New Books In Biography

Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer in his own day who sharpened his acute literary talents, Peter Zinoman observes in the opening pages of Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (University of California Press, 2014), “as a lower-class, untraveled, half-educated, opium addicted, colonized subject from a remote outpost of France’s second-rate empire”. He died in 1939, aged just 28. Today he is remembered as a literary giant, for Zinoman, comparable to Orwell in the English-reading world. Like Orwell, he was a complex and defiant figure whose work crossed genres and drew deeply on his rich life experiences as well as his wide reading in literature, politics, and psychology. His views on a range of topics attracted heated debate in his own lifetime, in which he engaged vigorously. He had a persistent interest in sexuality

In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse intellectual history of Buganda, an East African kingdom that came to be incorporated into the modern state of Uganda.  Earle constructs the intellectual biographies of four important Ganda activists who articulated and debated ideas about kingship, political pluralism, citizenship, and justice. Their views on state and society were drawn from a diverse range of sources such as religious texts, classical political thinkers and local histories. Earle’s book shows that often used distinctions between “sacred” and “secular” or “African” and “European” oversimplify and obscure what was a more pluralistic intellectual milieu.  In writing this book, Earle uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources among which are several private archival collections that had not been previously available to historians. The book is c

Today we are joined by Howard W. Rosenberg, author of Ty Cobb Unleashed: The Definitive Counter-Biography of the Chastened Racist (Tile Books, 2018). In this deeply researched volume, Rosenberg achieves what many biographers have failed to do: to put Cobb into the context of his times. That means seeing Cobb not as a man of the twenty-first century, but as he was perceived during and after his 24-year career in major league baseball. Rosenberg pulls no punches as he critiques several recent biographies about Cobb and demonstrates how some information in those works were either glossed over or lifted out of context. He also provides balance, giving credit where it is due as he focuses on several books. Rosenberg compiles an impressive list of facts, figures, notes, quotes and anecdotes about Cobb, particularly after his playing days. There are also plenty of vintage photographs and vintage editorial cartoons. Rosenberg lets his research do the talking and tackles the extent of Cobb’s racism. While the Georgia

When he was elected president of China in 1912, Yuan Shikai was hailed as his nation’s George Washington, yet four years later he would die as the leader of a country in turmoil after a failed bid to become its emperor. In Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal (University of British Columbia Press, 2018), Patrick Fuliang Shan uses recent studies of Yuan’s career to examine this controversial figure in a new light. A member of a prominent family of public servants, Yuan’s failure to pass the civil service exams led him instead to adopt a more congenital career in the military. There he quickly established a reputation as an effective imperial official and military reformer, most notably in training China’s first modern army in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War. His subsequent success in a series of increasingly prominent postings culminated in his appointment as Foreign Secretary in 1907, only to be dismissed a year later when his patroness the Dowager Empress Cixi died. Recalled in 1911 to deal with the rebel

Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events of his life and shows how they can inform many of the concepts for which he is best known. The son of a clergyman, Nietzsche excelled at university and became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel without even taking a degree. It was at that time he began a long-term friendship with Richard Wagner and often traveled to Bayreuth. Yet Nietzsche soon drifted away from philology towards philosophy, which led to his dismissal from his teaching post. As Prideaux shows, Nietzsche overcame ill health, physical handicaps, and the poor reception of his work to develop his ideas, and was on the cusp of gaining a wider audience when a mental breakdown led him to spend the last years of his life institutionalized, little knowing of the growing impact his books and ideas were having on European thought. Le

Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy, intelligent, and secretive man’s betrayal of his country and his friends, family and colleagues, has never been explored—until now. Drawing on a wealth of previously classified files and unseen family papers, A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean (W.W. Norton, 2018) meticulously documents this extraordinary story. In the first full biography of Maclean, author and publisher, Roland Philipps unravels Maclean’s character and contradictions. Like many members of his generation, Maclean became infatuated with Communism during his school days, even before his time at Cambridge. The very model of a perfect diplomat, he rose through the ranks of the diplomatic service rapidly, never arousing suspicion of his treasonous double life. He married an American woman despite his sexual ambivalence and increasing antip

Jack Benny was one of the first crossover stars in broadcast comedy, rising from the vaudeville circuit to star in radio, film, and television. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley chronicles Benny’s career in her book, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (University of California Press, 2017). The book recently received a Special Jury Prize from the Theatre Library Association. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of various books on film history, including At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period in which Roosevelt exhorts an America prone to isolationism to join the war against Germany, only for the war to take the life of one of his sons. Pietrusza tracks how Roosevelt’s alters America’s political history, abandoning his “Bull Moose” party and re-uniting the Republicans in hopes of strengthening American foreign policy. And the author chronicles Roosevelt’s heartbreak, unable to die a glorious death on the battlefield himself, but bereaved to see his son die from a policy he advocated. Pietrusza also offers evidence of a controversial theory: that a depressed Roosevelt ultimately took his own life with an overdose of morphine. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided

Paul Bjerk’s compact biography Julius Nyerere, published as part of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series follows closely on the heels of his monograph on the same subject – Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 – published in 2015 by the University of Rochester Press, about which Bjerk was interviewed on the New Books in African Studies podcast. Similar to the monograph, in this short work, Bjerk foregrounds Nyere’s political biography – the founding of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU); his leadership of an independent Tanzania; and his eventual consecration as an icon of postcolonial Africa. Additionally however, considerable time is spent on Nyerere’s personal arc from intellectually gifted rural youth, to principled if flawed leader of an independent nation, to, having foregone many of the trappings of political office, elder statesman living the end of his life much as he began it. The podcast conversation delves deeply in

Among the many personages associated with the Peloponnesian War, none are as colorful as the Athenian general Alcibiades. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (Harvard University Press, 2018), David Stuttard recounts the dramatic life of this controversial figure. A scion of a wealthy family, Alcibiades was adopted by the statesman Pericles after his father died in battle. Growing up he demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, which in combination with his fortune made him a prominent figure at a young age. Yet Alcibiades desired more, and sabotaged the peace agreement with the Spartans orchestrated by Nicias in an effort to prolong the war so as to gain new opportunities for glory. The Sicilian Expedition presented him with just such an opportunity, though controversial actions attributed to Alcibiades and his friends undermined his standing. Faced with mounting opposition, Alcibiades defected, first to Sparta, then to Persia before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general. Though Alcibiad

Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorjé (1284-1339). In this book, Gamble gives an account of Rangjung Dorjé’s life based on his autobiographical liberation stories and songs, connecting him to the teaching and practice lineages with which he was involved, the communities that supported him, and the physical and sacred spaces that he inhabited. The book highlights the ways in which Rangjung Dorjé’s autobiographical writing and his later biographies worked to deliberately construct and solidify his authority and place within the Karmapa lineage. In our conversation, Gamble discusses the broader context of her book, as well as the relevance of Rangjung Dorjé’s life to contemporary issues in Tibetan Buddhist lineages. She also explains how snowboarding has influenced her scholarly work.

If Lord Derby was the ‘forgotten Prime Minister’ and Andrew Bonar-Law was the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’ then Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770-1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was Britain’s longest serving prime minister since William Pitt the Younger, surely deserves is own epithet. While not providing us with that, William Anthony Hay, Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University has instead provided us with the definitive modern study of Lord Liverpool’s political career–Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (Boydell Press, 2018. In a beautifully written and produced book, one that any student of late 18th century and early 19th century British history will not wish to be without, Hay delineates for the reader Lord Liverpool’s manifold achievements and failures in office. From such seismic events as the War of 1812 with the United States, the endgame of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the Corn Laws, the Peterloo Massacre, to the escalating contention over the issue of Catholic Emanc

We have all seen pictures of the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) at their historic meeting Yalta in February 1945. The three leaders command the viewer’s attention, naturally, but in the background of the various versions of that photo are other important figures. One can glimpse George Marshall in some. Foreign ministers Eden and Molotov appear in others. American Admirals King and Leahy are there. And so is a U.S. Army Air Force general named Larry Kuter. Not exactly a household name, Kuter was an enormously influential figure, who richly deserves this excellent biography written by airpower expert, Brian Laslie: Architect of Air Power: General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the U.S. Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2017). Dr. Laslie is the Deputy Command Historian at NORAD and US Northern Command and the author of another noteworthy book on the U.S. Air Force: The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam (2015), which I can also recommend. Laslie kept encounteri

Jonathan W. White, an associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, is the author of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life (Cumberland House, 2015). In this work White reveals the moral character of Abraham Lincoln through his law practice.  Lincoln was a lawyer on the American frontier in Illinois, representing clients ranging from individuals in divorces and railroads in contract disputes.  Throughout his career he rendered advice, not only to clients but to prospective young lawyers and friends.  Lincoln’s experience as a lawyer is both revealing about the norms of law practice in the antebellum period and about the formation of Lincoln’s approach to law and governance, which would influence his behavior as President during the Civil War.  White has an eye for entertaining and revealing anecdotes.  In revealing how Lincoln practiced law White helps uncover Lincoln as a person, beyond the reverential historical figure we all know from America’s Civil War. Ian J. Drake is an As

In about 1978, I found myself in my high school library. I don’t know why I was there except to say I was probably on detention; I didn’t do a lot of reading in those days. In any event, I was wandering around the stacks and I found a book called My Lai 4. I knew a little about the My Lai massacre because I knew a little about the Vietnam War; my father had been in the army in the 1960s and my uncle had fought in Vietnam. I started reading. It’s not often that a book stays with you your whole life, but Seymour M. Hersh‘s My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Random House, 1970) did. Hersh reported–that’s just the word–what happened: he did not embellish, he did not moralize, he did not speculate. He tirelessly interviewed the men who were there, the men who commanded them, and read everything he could get his hands on. Then he told a shocked American public: this happened. His reporting arguably changed the course of the Vietnam War. It changed the course of my life, as I went on to write a b

Originally published in 1994, Marc Leeds’ The Vonnegut Encyclopedia (Delacorte Press, 2016) was initially conceived of as a comprehensive A-Z guide to the expansive oeuvre of the American author Kurt Vonnegut. The encyclopedia was created as resource for scholars, teachers and casual fans of Vonnegut’s work and was comprised of detailed entries on all of his plays, novels and stories, in addition to descriptions of individual characters, narratives and motifs. Readers of Vonnegut will, of course, be aware that rather than distinct, hermetically sealed texts, each of Vonnegut’s works forms part of a larger fictional universe wherein characters, locations, turns of phrase and even consumer products cross back and forth between different novels, short stories and plays. As such, Leeds’ encyclopedia allows researchers and readers to cross reference recurring characters, words and plot points. The book also serves as something of a glossary of Vonnegut’s various neologisms (e.g. “foma” and “karass”) as well as pro

The achievements of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great are often presented as primarily the work of a singular genius. As Richard A. Billows demonstrates in his book Before and After Alexander: The Legend and Legacy of Alexander the Great (The Overlook Press, 2018), such an interpretation ignores the considerable advantages that he inherited. Foremost among them was Macedonia itself, which was a kingdom rich in resources, especially when compared to the more economically marginal Greek city-states to the south. Recognizing the advantages that Macedonia possessed and utilizing them to defeat Balkan invaders, Alexander’s father Philip II began the process of turning Macedonia’s potential into reality. By reorganizing the Macedonian military and employing it effectively in a series of wars, Philip forged it into a fearsome fighting force that Alexander inherited upon his father’s assassination in 336 BCE. It was by employing the generals of Philip’s armies and the tactics they developed that Alexander

Brian Abrams interviewed more than 100 people – Democrats, Republicans, cabinet officials, White House aides, campaign operatives, congresspeople and activists – to piece together a comprehensive oral history of the Barack Obama presidency, in Obama: An Oral History, 2009-2017 (Little A, 2018).  Based almost solely on the words of those who helped Obama win election and govern the country, Abrams begins with Obama’s famous anti-war speech in 2002 and carries the reader through the shocking aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory. Through often candid and unvarnished remembrances, readers will relive the debates between Democrats and Republicans, and between pragmatists and idealists, that shaped Obama’s legacy and continue to reverberate. Abrams gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most dramatic presidencies in history. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The

In Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (Yale University Press, 2018), Brigham Young University Associate Professor Jenny Hale Pulispher demonstrates that Indians, too, could play the land game for both personal and political benefit.  According to his kin, John Wompas was “no sachem,” although he claimed that status to achieve his economic and political ends. He drew on the legal and political practices of both Indians and the English—even visiting and securing the support of King Charles II—to legitimize the land sales that funded his extravagant spending. But he also used the knowledge acquired in his English education to defend the land and rights of his fellow Nipmucs. His biography offers a window on seventeenth-century New England and the Atlantic world from the unusual perspective of an American Indian who, even though he may not have been what he claimed, was certainly out of the ordinary. Drawing on documentary and anthr

There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And what’s not to love? You meet really interesting people (some very attractive, if you get my drift); you get to yak about really fascinating though useless stuff into the wee hours (and sleep late!); you can play pick-up basketball at nearly any hour of the day (“I got next”); there’s a lot of beer to be drunk and, um, other things to be ingested (some of which will, so you are told, “expand your mind” or something like that); and you don’t really have to work (other than the job you get to raise the money to buy the aforementioned beer). Oh, and the dining hall (a really magical place) always had soft serve! It never occurred to me  to leave this youthful paradise of irresponsibility. So I didn’t; I went to graduate school where I continued to live that indolent life for nearly another decade. And even when I was done there and got my first “job”, I contin