New Books In Biography

Nineteenth-century composer Fanny Hensel is the subject of more published research than any other woman of the period, with the possible exception of Clara Schumann. A prolific composer, salon hostess, and a member of a well-connected and prominent family, she was one of the first women composers that musicologists studied in depth. Yet, in some ways, the historiography of Hensel scholarship is as fascinating as her life and music. As musicological priorities and historical understandings of women’s roles in nineteenth-century Europe shifted, so too did the analysis of Hensel’s life and cultural significance. In Fanny Hensel: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2019), Laura Stokes provides a comprehensive bibliography of Hensel scholarship but also confronts the ethical issues presented by the sometimes fraught scholarly work on Hensel through her annotations, the work she decided to include in the Guide, and the organizational structure she employed. In this interview, Dr. Stokes discusses Hensel’s

Andrew Roberts is one of our most distinguished biographers and historians, and the author of the magisterial work, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018). Today we talk to Andrew about his most recent work, Leadership in War: Lessons From Those Who Made History (Allen Lane, 2019). With chapters on such individuals as Napoleon, Nelson, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Marshall, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Thatcher, the book considers the importance of historical thinking and awareness, the varying significance of religious faith, and the driving insistence of notions of self-respect, pride and honor, before building a paradigm for the study of leadership that opens up the central questions of the mini-biographies it collects. This outstanding contribution identifies significant new themes in its collective biography of some of those individuals who, for good or ill, have done most to shape the modern world. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the

All aficionados of baseball are familiar with the pathbreaking role of Jackie Robinson in reintegrating the game back in 1947. What many fans are less familiar with are the issues that Latinos of color endured both in the minor leagues and the Majors starting back in the 1950s. How difficult was it for a mulato, a person who had never endured (or even heard of) Jim Crow, to come to grips with the “peculiarities” of life in the United States, while simultaneously trying to learn a new language as well as trying play well enough in order to move up the various rungs of a particular franchise’s farm system? The story of Major League great (as a player and manager) Felipe Alou sheds light on this important topic. Alou started playing organized baseball late in life (early teens), endured poverty and hardship in his native Dominican Republic, and then helped to break down barriers of language and perception throughout his long career on the field and in the dugout. All the while, he played with skill, dignity, and

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, a debate raged. Some celebrated, while many others questioned the choice. How could the world’s most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter who wouldn’t even deign to attend the medal ceremony? In Why Bob Dylan Matters (Dey Street, 2017), Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas answers this question with magisterial erudition. A world expert on Classical poetry, Thomas was initially ridiculed by his colleagues for teaching a course on Bob Dylan alongside his traditional seminars on Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. Dylan’s Nobel Prize brought him vindication, and he immediately found himself thrust into the spotlight as a leading academic voice in all matters Dylanological. Today, through his wildly popular Dylan seminar—affectionately dubbed "Dylan 101"—Thomas is introducing a new generation of fans and scholars to the revered bard’s work. This witty, personal volume is a distillation of Thomas’s famous course, a

With a name associated with the famous university in Palo Alto, Leland Stanford is among the best-known of the famous “robber barons” of the 19th century. Yet as Roland De Wolk explains in American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford (University of California Press, 2019), much of his fascinating life has been obscured by efforts to hide some of his most nefarious activities. Growing up in New York, Stanford became a part of the general movement of many ambitious Americans westward soon after reaching adulthood. After a few years in Wisconsin as a lawyer and political candidate he followed his brothers to California, where Stanford operated a general store that provisioned the miners in the gold rush of the era. His burgeoning business and political career made him an ideal partner for the group that formed in Sacramento to build a railroad connecting California with the rest of the United States. De Wolk demonstrates how Stanford used his term as the state’s governor to benefit the Central Paci

In Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, Dr. Charles Halperin provides a new analysis of Ivan’s reign, as well as valuable syntheses of previous scholarship on one of Russian’s most infamous rulers. Halperin argues that we should move beyond old questions about Ivan’s sanity. Instead, we should reject the notion of Russian “exceptionalism,” place Ivan in comparative context, and evaluate his reign with the recognition that Ivan’s problems were often similar to those faced by contemporary monarchs. With careful attention to evidence and detail, Halperin’s Ivan IV emerges as a ruler at once less—and more—mysterious than in previous treatments of this subject. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American

In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to the first. She is, judges her biographer Lian Xi, the only Chinese citizen to have openly and steadfastly opposed Mao and his regime–denouncing lies such as those conveyed in the “Great Leap Forward” poster, reproduced above. From her cell, Lin wrote long poems and essays, some written in her own blood, denouncing those who had brought China into such a condition of misery and oppression. Eventually she was judged incapable of re-education and executed. Her family was billed (as was typical) for the cost of the bullet that ended her life. But Lin Zhao’s writings survived: Totalitarian societies are also bureaucratic ones, strangely loath to destroy even the evidence of their own tyranny. When Lin Zhao’s sentence was commuted during the

Nobody should feel excited about the renewed relevance of Hannah Arendt's work today. Her foresight about the fragility of democratic life is relevant for the worst possible reasons: populism, white supremacy, mass deception, the rise of fascism around the world, the coordinated assault on serious journalism, academia and any kind of responsible thought. Really, there's no reason to celebrate why the great analyst of totalitarianism, fascism, and anti-democratic forces and a thinker "in dark times" is so timely today. But Arendt also insisted, in the preface to her 1968 collection of essays, “Men in Dark Times”: “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination.” The philosopher Richard J. Bernstein is the author of Why Read Hannah Arendt Now (Polity, 2018). He met Arendt first in 1972, when he was a young professor and three years before her death. He explained to me why Arendt’s work should be read today with renewed urgency, because it provides illumination into the forces that sh

Acclaimed after the Second World War as England's greatest historian, Sir Lewis Namier was an eastern European immigrant who came to idealise the English gentleman and enjoyed close friendship with leading figures of his day, including Winston Churchill. Today, Namier is associated with the belief that the thoughts and actions of elites matter most, and with a view of politics in which those who enter public life do so only in pursuit of personal and material advantage. This exaggerated view has made him a hero to social and political conservatives, and a demonic figure to the Left. Preoccupied by nationalism, empire, and human motivation, Namier also remains famous in academic circles for supposedly declaring that any reference to ideas in political discourse was nothing more than 'flapdoodle'. In this comprehensive biography, the first in over thirty years, Emeritus Professor of History at Queen’s University, Belfast, David Hayton, examines these manifold issues. Based on a vast range of sources, including

The history of anthropology remembers James Teit as a field assistant and man-on-the spot for Franz Boas. But in At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (University of British Columbia Press, 2019). Wendy Wickwire turns this picture upside down, revealing Teit to be a superb ethnographer in his own right and a tireless political activist who advocated for the rights of Indigenous people. Drawing on thirty years of exhaustive research, she shows us that Teit exemplified an 'anthropology of belonging': an anthropology deeply rooted in a place and community, even if it is carried out by a settler. But more than this, At The Bridge uses the thread of Teit's life to weave a truly synthetic story of the history of colonialism and dispossession in British Columbia as a whole. In this podcast host Alex Golub talks with Wendy Wickwire about Teit, his his life, and the example he offers to anthropologists interested in an anthropology of belonging. They contrast Teit and Boas, and examine how Wickwir

John and Abigail Adams founded a famous political family, but they would not witness its calamitous fall from grace. When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow decline of the family’s political legacy. In Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America (Basic Books, 2019), Douglas R. Egerton, Professor of History at Le Moyne College, depicts a family grown famous, wealthy — and aimless. After the Civil War, Republicans looked to the Adamses to steer their party back to its radical 1850s roots. Instead, Charles Francis Sr. and his children — Charles Francis Jr., John Quincy II, Henry and Clover Adams, and Louisa Adams Kuhn — largely quit the political arena and found refuge in an imagined past of aristocratic preeminence. An absorbing story of brilliant siblings and family strain, Heirs of an Honored Name shows how the burden of impossible expectations shaped the Adamses and, through them, American history. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct histo

Throughout much of his career as an actor in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan identified as a passionate New Deal Democrat, yet by the time he turned to a career in politics in the 1960s he was a conservative Republican. In Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon (Potomac Books, 2019), Robert Mann charts the course of his transition and explores the factors behind it. Growing up in Illinois, Reagan adopted the politics of his father Jack, an Irish Democrat who administered welfare programs during the Great Depression. As an actor Reagan became known among his peers for his passion for politics, and he often campaigned for Democrats in national elections. As Mann explains, while Reagan’s time as president of the Screen Actors Guild was an important stage in his shift rightward, the key was his work in the 1950s as a spokesperson for General Electric. During his time with the famously conservative company, Reagan embraced their views and gradually crafted his presentation of them in speeches he gave thr

In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, paints a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century's most versatile and influential thinkers. Tracing Buber's personal and intellectual biographical arcs, Mendes-Flohr helps us understand Buber as an accomplished scholar, a reverent student of Judaism, and a proponent of genuine engagement on the personal, cultural, and political levels -- but also as a person at times deeply affected by loss, dislocation, and marginalization. David Gottlieb earned his PhD, studying under Professor Mendes-Flohr in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in 2018. He teaches at Spertus Institute in Chicago, and is the author of the forthcoming Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.

John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you may have in your mind of Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender in flagrante delicto. If this reference does not ring a bell, perhaps you can just consider yourself lucky. What follows are some head spinning facts: Sabina Spielrein was the first female member of Freudʼs inner circle. As a young Russian woman from a prominent, educated and chaotic Jewish family, she fell ill and was treated at the Burghozli Hospital for psychiatric illnesses in Zurich. There she began to recover and to do research into the psyche. On regaining her emotional balance, she attended medical school. She wrote a paper that argued for the existence of a death instinct in 1912, pre-empting Freudʼs work in that area by 8 years. She developed ways of working with children that also preceded the thinking of Anna Freud or Melanie Klein. Her dis

Noelle Giuffrida’s book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018), tells the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art through the story of renowned curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918-2008). This book provides one of the first forays into post-war North American collecting and exhibiting, carefully reconstructing the rise of the USA as the scholarly hub on Chinese art, in many ways displacing Europe’s dominance in this area. As such, Separating Sheep from Goats, contributes hugely to the historiography of the field of East Asian art and gives sense of individuals and their contributions, rather than institutions. Relying on extensive archival research, Noelle Giuffrida shines light on the so-called ‘Monuments Men’ and namely their time in East Asia in this engaging and lavishly illustrated book. In this podcast, Noelle and I talk about we talk about the archival research that went into writing this boo

John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology (emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, has been observing the South for decades. This week he and Al Zambone talk about New Orleans in the 1920s, the subject of his book Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s (LSU Press, 2012). In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends -- ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer -- and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the

This memoir by one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet period spans three continents and more than half a century―from the 1950s when Lewis Siegelbaum's father was a victim of McCarthyism up through the implosion of the Soviet Union and beyond. Siegelbaum recreates journeys of discovery and self-discovery in the tumult of student rebellion at Columbia University during the Vietnam War, graduate study at Oxford, and Moscow at the height of détente. His story takes the reader into the Soviet archives, the coalfields of eastern Ukraine, and the newly independent Uzbekistan. An intellectual autobiography that is also a biography of the field of Anglophone Soviet history, Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian (Northern Illinois UP, 2019) is a guide for how to lead a life on the Left that integrates political and professional commitments. Siegelbaum reveals the attractiveness of Communism as an object of study and its continued relevance decades after its disappearance from the landscape of its origi

Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. As a leading abolitionist, her bravery and selflessness has inspired generations in the continuing struggle for civil rights. Now, National Book Award nominee Erica Armstrong Dunbar presents a fresh take on this American icon blending traditional biography, illustrations, photos, and engaging sidebars that illuminate the life of Tubman as never before. Not only did Tubman help liberate hundreds of slaves, she was the first woman to lead an armed expedition during the Civil War, worked as a spy for the Union Army, was a fierce suffragist, and was an advocate for the aged. She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (37 Ink, 2019) reveals the many complexities and varied accomplishments of one of our nation’s true heroes and offers an accessible and modern interpretation of Tubman’s life that is both informative and engaging. Filled with rare outtakes of commentary, an expansive timeline of Tubman’s life, p

Can justice heal? Must there be justice in order to heal? Is there such a thing as justice, something to be striven for regardless of context? Alexander L. Hinton thinks through these questions in a pair of new books. The two are companion pieces, each using Cambodia in a different way as a lens through which to look at the notion of transitional justice. In The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia (Oxford University Press, 2018), he argues there is something deeply mistaken in the way thinkers and practitioners have imagined and employed transitional justice in the past half-century. Justice, Hinton argues, is much more deeply embedded in localities and particularity than conventional notions of transitional justice allow. Rather than striving toward a universal notion of justice, what is needed is a deeply rooted sense of the way local actors, organizations and values understand and respond to calls for justice. Transitional justice requires a thorough understanding of local societies, of the wa

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to