New Books In Biography

For three decades, Kenneth Roth led Human Rights Watch, transforming it from a small advocacy group into one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world. In Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments (Knopf, 2025), he offers a gripping inside account of the relentless fight against some of the world’s most abusive governments—from war crimes in Syria and Russia’s authoritarianism to China’s crackdown on dissent and the global erosion of democratic norms. Part memoir, part strategic guide, and part call to action, Righting Wrongs reveals the behind-the-scenes battles to hold governments accountable, the difficult choices human rights activists must make, and the lessons learned from engaging with autocrats, diplomats, and international institutions. With keen insight, Roth shows how pressure and advocacy can curb abuses and spark change—even against the most powerful forces. A must-read for anyone passionate about justice, democracy, and global affairs, R

A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don’t associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic. The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities. Loving Strangers has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography. Mentioned in the podcast: • Diana Saltoon, My Sister Meda: A Memoir of Old Singapore (2023) • The Jews of Singapore Museum Rece

Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Dr. Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson was the owner of Blue Spring Farm, a veteran of the War of 1812, and the US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted. What makes Chinn's life exceptional i

In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about one of the most infamous of Warhol's Superstars. A young, aspiring writer desperate for a break...and the legendary Andy Warhol superstar who gave him the story of a lifetime. By the mid-1980s, Holly Woodlawn, once lauded by George Cukor for her performance in the 1970 Warhol production and Paul Morrissey directed Trash, was washed up. Over. Kaput. She was living in a squalid Hollywood apartment with her dog and bottles of Chardonnay.  A chance meeting with starry-eyed corn-fed Missouri-born Jeff Copeland, who moved to Hollywood with dreams of 'making it' as a television writer, changed the course of BOTH of their lives forever. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn is a story of how an unlikely friendship with a young gay writer and an, ahem, mature trans actress and performer created the bestselling autobiography of 1991, A Low Life in High Heels. This book ab

On the podcast today I am joined by Presidential Scholar and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at John Jay College, City University of New York, Alisse Waterston to talk about her award-winning book, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of A Century (Routledge, 2024). The book was first published in the Innovative Ethnographies series by Routledge Books in 2014. Its acclaim has led to the Tenth Anniversary edition which has just come out in 2024. My Father’s Wars is a story about twentieth-century social history told through the vivid account of Alisse’s father as he journeys across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations—and wars. The book is a beautifully moving account bridging family narrative and anthropological offering deeply insightful reflections on themes that remain more urgent than before, including migration, memory and violence. Captivating and powerful, the book is not only an important example of just how much ethnographic writing can show rather than tell, it

John Madden is synonymous with football. He was the television face and voice of the nation's most popular sport, the namesake of its best-selling sports video game, and the man with the highest career winning percentage of any NFL coach. Despite his international fame, there was a side of Madden known only to those who listened to morning radio broadcasts in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's where Madden grew up, lived, and died. It's where for decades he found joy in a daily chat with his hometown radio station: a chance to unwind, tell stories, and impart his own brand of wit and wisdom.  In Mornings with Madden: My Radio Life With An American Legend (Triumph, 2024), Stan Bunger— the man most often on the other side of the mic— illuminates this larger-than-life figure, drawing upon memories of more than fifteen years of daily broadcasts, backed up by thousands of recordings of those conversations. Readers who adored Madden's football acumen and quirky personality on NFL broadcasts will get to know the fat

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 (U Chicago Press, 2024) which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels. After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to unravel, as British dominance in manufacturing is starting to be challenged by cheaper rivals in Germany and Japan, with arguments for economic policies that seem very familiar to us today. Rosemary Wakeman is professor of history at Fordham University. She is the author of A Modern History of European Cities: 1815 to the Present (Bloomsbury: 2020) as well as The Heroic City: Paris, 1945–1958 (The University of Chicago Press: 2009) and Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (The University of

Our book is: Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra (UNC Press, 2025), by Ericka Verba, which explores the life of Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967). Parra is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Canción (New Song). Her renowned song "Gracias a la vida" has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Mercedes Sosa, and Kacey Musgraves. A self-taught visual artist, Parra was the first Latin American to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre. In this remarkable biography, Dr. Ericka Verba traces Parra's radical life and multifaceted artistic trajectory across Latin America and Europe and on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Verba paints a vivid and nuanced picture of Parra's life. From her modest beginnings in southern Chile to her untimely death, Parra w

At the height of his career, Sargent painted twelve portraits of the Wertheimer family, commissioned by Asher Wertheimer, a German-Jewish London art dealer who became his greatest private patron and close friend. Their portraits, later gifted to the National Gallery, stirred both admiration and controversy, challenging societal norms. In Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers (FSG, 2024), Jean Strouse's historical narrative explores the decline of the British aristocracy and the evolving art market across London, Vienna, and Italy. Christina Obolenskaya researches twentieth-century women’s political history based out of Columbia University and LSE. In the past, her work has been featured in the Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Ann Schmiesing, Ph.D. is Professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, with research interests spanning 18th and 19th-century German and Norwegian literature and culture. In our interview we discuss her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale UP, 2024), their first biography in over half a century. We talk about what led her to Germanic studies and fairy tales in particular. We discuss the revelations in her book dealing with their lives and work, their antisemitism as reflected in their correspondence and the stories they published and its long-ranging consequences. We talk about some of her favorite fairy tales and what makes them special. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025) is a first-person memoir written from the standpoint of a Jewish boy growing up in Egypt during the watershed years that shaped the Middle East into the powder keg it is today. Described as the “Holden Caulfield of the Nile” for his rebellious attitude, the boy witnessed—between the ages of seven to fourteen—the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk and gave rise to the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser; the 1956 Suez war that marked the end of the British empire; and in its wake the destruction of the Jewish community that had lived in Egypt since Biblical times. Though set in times of revolution and war, Goodbye, Tahrir Square is not a political book. It is the story of a boy whose close-knit extended Sephardic family, full of rich traditions and colorful characters, is suddenly torn asunder by the forces of revolution and war. A man-child coming of age like a wild cactus in the rubble of the past, overcoming a hos

What were two Irish sisters doing in Russia during the early years of the nineteenth century, editing the French-language memoirs of a princess who had been a close confidante of Catherine the Great? Author Alexis Wolf is in conversation with Duncan McCargo about a remarkable transnational story she has unearthed through meticulous archival research.  Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840 (Boydell Press, 2024) highlights the centrality of non-canonical, middle-ranking women writers to the production of literature and culture in Britain, Ireland, Europe and Russia in the late eighteenth century. The Irish writers and editors Katherine (1773-1824) and Martha Wilmot (1775-1873) left a unique record of middle-ranking women's literary practices and experiences of travel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Their manuscripts are notable for their vivid portrayal of the era's political conflicts, capturing a flight from Ireland during the Irish Rebellion (1798), time spent in P

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk. As explored by Dr. Yves Rees in Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America (New South, 2024), a century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across the Pacific to make their fortune. In doing so, they reoriented Australia towards the United States years before politicians began to lumber down the same path. For the artist Mary Cecil Allen, this meant spreading the word about American abstract expressionism. For the naturopath Alice Caporn, it meant evangelising fruit juices and salads. For the swimmer Isabel Letham, it was teaching synchronised swimming. Others imported the latest thinking in dentistry, fashion, design, economics, law, music, medicine and more. They were rebels, they were trailblazers, they were disruptors. Individually, they have extraordinary stories;

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son (Atria, 2024), the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond to see how Son’s firm SoftBank has defied conventional wisdom and imposing odds to push global tech and commerce into the future. From the dizzying highs of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack to the epic lows of WeWork and tech-infused dogwalking app Wag Son and SoftBank have been at the center of cutting-edge capitalism’s absolute peaks and valleys. In the process, Son, son of a pachinko kingpin who grew up in a slum in Japan, has been a he

Today I talked to Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal about About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.  Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote speculative fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. Her radical imagination links the realities of living in a British colony to the technological and scientific breakthroughs of her time, the effects of hauntingly pervasive systems of sexual domination, and collective dreams of the future, forging a visionary, experimental body of work. Alongside Rokeya’s pathbreaking feminist science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream,” this volume features fresh and exciting new translations of her key Bengali writings and a superbly informative introduction to her life and work. If her contemporary B. R. Ambedkar urged the “annihilation of caste,” Rokeya demands nothing less than the annihilation of se

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even in highly technical works of Sanskrit knowledge, and their personal religious commitments featured in a language and genre of writing that deliberately isolated itself from worldly matters. The religion of bhakti bound together the transregional discourse of Sanskrit learnin

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality.  In George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Peter Brian Barry avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of Orwell's corpus, including his fiction, journalism, essays, book reviews, diaries, and correspondence, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While Orwell is often read as a humanist, egal

This volume utilises the personal papers of Sir Ronald Storrs, as well as other archival materials, to make a microhistorical investigation of his period as Governor of Jerusalem between 1917 and 1926. It builds upon Edward Said’s work on the Orientalist ‘determining imprint’ by arguing that Storrs took a deeply personal approach to governing the city; one determined by his upbringing, his education in the English private school system and his service as a British official in Colonial Egypt. Burnham recognises the influence of these experiences on Storrs’ perceptions of and attitudes towards Jerusalem, identifying how these formative years manifested themselves on the city and in the Governor’s interactions with Jerusalemites of all backgrounds and religious beliefs. It also highlights the restrictions placed on Storrs’ approach by his British superiors, Palestinians and the Zionist movement, alongside the limitations imposed by his own attitudes and worldview. Placing Storrs’ personality at the centre of dis

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Keller uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures. Abandoning the surety of established intellectual practice, this 'experimental century' saw Major and his peers reshaping fragments of knowledge into new perspectives. Across new disciplines, from experimental philosophy to archaeology and museology, they reexamined what knowledge was, who it was for, and how it was to be stored, managed, accessed, judged, and transformed. Although later typecast as Baroque obstacles to be overcome by the Enlightenment, these academics arranged knowledge in dynamic infrastructures that enco

The Great Gatsby is often called the great American novel. Emblematic of an entire era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of illicit desire, grand illusions, and lost dreams is rendered in a lyrical prose that revives a vanished world of glittering parties and vibrant jazz, where money and deceit walk hand in hand. Rich in humor, sharply observant of status and class, the book tells the story of Jay Gatsby's efforts to keep his faith - in money, in love, in all the promises of America - amid the chaos and conflict of life on Long Island's Gold Coast during the Roaring Twenties.  The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby (Cambridge UP, 2025) presents the established version of the text in a collector's volume replete with social, cultural, and historical context, and numerous illustrations. The authoritative introduction examines persistent myths about Fitzgerald, his greatest work, and the age he embodies, while offering fresh ways of reading this iconic work. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis