New Books in Biography & Memoir

What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person’s fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg‘s new book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography (MacLehose Press, 2016). A diplomatic envoy in Hungary, Wallenberg has been lauded throughout the world for his efforts to save Jews living during World War II. But, his fate following his arrest in 1945 rem...

Peter L. Laurence is an associate professor of urban design, history and theory at Clemson University School of Architecture. His book Becoming Jane Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an intellectual biography of the architecture critic and neo-functionist Jane Jacobs and how she came to write the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Beginning with Jacobs’s arr...

Considered by many to be the greatest American film ever made, Citizen Kane was the product of Orson Welles, who made a movie that is still groundbreaking today. In his new book Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), Harlan Lebo presents a wonderful overview of the film on its 75th anniversary. He used previous interviews with some of the people involved in the production,...

“There still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography or autobiography should look like,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 classic, Writing A Woman’s Life, noting, “Even less has been told of the life of the unmarried woman.” One can only hope that Kate Bolick‘s Spinster is a sign that, nearly thirty years later, the circumstances Heilbrun described are, at long last, about t...

In Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Indiana University Press, 2013), Shai Held, Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, offers a sympathetic, yet critical, examination of the thought of this influential mid-twentieth century theologian, scholar, and activist. Held identifies a central theme that runs through all of Heschel’s writing: the idea of transcendenc...

In anticipation of Super Bowl 50, Sports Illustrated and WIRED magazines teamed up to speculate about the state of football fifty years from now, at the time of Super Bowl 100. Of course, the big question that arises when considering the future of the football is whether the sport will even exist decades from now, given the evidence of severe brain disease in many former players. Historian Julie D...

On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that unsettled Paris for years. Were the Nozieresan upstanding middle-class family? Was Violette a victim of sexual assault, her father a heinous predator? Was Violette a sexual degenerate? In an age of unprec...

John Allen Paulos, who has accomplished the unheard-of double of writing best-sellers about mathematics and inserting a word (‘innumeracy’) into the language, has attempted another ambitious feat – bringing mathematics to bear on one of the few subjects it has yet to examine: biography and autobiography. A Numerate Life (Prometheus Books, 2015) is simultaneously a charming memoir and a highly ente...

Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor in writing, literature and publishing. Her book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Mariner Books, 2013) won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Marshall has written a beautiful and detailed portrait of the nineteenth-century political thinker, women’s rights advocate, and writer Margaret Fuller. Fuller’s childhood begins in Cambri...

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A “midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s” who was famed...

Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This story of Dai Zhen begins before his birth and ends after his death, extending from a moment in which the Jesuits were denounced as “seditious foreigners” in 1664, to around 1800, when Dai’s classical vi...

Muhammad is remembered in a multitude of ways, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. And through each retelling we learn a great deal not only about Muhammad but about the social milieu of the authors. In The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard University Press, 2014), Kecia Ali, Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, explores how several central components of the Muhammad biographical narrative...

As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one encounters tangible pieces of the subject’s life- letters, diaries, receipts, knick-knacks; one never knows what one will find. But how to incorporate that experience into a book? This is one of many compellingly original angles that Daisy Hay brings to...

In his new book Lee J. Cobb: Characters of an Actor (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014),Don Dewey discusses Lee J. Cobb’s career, both from his importance as a character actor and follower of the Method acting school. He also reviews Cobb’s importance to the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)hearings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by be...

Sally G. McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock professor of history at Davidson College. In her book Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (Oxford University Press, 2015) McMillen has given us a rich biography of the life and times of the abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone. Born in 1818 into a farming community in Massachusetts, Stone a precocious and determined girl set her sights not...

As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli, it’s a sentence many people might assume was being applied to Coco Chanel, for Chanel looms large as the fashion designer of the last century. But S...

I have really enjoyed Michael Leggiere‘s earlier work, including the excellent Napoleon and Berlin : The Franco-Prussian War in North Germany, 1813 (2002), like this work, part of the Campaigns and Commanders series at the University of Oklahoma Press. In Blucher: Scourge of Napoleon (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), Leggiere rescues Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher from the shadow cast by Wellin...

Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar w...

Nick Wilding‘s new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar w...

Biography is, both etymologically and in its conventional forms, the writing of a life. But what is the role of place within that? And how do the stories of lives- some of them well known, others less so- realign when we see them through the lens of a particular place? That’s Justin Martin‘s way in to the stories of Walt Whitman, Artemus Ward, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Adah Menken and Edwin Booth, among o...

One of the fundamental functions of biography is the preservation of stories. But it also acts to resurrect the stories that may have fallen from view, reinvigorating the tales of people who, with the passage of time, have become merely names on plaques. In La Belle Creole:The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris (Chicago Review Press, 2014), Alina Garcia-Lapuerta aims to do jus...

Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s. Lumumba’s short tenure as prime minister was marked by an unc...

In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his execution as a Nazi collaborator in 1947. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2013) is also a fascinating look at Catholicism, na...

S. Duncan Reid has written a meticulously researched and detailed account of the performances and recording career of Bay Area-raised and small group Latin-jazz innovator and vibraphonist Cal Tjader. Tjader’s high-energy yet lyrical and melodic playing introduced new demographics of jazz listeners to the soulful sound of Latin jazz for four decades beginning in the 1940s and ending with Tjader’s u...

There was once a notion that black people had no meaningful history. It’s a notion Dorothy Porter Wesley spent her entire career debunking. Through her 43 years at Howard University, where she helped create the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, her own publishing endeavors and collecting, and her unfettered support of the researchers she encountered, Wesley devoted her entire life to the preserva...