New Books in Biography & Memoir

Paul J. Croce, professor of history at Stetson University. Young William James Thinking (John Hopkins University Press, 2018) offers a developmental biography of the famous pragmatist. James’s mature thinking as a radical empiricist was formed through his experiences and intellectual curiosity as a young man. Looking for a suitable vocation that matched his intellectual interest, he explored life...

In 1956 Albert Gore, Sr. received national attention as one of only three senators from the states of the former Confederacy who refused to sign the infamous “Southern Manifesto” opposing the racial integration of public spaces. Lauded as Gore was by many for his decision, as Anthony J. Badger shows in his Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) it was a product...

Since its inception in 2017, the viral #MeToo movement has called more cultural attention to abusive behavior, creating a much-needed public space for women to speak up about the violence they have endured at the hands of abusers, and for women to speak more openly about their own ambitions, dreams, and desires. For the first time in history, there is a platform for women to speak, and—most import...

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped the way she practices medicine. Chen is the author of Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality (Vintage, 2008) and the New York Times column “Doctor and Patient.” Her essays have appeared in The W...

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard?  Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South.  Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, foun...

Though not as well known today as her husband George or her son William Randolph, Phoebe Apperson Hearst was a woman who rose beyond the gender norms of her age to exert considerable influence both within her community and nationally. In Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life of Power and Politics (Bison Books, 2018) (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Alexandra M. Nickliss shows how Hearst came to exer...

Sutra is the Sanskrit name for a short spiritual teaching, and it comes from the same root as the English word suture, or stitch. This story of motherhood as a path to awakening is, says yoga and meditation teacher Anne Cushman, “an homage to the long threads that run through all human lives, stitching up what’s shredded in our hearts.” In this interview, Anne Cushman, a longtime yoga and dharma t...

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Sharon Kirsch (she/hers)--Associate Prof. of English and rhetorical studies in the New College at Arizona State University--on the scintillating and beautifully written Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric from University of Alabama Press (2014). This book is truly a must-read for lovers o...

It’s quite common these days to hear young people being urged to collect and record the stories of their grandparents or parents in order to learn and preserve their family’s history. For a few fortunate folks, like Robbin Légère Henderson, such a record already exists. Henderson’s maternal grandmother, Matilda Rabinowitz, penned her own memoir before her passing in 1963 so that her grandchildren...

In 1919 a man named Ohlohr Maigi died of tuberculosis in London, in deep poverty. He had arrived over a decade before in the imperial capital bearing different name, seeking education, fame and fortune. Some of these he had found, but ultimately he had found much more adversity than success. Ultimately, as Dannel Jones writes, he had spiraled downward on the social ladder, from barrister to worker...

The diaries of the ninth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are a collaboration between David O. McKay and his long-time secretary Clare Middlemiss. During the day Middlemiss would take dictation, attend meetings, handle correspondence, and listen to telephone conversations, making recordings and transcripts and taking detailed notes. In the evening, according to her neph...

Brian Cremins' book Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) explores the history of Billy Batson, a boy who met a wizard that allowed him to transform into a superhero. When Billy says, “Shazam!” he becomes Captain Marvel. Cremins explores the history of artist C.C. Beck and writer Otto Binder’s Captain Marvel comic book character who outsold Superman comics...

John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to become the poet laureate and historiographer royal of Charles II’s new regime. But, as this important new book demonstrates, Dryden never entirely left behind the ideas – and worries – about inspiration t...

Today I talked with historian Erika Dyck about Aldous Huxley, Humphry Osmond and their correspondence over a ten year period. Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018) is a collection of letters which were carefully curated by Erika and Cynthia Carson Bisbee, Paul Bisbee, and Patrick Farrell. During our discussion, Erika recounts...

One of the first and most famous of Christian martyrs was Perpetua, who died in Carthage in the early 3rd century CE. Though there is no record of her life beyond the details contained in a single text, in her book Perpetua: Athlete of God(Oxford University Press, 2018), Barbara K. Gold analyzes the account of her sacrifice and draws upon the dual contexts of the Christian and Roman worlds of that...

Linda M. Grasso's Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) provides an in-depth look at O'Keeffe's ambivalent relationship with feminism from her early beginnings as a New Woman of the 1910s, to the support she received from women to become a national icon for feminism. Along the way, she distanced herself in multiple ways from women...

In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military commander and strategist. That Hitler saw World War II as the only way to retrieve Germany’s fortunes and build an expansionist Thousand-Year Reich is uncontroversial. But while his generals did sometime...

"Dear Brother," Jane Manning James wrote to Joseph F. Smith in 1903, "I take this opportunity of writing to ask you if I can get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead .... Your sister in the Gospel, Jane E. James." A faithful Latter-day Saint since her conversion sixty years earlier, James had made this request several times before, to no avail, and this time she would be...

John Owen is one of the most significant seventeenth-century Protestant theologians. He is often discussed by historians of politics and religion in terms of his contributions to the national church settlement of the British Republic (1649-60) or to the post-reformation scholastic theological tradition. But, as this new book argues, Owen regarded himself as a biblical interpreter more than as a do...

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Nico Slate, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, about the intersections between diet, spirituality, health, and politics for one of the world’s most famous nonviolent political activists, Mahatma Gandhi. Dr. Slate, who researches anti-racist activism in the United States and India, researched Gandhi’s experiments with vegetarianism a...

After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of Zawa Damdin, one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of counterm...

Peter Josephson and Ward Holder collaborated on their second book on theologian and political theorist Reinhold Niebuhr in producing this new book, specifically focusing on the questions of “why Niebuhr?” and “why Niebuhr now?” Josephson and Holder note that their “focus is Niebuhr himself and what the encounter between his own theology and his practical political experience might reveal in our co...

Harold J. Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War out this year with University of Chicago Press (2018). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer C...

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2018), Professor Nikolai Krementsov’s recent history of Russian eugenics, reflects on a broad problem: How to acknowledge what eugenics movements worldwide have had in common, while doing justice to local differences that, for example, make the late Victorian eugenics of Francis Galton comparative...

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely recognised as the greatest epic poem in the English language – and it is buried in the commentary of thousands of other texts. William Poole, who is John Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, has written what will be recognised as one of the most important contributions to this formidable body of scholarship. Milton and the Maki...