New Books in Biography & Memoir

Today, the Big Bang is so entrenched in our understanding of the cosmos that to doubt it would seem crazy. But as Paul Halpern shows in Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate (Basic Books, 2021), just decades ago its mere mention caused sparks to fly. At the center of the debate were Russian American physicist George Gamow and British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle...

Mary Sully was many things: a Dakota woman, an artist, and an American living through a heyday of early celebrity culture in the United States. All of these facets of her life and of her context are present in her art. In Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), Harvard University professor and OAH President (and direct Sully relative) Phil De...

Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first book in 15 years to take a comprehensive look at Wim Wenders's extensive filmography. In addition to offering new insights into his cult masterpieces, the 10 essays in this volume highlight the thematic and aesthetic continuities between his early films and his latest productions. Wenders's films have much to contribute to curre...

Shajar al-Durr--known as "Tree of Pearls"--began her remarkable career as a child slave, given as property to Sultan Salih of Egypt. She became his concubine, was manumitted, became his wife, served as governing regent, and ultimately rose to become the legitimately appointed sultan of Egypt in 1250 after her husband's death. Shajar al-Durr used her wealth and power to add a tomb to his urban madr...

Quyền Văn Minh (b. 1954) is not only a jazz saxophonist and lecturer at the prestigious Vietnam National Academy of Music, but he is also one of the most preeminent jazz musicians in Vietnam. Considered a pioneer in the country, Minh is often publicly recognized as the “godfather of Vietnamese jazz.” Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam: Quyền Văn Minh and Jazz in Hà Nội (UP of Mississippi, 2021) tel...

Banksy is the world's most famous living artist, yet no one knows who he is. For more than twenty years, his wryly political and darkly humorous spray paintings have appeared mysteriously on urban walls around the globe, generating headlines and controversy. Art critics disdain him, but the public (and the art market) love him. With Banksy: Completed (MIT Press, 2021), artist and critic Carol Dieh...

Most Americans dismiss George III as a buffoon--a heartless and terrible monarch with few, if any, redeeming qualities. The best-known modern interpretation of him is Jonathan Groff's preening, spitting, and pompous take in Lin-Manuel Miranda's mauvais ton, Broadway show. But this deeply unflattering and ahistorical characterization is rooted in the prejudiced and brilliantly persuasive opinions o...

Elena Poniatowska is a legendary Mexican journalist who has chronicled popular celebrities, politicians as well as important social movements in Mexico since the 1968 Tlatelolco students massacre. Today I talked to Lynn Stephen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon who has described in her book Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas (Duke UP, 2021...

Lucy's People: An Ethiopian Memoir (Yerada Lij,2021) is the inspiring story of a country and a life. Young engineer Mesfin grows up under Emperor Haile Selassie I in Ethiopia. She is mother to all her people. Under her sun and moon, women walk tall. Many are warriors, including his mother and grandmother. The boy comprehends the burden placed upon ethical military such as his colonel father. He de...

In this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals—from fish to bats to humans—American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress. We join Schutt on a tour from the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales. We visit bea...

The Strange Genius of Mr. O.: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2021) by Carolyn Eastman is at once the biography of a remarkably odd celebrity---a gaunt, opium-addicted Scottish orator who lectured in a toga--and a tour of the fledgling United States. James Ogilvie arrive...

Few figures in the American arts have stories richer in irony than does architect Minoru Yamasaki. While his twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center are internationally iconic, few who know the icon recognize its architect’s name or know much about his portfolio of more than 200 buildings. One is tempted to call him America’s most famous forgotten architect. He was classed in the top tier of...

Zwingli: God's Armed Prophet (Yale, 2021) is a major new biography of Huldrych Zwingli--the warrior preacher who shaped the early Reformation. Zwingli (1484-1531) was the most significant early reformer after Martin Luther. As the architect of the Reformation in Switzerland, he created the Reformed tradition later inherited by John Calvin. His movement ultimately became a global religion. A vision...

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (Duke UP, 2021), Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system....

Leonard Cohen's troubled relationship with God is here mapped onto his troubled relationships with sex and politics. Analysing Covenantal theology and its place in Cohen's work, Marcia Pally's From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (Bloomsbury, 2021) is the first to trace a consistent theology across sixty years of Cohen's writing, drawing on his J...

“When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.” So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith. In Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazem...

Global thinker, public intellectual, and world-famous theorist of ‘liquid modernity’, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful academic career and, after retirement, became a prolific and popular writer and an intellectual talisman for young people everywhere.  Izabela Wagner's Bauman: A Biography (Polity Press, 2020) is the first comprehensiv...

Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America (Lexington, 2021) argues that the core commitments of the nihilist movement of the 1860's made their way to 20th century America via the thought of Ayn Rand. While mid-nineteenth-century Russian nihilism has generally been seen as part of a radical tradition that culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the author argu...

NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners.  When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with...

Ali ibn Abi Talib is arguably the single most important spiritual and intellectual authority in Islam after prophet Mohammad. Through his teachings and leadership as fourth caliph, Ali nourished Islam. But Muslims are divided on whether he was supposed to be Mohammad’s political successor and he continues to be a polarizing figure in Islamic history. In The Prophet's Heir: The Life of Ali ibn Abi...

Most of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton UP, 2022) is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film—an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence—which was b...

In Civility in Uncivil Times: Kazimierz Moczarski’s Quiet Battle for Truth, from the Polish Underground to Stalinist Prison (Peter Lang, 2020), Anna Machcewicz offers a powerful case study in the ethics and logistics of bearing witness in response to the two forces that brutalized Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century: Nazism and Stalinism. Civility in Uncivil Times is a biography of Kazimie...

When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his s...

Today I talked to the remarkable Fiona Hill about her new memoir There Is Nothing for You Here: Opportunity in an Age of Decline (Mariner Books, 2021). We talked about the decline of older coal and steel industries (and economic dislocation generally), how this decline relates to the rise of populism in the Russia and the West, and her decision to join the Trump administration as a national securi...

In this podcast Diana Kelly, author of The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov (Emerald, 2020), tells us of the advantages of using a biography to explore a contested topic such as Taylorism. In this case by mapping the life and works of a Russian engineer, Walter Polakov, who was very active and helped shape the Taylor Society in the 1920s as well as the adoption of diffu...