New Books In Biography

Who is the most fascinating historical figure that you have never heard of? David Lester and Marcus Rediker make a good case that it was Benjamin Lay. Based on Rediker’s 2017 The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, Lester has created a moving, engaging, and eye-opening graphic novel. Lay embodied inter-sectional resistance centuries before the term was coined. In the 18th century he not only fought against slavery and condemned racism but supported women’s rights, criticized class disparities, and promoted the human treatment of animals. Lay was a vegetarian who lived in a humble cave with his beloved wife. He condemned the hypocrisy of the slave owning church leadership. The diminutive Lay engaged in powerful acts of guerilla theater that included smashing expensive Chinese porcelain in the public square and splashing fake blood about a Quaker meeting house. Well-known after his death as a founder of the abolitionist movement, post-Civil War white supremac

Andrea Warner's Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography (Graystone Books, 2018) tells the story, often in Buffy's own words, of the life of the remarkable artist and activist. Buffy Sainte-Marie's musical career is as varied and fascinating as those of her Canadian contemporaries Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, but he work has not always achieved the recognition it deserves. Warner's book is in part an attempt to rectify that by presenting Buffy's complete story to a new generation of readers and listeners. We encounter Buffy as a coffee shop folkie, an electronic music pioneer, and indigenous activist, a Sesame Street cast member, and finally as an elder stateswoman of Canadian music. This is a book for longtime fans or for new initiates who have never heard songs like Power in the Blood, Now That the Buffalo's Gone, The Universal Soldier, or The War Racket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork

A ’90s time capsule buried inside a coming-of-age memoir set against the neon backdrop of the San Francisco Bay Area's rave scene, Raver Girl (She Writes Press, 2021) chronicles Samantha’s double life as she teeters between hedonism and sobriety, chaos and calm, all while sneaking under the radar of her entrepreneur father—a man who happened to drop acid with LSD impresario Owsley Stanley in the ’60s. Samantha keeps a list of every rave she goes to—a total of 104 over four years. During that time, what started as trippy fun morphs into a self-destructive roller coaster ride. Samantha opens the doors of her mind, but she's left with traumas her acid-fried brain won't let her escape; and when meth becomes her drug of choice, things get progressively darker. Through euphoric highs and dangerous lows, Samantha discovers she’s someone who lives life to the fullest and learns best through alternative experience rather than mainstream ideals. She’s a creative whose mind is limitless, whose quirks are charms, whose p

In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai for whom she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave birth to two of his sons. Writing after Yoshiyasu’s retirement, she recalled it all—from the glittering formal visits of the shogun and his entourage to the passage of the seasons as seen from her apartments in the Yanagisawa mansion. In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japan’s early modern era. Featuring Machiko’s keen eye for detail, strong narrative voice, and polished prose studded with allusions to Chinese and Japanese classics, this memoir sheds light on everything from the social world of the Tokugawa elite to

He was the son of a prominent politician, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, and viewed by many as the Duce’s likely successor, only to die before a fascist firing squad near the end of the Second World War. In  Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender (U Toronto Press, 2021), Tobias Hof examines Ciano’s career for the many insights it has to offer into Italian fascism and Italian politics during the years of its dominance. As Hof explains, Ciano benefited considerably both from his father Costanzo’s political connections during the early part of his career and from his 1930 marriage to Mussolini’s daughter Edda. During the 1930s Ciano enjoyed a rapid ascent to high office, which fueled the belief that he was being groomed to succeed his father-in-law. Yet Hof demonstrates how Ciano’s positions and bourgeois public persona often were at odds with the views of committed fascists, and that he enjoyed little support from either the monarchy or the Catholic Church. Instead, Ciano found himself increasingly marginalized

Flourishing Through Spinoza is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Hasana Sharp, Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. This conversation provides detailed insights into Hasana Sharp’s book Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, in which she offers a sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza’s iconoclastic philosophy. Further topics include the implications of Spinoza’s naturalism to today’s world, from issues of social inequality, feminism, treatment of the elderly and the environment to animal rights, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Today I spoke to John D. Gazzelli about his book Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, KCB: The Planner Who Saved Europe (Palmetto, 2021). History has forgotten Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, yet without Morgan there would have been no D-Day. In the development and execute of the operational plan that was to become OVERLORD, Lieutenant General Morgan faced numerous challenges, the most pressing being the inability of American and British political and military senior leaders to agree to a common strategy for the defeat of Germany. Morgan also faced challenges with a lack of resources to support what was to become the primary mission of the Allies, the return to the Continent. Finally, Morgan dealt with personalities, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard L. Montgomery, who assumed responsibility for OVERLORD and in the case of Montgomery summarily dismissed all of Morgan's efforts. Despite all these challenges, Morgan produced a plan for OVERLORD that was fundamentally followed on June 6, 1944.

"They don't know me. They don't know what I'm capable of." Diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder, a form of autism, as a toddler, Anthony Ianni wasn't expected to succeed in school or participate in sports, but he had other ideas. As a child, Ianni told anybody who would listen, including head coach Tom Izzo, that he would one day play for the Michigan State Spartans. Centered: Autism, Basketball, and One Athlete's Dreams is the firsthand account of a young man's social, academic, and athletic struggles and his determination to reach his goals. In this remarkable memoir, Ianni reflects on his experiences with both basketball and the autism spectrum. Centered, an inspirational sports story in the vein of Rudy, reveals Ianni to be unflinching in his honesty, generous in his gratitude, and gracious in his compassion. Sports fans will root for the underdog. Parents, teachers, and coaches will gain insight into the experience of an autistic child. And everyone will triumph in the achievements of Centered

Bishop Stephen Neill was one of the most prolific, accomplished, and fascinating Christian leaders of the global church in the twentieth century. Privileged to live in radically different cultural contexts over the course of his life, Neill was also a supremely gifted individual. He excelled by turns as a missionary, a bishop, an ecumenist, a professor, and a prolific author, all the while travelling around the world to share his tremendous knowledge of the world Christian movement with scholars, clergy and laypersons alike. This is the first complete biography of this influential figure, and builds on Daughrity's previous work Bishop Stephen Neill: From Edinburgh to South India (Peter Lang Publications, 2008). Worldly Christian: The Life and Times of Stephen Neill (Lutterworth Press, 2022) stands to become the authoritative word on a man who understood Christianity's changing contours better than most during the dramatic diversification that it underwent during his lifetime. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. student

In La Guera Rodriguez: The Life and Legends of a Mexican Independence Heroine (U California Press, 2021), Silvia Marina Arrom traces the legends of María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco y Osorio Barba (1778–1850), known by the nickname "La Güera Rodríguez." Seeking to disentangle the woman from the myth, Arrom uses a wide array of primary sources from the period to piece together an intimate portrait of this remarkable woman, followed by a review of her evolving representation in Mexican arts and letters that shows how the legends became ever more fanciful after her death. How much of the story is rooted in fact, and how much is fiction sculpted to fit the cultural sensibilities of a given moment in time? This is an indispensable resource for those searching to understand late-colonial Mexico, the role of women in the independence movement, and the use of historic figures in crafting national narratives. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in Histo

In this episode, I interview Ethan Kleinberg, professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University, about his new book, Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought, recently published by Stanford University Press. In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons. The book, largely written in two columnar strands of text, explores the difference between Levinas’s conception of “God on Our Side” and “God on God’s Side” to animate two parallel and, at times, conflicting Talmudic readings Levinas engages in. One is historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." Bringing the two approaches together, Kleinberg asks wh

For nine years, Stephen Colbert’s persona “Colbert”?—a Republican superhero and parody of conservative political pundits--informed audiences on current events, politics, social issues, and religion while lampooning conservative political policy, biblical literalism, and religious hypocrisy. To devout, vocal, and authoritative lay Catholics, religion is central to both the actor and his most famous character. Yet many viewers wonder, “Is Colbert a practicing Catholic in real life or is this part of his act?” This book examines the ways in which Colbert challenges perceptions of Catholicism and Catholic mores through his faith and comedy. Religion and the foibles of religious institutions have served as fodder for scores of comedians over the years. What set “Colbert” apart on his show, The Colbert Report, was that his critical observations were made more powerful and harder to ignore because he approached religious material not from the predictable stance of the irreverent secular comedian but from his positio

The Hungarian Marxist philosopher George Lukács has long occupied a complicated place in the Marxist canon of thinkers, both his lived and theoretical practice subject to much critical commentary and debate. While History and Class Consciousness is considered to be a classic of critical sociology, it has also often been held at arms length by Marxists, many of whom find it’s use of Hegelian speculative philosophy unhelpful, while others find the overemphasis on praxis at the expense of other forms of life and inquiry reductive. In spite of these hesitations, the text has maintained a canonical status for a century now, leaving philosophers on the left with a difficult set of questions about how to read it and what to do with it. Stepping into this difficult terrain is Daniel Andres Lopez with his massive book Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (Haymarket Books, 2020). Lopez’s work reconstructs Lukács’ thought of the 1920’s by putting it back into it’s tumultuous context, allowing us not only to get a close look

When inspiration struck Robert McCrum to write a book about the Bard, it came while watching one of the playwright’s plays in Central Park, New York. Here, McCrum realized that we, today, are undoubtedly living in Shakespearean times. Joe Krulder, a British Historian, interviews Robert about his latest book, Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption (Pegasus Books, 2021) Current events such as the Covid-19 Pandemic, the election and then four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, and this twenty-first-century obsession with conspiracy theories, mirror London’s many plagues from 1592 to 1603, Shakespeare’s Caesar and Richard III, and of course our post-modern social media outlets are simply riddled with conspiracies. Shakespearean, indeed. What Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption accomplishes is to place the reader in William Shakespeare’s London. There is danger at Bishops Gate, the neighborhood the Bard chose to reside in; danger appeared both from below and above. Sword

History is told, it is said, by the victors. And so it is in regard to Richard Nixon. We all know how his presidency ended. What too few of us recall or bother to learn is how it started. In his new The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider's Perspective on Nixon's Surprising Social Policy (UP of Kansas, 2021), John Roy Price details how in Nixon's first few years in office, the President ardently tried to lead from the middle to eradicate the widespread poverty that had so characterized his own upbringing. It is a view of Nixon and a big-tent, policy-driven Republican Party that few of us would recognize today. Part policy history, part political history, part memoir, John Roy Price's account of his time in the White House from 1969 to 1971 is an important corrective to simplistic views of Richard Nixon and the current Republican Party. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing

Sandfuture (MIT Press, 2021) is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once s

What can southern Black joy teach us about agency? What role does refusal have in liberation? What more might there be to root work than resistance? In The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism (Northwestern UP, 2021), Lindsey Stewart explores Hurston’s contributions to political theory and philosophy of race to develop a politics of joy that owes much to indifference, refusal, and tactical misrecognition. Contending with white supremacy and countering neo-abolitionist approaches that reduce southern Black life to tales of tragedy, Stewart suggests how a politics of Black joy can broaden our imaginations to think emancipation anew. Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Counting Dreams: The Life and Writings of the Loyalist Nun Nomura Bōtō (Cornell UP, 2021) tells the story of Nomura Bōtō, a Buddhist nun, writer, poet, and activist who joined the movement to oppose the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore imperial rule. Banished for her political activities, Bōtō was imprisoned on a remote island until her comrades rescued her in a dramatic jailbreak, spiriting her away under gunfire. Roger K. Thomas examines Bōtō's life, writing, and legacy, and provides annotated translations of two of her literary diaries, shedding light on life and society in Japan's tumultuous bakumatsu period and challenging preconceptions about women's roles in the era. Thomas interweaves analysis of Bōtō's poetry and diaries with the history of her life and activism, examining their interrelationship and revealing how she brought two worlds—the poetic and the political—together. Counting Dreams illustrates Bōtō's significant role in the loyalist movement, depicting the adventurous life of a complex woman i

Settle back for a wild ride through a Southern lesbian's life of soul-searching, rule-breaking, and truth-telling. This belle's kind of coming out was not what her traditional Mississippi family expected. How does she recover from family estrangement in the midst of her career as a psychotherapist? How does she find lasting love and a family-of-choice? From her last boyfriend suggesting she become a lesbian, to coming out to the church ladies at her mama's funeral, these true stories will touch your heart, give you hope, and make you laugh out loud. Based on Elizabeth McCain's award-winning one-woman play, A Lesbian Belle Tells..., A Lesbian Belle Tells: OUTrageous Southern Stories of Family, Loss, and Love (Crystal Heart Imprints, 2020) provides story medicine for your soul. It is filled with Southern charm and drama, as well as triumph over tragedy, as only a lesbian belle can tell. Originally from Mississippi, Elizabeth McCain is a transformational storyteller, spiritual counselor, story coach, and shamani

In this episode I chatted with Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai, two scholars of film, about their new anthology The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul out with Rutgers University Press, 2021. As a child Rithy Panh survived the Khmer Rouge regime yet lost his immediate family during those awful years. He was fortunate enough to emigrate to France where he studied film and became a prolific director. Rithy Panh is now the most important film maker in Cambodia and in the Khmer diaspora. Committed to mentoring a new generation of Cambodian storytellers, he helped found the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center which trains young Khmer film makers. The essays in The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul cover his diverse offerings but focus on the memory of the disaster of the Khmer Rouge years, as well as the 1976-1975 civil war and the Vietnamese occupation of the 1980s. Rithy Panh also engages the history of French colonialism and the explores social difficulties of workers caught in neo-liberal devel