New Books In Biography

A sadist. A madman. A sociopath seduced by the terrible allure of nuclear weapons. These are but a few of the pejoratives commonly used to describe United States Air Force General Thomas S. Power, Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1957 to 1964. Power’s remit as CinCSAC was twofold: deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear first strike on the United States and plan to unleash Armageddon if they did. Neither was easily achieved. Effective deterrence hinged upon the actual possession of qualitatively superior weapons systems combined with the perception that the United States was willing to use them. Loosing the nuclear dogs of war, in turn, depended on the exacting coordination of those weapons systems under combat conditions. Further complicating matters was the incredible compression of time and space brought on by the advent of new delivery systems like the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). SAC's mission was truly a Gordian Knot—one Power was determined to cut. Power appr

One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. In Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir (Little a, 2021), Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future. Dr. Christina Gessler is a historian of women, gender, and se

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. On today’s podcast, I am interviewing Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Givens joins us to discuss Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, published by our friends at Harvard University Press in 2021. In our discussion we chopped it up about Carter G. Woodson, Black educational history, the origin story behind "fugitive pedagogy" as a term, his journey from grad school at Berkeley, to his post at Harvard, and much much more. Enjoy the conversation family! Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingca

On October 2nd, 1977, Glenn Burke, outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, made history without even swinging a bat. When his teammate Dusty Baker hit a historic home run, Glenn enthusiastically congratulated him with the first ever high five. But Glenn also made history in another way--he was the first openly gay MLB player. While he did not come out publicly until after his playing days were over, Glenn's sexuality was known to his teammates, family, and friends. His MLB career would be cut short after only three years, but his legacy and impact on the athletic and LGBTQIA+ community would resonate for years to come. New York Times bestselling author Andrew Maraniss tells the story of Glenn Burke: from his childhood growing up in Oakland, his journey to the MLB and the World Series, the joy in discovering who he really was, to more difficult times: facing injury, addiction, and the AIDS epidemic. Packed with black-and-white photographs and thoroughly researched, never-before-seen details about Glenn's life,

Carrie Noland's Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary (University of Chicago Press, 2020) goes past conventional understandings of Cunningham that insist that randomness was his central goal as a choreographer, instead providing a portrait of a choreographer interested in story, connection, and affect. For Noland, chance is a starting point in understanding Cunningham, not a final destination. His chance operations were always shaped and modified by a keen choreographic and theatrical eye. Chapters explore his relation to many other artists and thinkers, including John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, James Joyce, and Bill T. Jones. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In 1916, hundreds of local female household workers attempted to establish a union in Denver. The organizer behind the effort was Jane Street, a remarkable 29-year-old woman who, as Jane Little Botkin describes in The Girl Who Dared to Defy: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), brought a remarkable set of skills to what seemed an impossible task. Raised in Arkansas, young Jane went west with her sister after a failed marriage to a bigamist and sexual predator. While in San Francisco, she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and upon her move to Denver in late 1915 began to organize the mainly immigrant housemaids who worked for the city’s elite. While Street’s efforts enjoyed considerable success initially, she soon found herself battling as well the patriarchal views of the all-male IWW leadership. The loss of the Housemaids’ Union’s charter in 1917 spelled the beginning of the end for the local, while the demands of her growing family forced Street to

In Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records (Equinox, 2021), founder Bill Nowlin combines memoir with a history of the founding and evolution of Rounder as he talks about his experiences as one of the labels three founders. Rounder Records was born in 1970, a "hobby that got out of control," a fledgling record company more or less conceived while the Sixties were still in flower, which began on just over $1,000. Founded by three friends just out of college, the Boston-area company produced over 3,000 record albums, the most active company of the last half-century specializing in roots music and its contemporary offshoots. Rounder won 56 Grammy Awards and documented a swath of music that in many cases might otherwise never have been presented to a broader public. It's arguably a quintessentially American success story. This book focuses on the early years up to and just through when Rounder evolved to a second stage, with a generational change that has kept the label healthy and flourishing when so ma

The western travel narrative genre has a history long tied to voyeurism and conquest. A way to see the world—and its many unique people and places—through the eyes of mostly white and male travelers. In an increasingly globalized world, many writers are beginning to raise questions about the ethics of travel writing and its tropes, especially the way western travelers tend to characterize cultures that are unfamiliar to them. These new books challenge the conventional approach, instead asking readers to consider perspectives other than their own. As a young native woman and member of the Karuk tribe, Ursula Pike joined the Peace Corps because she’d always dreamed of helping others. She was ecstatic to learn she would be assigned to serve in small town Kantuta, Bolivia. While at first Pike looked forward to helping the native people of Kantuta, she quickly realized they had less need for her help—and more to teach her—than she had imagined. In this thoughtful debut, An Indian Among Los Indígenas: A Native Trav

Political Theorist and activist Dana Mill’s latest new book, Rosa Luxemburg (Reaktion Books, 2020), is part of an extensive series of books published by Reaktion Books, Ltd, which focuses both on the ideas or creations and the lives of many leading cultural figures of the modern period. These volumes are not long, but they are thorough, and they help the reader to understand the historical context in which these thinkers, artists, writers, etc. lived, created, and worked. Mill’s contribution to this series centers on the turbulent life of Rosa Luxemburg, who lived, worked, studied, and advocated in Europe in the late 1800s and into the 1900s. Mills provides a biographical guide to Luxemburg as we learn about her young life growing up in Poland and her move to Zurich to pursue a PhD in Economics. Luxemburg becomes involved in politics in the late 1880s and 1890s, and she is also developing her thinking about economics, politics, exploitation, and nationalism during this same period. As Mills makes clear, Luxem

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is one of the most popular philosophical works by sales to the public, while in academic philosophy he is considered somewhat of a philosophical lightweight. In Marcus Aurelius (Routledge, 2020), John Sellars argues that this academic perception mistakes the Meditations as a failed work of theoretical argument, when instead it is a series of spiritual training exercises to condition the Roman emperor’s character in accordance with the Stoic doctrines he learned as a bookish boy.  Sellars, who is reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, sees Marcus Aurelius as using his Meditations as an antidote to corrupting pressures of his powerful position and debilitating suffering in the face of adversity in his personal life and in his military campaigns against Germanic tribes. The book accessibly introduces the main Stoic doctrines that form the background of Marcus Aurelius’s writings, and shows how he reviews the day’s events and where he has gone wrong in his respo

In My Private Lennon: Explorations From a Fan Who Never Screamed (Mad Creek Press, 2020), Sibbie O'Sullivan offers a new point of view from which to consider the Beatles’ impact on society and on the individual. In a series of linked autobiographical essays that explore the musical, cultural, and personal aspects of intense music fandom, Sibbie O’Sullivan dismantles the grand narrative of the fifteen-year-old hysterical female Beatles fan and replaces it with an introspective and often humorous tale about how the band shaped her intellectual and artistic development. My Private Lennon charts the author’s realization that the Beatles, especially John Lennon, were a crucial force in her development. A radical departure from other books written by Beatles fans, My Private Lennon invites its readers to consider subjects not usually found in works about Lennon and the band, such as the constraints of memory, the male body, grief, the female breast, race, cultural issues, and the importance of privacy in our over-m

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was an important forerunner of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier; a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings; a preacher and exegete; and a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities; Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. Cedric Cohen-Skalli’s Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography (Brandeis University Press, 2020) is the first new intellectual biography of Abravanel in twenty years and depicts his life in three cultural milieus — Portugal, Castile, and post-expulsion Italy — and analyzes his major literary accomplishments in each period. Abravanel was a traditionalist with innovative ideas, a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. An erudite scholar, author of a monumental exegetical opus that is still studied today, and an avid book collector, he was a transitional figure, defined by an age of contra

Operation White Rabbit: LSD, the DEA, and the Fate of the Acid King (Simon and Schuster, 2020) traces the rise and fall—and rise and fall again—of the psychedelic community through the life of the man known as the “Acid King”: William Leonard Pickard. Pickard was a scientific prodigy, a follower of Timothy Leary, a con artist, a womanizer, a man who believed LSD would save lives, and one of the first voices warning about the dangers of fentanyl. He was also a foreign diplomat, a Harvard fellow, and the biggest producer of LSD on the planet—if you believe the DEA. His biography Dennis McDougal, who grew close to Pickard while he was in prison and remains his friend now that Pickard is free, shows how the story of the Acid King is the story of psychedelics in America, as the drugs have transformed from psychedelic enhancements to personal introspection, to dangerous threats to the safety of the American public, to now, when they’re once again being used as tools for personal recovery and healing. Emily Dufton i

Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas,  and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told.  In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race (Michigan State University Press, 2020), Jack Glazier tells the story of Radin's work at Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. In this book, Glazier descri

How did the gay movement, which began as a sedate group of intellectuals, become what is arguably the most dynamic civil rights crusade in America? How did a deviant and marginalized fraction of society evolve into powerful, effective, and respected leaders? Activist Morris Kight, a sometimes ignored leader of the post-Stonewall gay rights movement, self-aggrandizing and egotistical in a room full of egos, always found the camera and a way to give gay rights a seat at the table of social reform. His style of organizing and activism showed the power of the “influencer” decades before social media brought millions together with a meme. His work in the 1950s as a part of an underground network of gay ‘safe houses’ that provided bail, health care, and legal advice was based on his early Socialist beliefs. He turned his unique charisma and organizing skills to the 1960s anti-war movement before deciding to devote the rest of his life to the public fight for “Gay Liberation.” He fostered key relationships with fell

The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford UP, 2021) offers a state-of-the-art summary of scholarship on Edwards by a diverse, international, and interdisciplinary group of Edwards scholars, many of whom serve as global leaders in the burgeoning world of research and writing on 'America's theologian'. As an early modern clerical polymath, Edwards is of interest to historians, theologians, and literary scholars. He is also an interlocutor for contemporary clergy and philosophical theologians. All such readers--and many more--will find here an authoritative overview of Edwards' life, ministry, and writings, as well as a representative sampling of cutting-edge scholarship on Edwards from across several disciplines. The volume falls into four sections, which reflect the diversity of Edwards studies today. The first section turns to the historical Edwards and grounds him in his period and the relevant contexts that shaped his life and work. The second section balances the historical reconstruction of Edwards

The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in California. In his teens, he lost friends to the escalating violence, and survived acts of brutality himself. He eventually traded the violence of the streets for human rights advocacy in wartime El Salvador where he joined the guerilla movement against the U.S.-backed, fascist military government responsible for some of the most barbaric massacres and crimes against humanity in recent history. Roberto returned from war-torn El Salvador to find the United States on the verge of unprecedented crises of its own. There, he channeled his own pain into activism and journalism, focusing his attention on how trauma affects individual lives and societies, and began the difficult journey of confronting the roots of his own trauma. As a child, Roberto endured a tumultuous relationship with his father Ramón. Raised in extreme poverty in the countryside of El Salvador dur

If, as expected, he re-emerges as prime minister after the Dutch election on March 17, Mark Rutte is on track to become the Netherlands' longest-serving prime minister. By mid-2022, he will beat the record set by Ruud Lubbers in 1994 and, assuming everything goes according to plan, he will serve until at least 2025. Yet, despite being a veteran on the European stage, Rutte remains an enigma - even at home. As Petra De Koning discovered from conversations with the prime minister's old friends and associates for this political biography, Rutte has never been in a relationship, cooked a meal or even had a political strategy. In a European Union without the UK and soon to be without Angela Merkel, Rutte is emerging as the spokesman of the EU’s pragmatic, fiscally conservative, free trading, and Putin-sceptical wing. But who is he? How has he refashioned his liberal party and Dutch politics, and can he reshape Europe? Petra De Koning is political editor of NRC and the 2020 winner of the Anne Vondeling Prize for po

Dutch Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck, a significant voice in the development of Protestant theology, remains relevant many years after his death. His four-volume Reformed Dogmatics is one of the most important theological works of the twentieth century.  James Eglinton is widely considered to be at the forefront of contemporary interest in Bavinck's life and thought. After spending considerable time in the Netherlands researching Bavinck, Eglinton brings to light a wealth of new insights and previously unpublished documents to offer a definitive biography of this renowned Reformed thinker.  Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Baker Academic, 2020) follows the course of Bavinck's life in a period of dramatic social change, identifying him as an orthodox Calvinist challenged with finding his feet in late modern culture. Based on extensive archival research, this critical biography presents numerous significant and previously ignored or unknown aspects of Bavinck's person and life story. Zach McCulley (@zamccull

Religion is at the heart of such ongoing political debates in Japan as the constitutionality of official government visits to Yasukuni Shrine, yet the very categories that frame these debates, namely religion and the secular, entered the Japanese language less than 150 years ago. To think of religion as a Western imposition, as something alien to Japanese reality, however, would be simplistic. As this in-depth study shows for the first time, religion and the secular were critically reconceived in Japan by Japanese who had their own interests and traditions as well as those received in their encounters with the West. It argues convincingly that by the mid-nineteenth century developments outside of Europe and North America were already part of a global process of rethinking religion. The Buddhist priest Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911) was the first Japanese to discuss the modern concept of religion in some depth in the early 1870s. In his person, indigenous tradition, politics, and Western influence came together t