New Books in Biography & Memoir

Alan Watts (1915-1973) was one of the first to interpret Eastern wisdom for a Western audience. Joan Watts, Alan's eldest daughter, is the co-editor (along with her sister, Anne) of the new volume, The Collected letters of Alan Watts, out now in hardback and paperback from New World Library (2017). This is part one in a two-part series on the life of Alan Watts, featuring Joan and Anne Watts. Greg...

One of the most important trends within evangelicalism over the last half-century has been a renewal of Reformed theology. In this important new book, Jeffrey S. McDonald, who is a Presbyterian pastor in Bellevue, Nebraska, and an affiliate professor of church history at Sioux Falls Seminary, Omaha, reconstructs the life of one of the individuals who did most to make that renewal possible. John Ge...

Anne Watts is one of the co-editors of the new book, The Collected letters of Alan Watts, released in January 2018 from New World Library. Anne Watts is a facilitator and educator who is committed to creating a world where everyone wins.  She honors each individual for the gift she or he is, and believes that love and nurturance are the most important aspects in human healing. She regularly leads...

During a career spanning six decades, Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) became one of the most prolific and outspoken landscape architects of his generation. He took on challenging new project types, developing a multidisciplinary practice while experimenting with adaptive reuse and ecological designs for new shopping malls, freeways, and urban parks. In his lifelong effort to improve the American land...

With questions over how ideas are translated across borders and between languages as acute as ever today, it is sometimes easy to forget that our efforts to understand each other are mediated through many accreted layers of previous translations. Pu Wang’s The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) takes us deep into th...

Though she died in 1847 at a young age, Marie Duplessis inspired one of the greatest operas ever composed. In The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (Oxford University Press, 2015), René Weis recounts the life of the remarkable woman who overcame poverty and abuse to become the toast of Parisian society. Born Alphonsine Plessis, as a young girl she was sexually assaulted by her own father...

Harold Holzer has written a biography of one of America’s greatest public artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Daniel Chester French.  In Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), Holzer chronicles the career of French, who became best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.  Fren...

Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story. For the first four years of his life, Prahlad didn’t speak. But his silence didn’t stop him from communicating—or communing—with the strange, numinous world he found around him. Ordinary household objects came to life; the spirits of lon...

Audrey Hepburn was justly known for her long acting career, yet her early life is largely unknown. In his book, Robert Matzen describes how she lived during the World War II period in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Based on many interviews and other primary sources, Robert shows how she was affected by the war. Listen in as we talk about his new book Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II (GoodKn...

Many of you listening to this now probably recall growing up in a household of faith. You may have fond memories of the familiar rituals, the holidays, the shared family values. A weekly service at a church, a temple or a mosque. For many worshippers, religion can provide a sense of comfort in an otherwise uncertain universe. But for some, being in communion with God can mean placing your faith ab...

Of the millions of books that have been published, few are as renowned or as coveted today by collectors as the famous Bible printed in the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg. In The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey (TarcherPerigee, 2019), Margaret Leslie Davis traces the journey of one copy of this book – known as Number 45 – over the course of two cent...

Mickey and Dick Flacks' new book Making History/Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America (Rutgers UP, 2018) is a chronicle of the political and personal lives of progressive activists Richard (Dick) and Miriam (Mickey) Flacks, two of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As active members of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam...

Robert McNamara is best remembered today for his momentous term as Secretary of Defense in the 1960s. Often overlooked because of this is his even longer tenure as president of the World Bank, one that reflected both the strengths and flaws of McNamara’s leadership. In Robert McNamara’s Other War: The World Bank and International Development (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Patrick Sharma...

If you’re a Latter Day Saint, you’ve probably heard of W. W. Phelps, and no doubt, you’ve probably sung some of his hymns. But did you know that he printed the Book of Commandments and other early church works? Or that he was one of the "council of presidents" that guided the Church in Kirtland, Ohio and helped publish the newspaper in Nauvoo, Illinois? Or as political clerk, he assisted Joseph Sm...

By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pushed him into new areas, in particular an expanded interest in the social and psychological consequences of popular culture and mass media. In his new book James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Rea...

That the Roman leader Gaius Julius Caesar is so well remembered today for his achievements as a general is largely due to his skills as a writer. In The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (Pantheon, 2017), the distinguished classics scholar Kurt Raaflaub provides readers with a new translation of the collection of writings known as the Corpus Caesarianum, which he supplements with footnote...

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Pr...

Richard Oakes was a natural born leader whom people followed seemingly on instinct. Thus when he dove into the icy San Francisco Bay in the fall of 1969 on his way to Alcatraz Island, he knew others would have his back. Kent Blansett tells Richard Oakes’ story in wonderful detail in A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and Red Power (Yale University Press, 2018). Blansett, an associate p...

During the first half of the 20th century the American historian Charles Austin Beard enjoyed both professional success and a national prominence that suffered with his outspoken opposition to the direction of foreign policy under Franklin Roosevelt. In Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperialism (Cornell University Press, 2018), Richard Drake traces the develo...

Though not as well known today as some of her literary contemporaries, Charlotte Lennox wrote numerous works during the mid-18th century that won her critical acclaim and influenced subsequent generations of authors. In Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Susan Carlile draws upon Lennox’s published works, her surviving correspondence, and the studies of her e...

Though overshadowed today by more celebrated figures, Walter Francis White was one of the most prominent campaigners for civil rights in mid-20th-century America. As Ronald L. Lewis and Robert L. Zangrando detail in Walter F. White: The NAACP’s Ambassador for Racial Justice(West Virginia University Press, 2019), for all his relative obscurity today White’s accomplishments did much to lay the groun...

Music lovers and researchers alike have long been fascinated by the story of Ludwig van Beethoven who became profoundly deaf as an adult and could not hear some of his most famous compositions including the Ninth Symphony. Many people have written about Beethoven’s deafness and speculated how he might have been able to compose despite his disability. Robin Wallace, however, is the first musicologi...

Even now, eighty years after its beginning in Europe, the Second World War continues to exert tremendous cultural and social influence on American historical writing. Perhaps one of the best testaments to this phenomenon is the increased interest in biographies of the war’s primary and secondary army commanders. Remarkably there are still quite a number of misplaced or even “lost” personalities wh...

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trench...

While William Penn’s name is one familiar to many Americans thanks to his founding of the Pennsylvania colony, this accomplishment can overshadow both his role as a leading 17th-century English Quaker and his pioneering contributions to Western political thought. In William Penn: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2018), Andrew R. Murphy recounts the range of Penn’s achievements and the many obstacl...