and Transformation (Lexington, 2021) is a straightforward and unembroidered account of his philosophy, allowing Sri Chinmoy to speak for himself in his own words, in poetry as mu...

Dr Daniel Gibbs is one of 50 million people worldwide with an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Unlike most patients with Alzheimer's, however, Dr Gibbs worked as a neurologist for twenty-five years, caring for patients with the very disease now affecting him. Also unusual is that Dr Gibbs had begun to suspect he had Alzheimer's several years before any official diagnosis could be made. Forewarned by...

Historian Kevin Starr described Carey McWilliams as "the finest nonfiction writer on California—ever" and "the state's most astute political observer." But as Peter Richardson argues in American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams (University of California Press, 2019), McWilliams was also one of the nation's most versatile and productive public intellectuals of his time. Richardson's a...

Tracing Mead’s career as an ethnographer, as the early voice of public anthropology, and as a public figure, this elegantly written biography links the professional and personal sides of her career. Paul Shankman's Margaret Mead (Berghahn Books, 2021) looks at Mead’s early career through the end of World War II, when she produced her most important anthropological works, as well as her role as a p...

In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar spa...

Exploring Spinoza is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Susan James is an internationally-renowned Spinoza scholar and author of Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics and Spinoza on Learning to Live Together which are discussed in detail during this wide-ranging conversation. After an ins...

Howard talks to Henry Hardy, Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and the author of In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure about the many joys—and occasional frustrations—of being the principal editor of one of the 20th century's most captivating public intellectuals. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can...