New Books in Biography & Memoir

Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during a military coup that brought down his government. Although his time in office was relatively short, Sankara left an indelible mark on his country’s history and development. But as Ernest Harsch explains in his engaging biography, Thomas Sankara...

In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education, but that women’s education served a fundamental role in the French mission in the colonies. “Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe,” s...

If group biography is one of the exciting new trends in life-writing (and some say it is), Karen Abbott– the historian, not to be confused with the novelist-proves one of its deftest practitioners- first, in her debut Sin in the Second City, then in the follow-up American Rose (which we discussed back in 2012) and now in her new book: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civ...

"Why write the biography of a nobody?" That is the question with which Melanie C. Hawthorne begins Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisele d'Estoc (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) but in justifying the writing of such a life and then, in turn, excavating its contours, Hawthorne winds up exploring a number of issues fundamental to the genre of biography. In particular, th...

For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift. It is safe to say that his voice is singular in its mellifluousness and its range. I first encountered his writing at one of my dearest friend’s, and any second now new NBiP ho...

Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback edition 2014) is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose rel...

Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in Constructing American Lives (1999), in nineteenth-century America “biography remained the essential genre for creating American pantheons: collections of lives that represented the nation’s history, aimed to promote values or virtues or both.” This...

It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide.  But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things. In the past few years, this has changed.  We now have a greater understanding of Lemkin’s role in pushing the UN to write and pass the Convention on...

Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett‘s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio is a book with a big mission: to write inventively about the life of someone with whom most everyone outside of Italy is entirely unfamiliar whilst also promoting the literary legacy of a man celebrated within his own country and little translated (much less read) everywhere else. In the end, Gabriele d...

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are the co-authors of authors of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (Crown Publishers 2014). Allen is White House bureau chief at Bloomberg; Parnes is White House correspondent for The Hill. This is a big, buzzy book that has gotten a lot of media attention. Much of the book is about how important trust is to Hillary Clinton. Allen and Parnes refer...

In America, biographies of Presidents and First Ladies are a staple of the genre, but the relationship that exists between the two receives surprisingly less exploration, as though the biographies needed to be kept as separate as the offices in the East and West Wings. (The relationship of the Clintons being the notable exception.) Hopefully Will Swift‘s Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portr...

The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the development and workings of capitalism around. You can still read his work and profit. He was the intellectual godfather of several notable British Marxist historians of the “New Left” of the 1960s and 1970s: R...

Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person. In recent years, the jettisoning of this tradition has led to a number of compelling explorations of the lives of commodities (such as salt or the banana), texts (Gone with the Wind, for example), diseases (including cancer or cancer cells), and ev...

Few historians have influenced their field the way that C. Vann Woodward (1908-99) changed the writing of southern history. First at Johns Hopkins and then at Yale, Woodward’s books, reviews, and mentoring turned southern history into one of the most dynamic fields of historical scholarship. These letters, edited by Michael O’Brien of Jesus College, Cambridge University, follow Woodward from his e...

Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televised miniseries was a must-watch event of the day, and it remains an important production in television history. However, a little more than a decade after his success, Haley was in trouble. His wealth had...

Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ruler, scholar, patron, and human being. Emperor Huizong (Harvard University Press, 2014) explores the person and the reign of the eighth emperor of the Song Dynasty, who ascended the Song throne in 1100 (at age 17) and ruled almost 26 years until 1125....

Everybody knows the author of The Jungle was Upton Sinclair (or, if they’re a little confused, they might say Sinclair Lewis). As Lauren Coodley shows in her new biography Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), there was a lot more to Upton Sinclair. For one thing, he was the author of nearly eighty books that were not entitled The Jungle...

It’s almost a cliché by now to say that we need stories of strong women, but that doesn’t lessen the fact that we do. And biography is a field uniquely poised to transmit such stories- of compelling, complex and, at times, contradictory female characters- to a broad audience. Case in point: Clare Mulley‘s The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s, 2013). Yes, s...

Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as the struggle for equality in South Africa under Apartheid rule, and how it relates to the Civil Rights Movement in America.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbo...

There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degree, casually combative. For biography has long been a genre wherein story-telling is disproportionately devoted to cradle-to-grave narratives about the lives of white men. It’s also a field wherein there persists a notion that there are things one, as a...

Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sold more than six million copies worldwide, is seen as a popular handbook on how to relate to others and how to overcome the narcissism ingrained in every human being. In his book The Lives of Erich Fromm:...

In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, but most famous for his creation of the Muppets. And yet, he’s remained an enigmatic figure in the years since his death. People remember the Muppets and they remember Jim, but they don’t know much about him. Jim Henso...

John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke writes in the preface of his new biography JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, he was “more than most presidents– more than most middle aged men… a work in progress.” This is perhaps also why he’...

For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we know the answers to both questions: Oswald killed Kennedy and he did so alone. These facts won’t keep people from speculating–everyone loves a mystery–but they might allow us to focus on more pertinent...

What do most Americans know about Andrew Jackson, apart from that he’s on the $20 bill and that he apparently had great hair? Probably not much. Maybe that he was a two-term president who pioneered the aggressive use of the powers of that office, and that he steadfastly opposed the sectionalizing, states-rights tendencies of the South Carolina nullifiers. In short, most of the conventional image o...