New Books In Biography

For all that has been written about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many misconceptions about the man and his achievements continue to persist. Roger Daniels seeks to correct these in a new two-volume biography of the 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 (University of Illinois Press, 2015), and Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945 (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Drawing upon Roosevelt’s speeches, press conferences, and other statements, Daniels argues that Roosevelt was not the second-class intellect deemed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. but a person of considerable intellectual ability who possessed a mastery of not just politics but administration as well. When it came to formulating both domestic and foreign policy Daniels credits Roosevelt as being oriented towards the future in ways unlike many of his contemporaries. This emphasis plays a role in shaping national policy not just on the prominent issues such as the role of the government in the economy but on q

“Women’s history, if they had any, consisted in their being beautiful enough to become events in male lives,” the feminist academic Carolyn R. Heilbrun noted in a series of 1997 lectures, suggesting the need for new narratives and new ways of writing women’s lives. Brooke Hauser‘s Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman is an exciting new entry into group of books that have emerged in the last few years to offer provocative and innovative biographical readings of women’s lives (Kate Bolick’s Spinster, for example). In Enter Helen, Hauser contextualizes Helen Gurley Brown’s experience, demonstrating how the times in which she lived affected her and she, in turn, affected them. In many ways a misfit, Gurley Brown’s approach made many in the women’s movement uneasy. Rather than arguing for the overthrow of the patriarchy, she advocated that women use everything at their disposal to make it in a man’s world. Advice that might ring a little retro, it was nonethele

In The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Indiana University Press, 2013), Mel Scult, professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, explores the ways in which Mordecai Kaplan, the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America, was a radical. Using Kaplan’s 27-volume diary, Scult places Kaplan’s thought in conversation with other thinkers like Spinoza, Emerson, Ahad Ha-Am, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Most biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (Pegasus, 2015) the inaugural volume of a projected three-volume biography of the French ruler Michael Broers’ takes a different approach. Drawing upon a new and vastly expanded collection of Napoleons letters to chronicle his subjects life from his early years in Corsica to the eve of his 1805 campaign, Broers focuses on his achievements in politics and state-building. He sees Napoleon’s time as conqueror and ruler of Italy as key both to his emergence as a prospective leader and to the development of his ideas of governance. Though applied bluntly in Egypt, their legacy in Napoleons development of the French state during his subsequent years as First Consul and as emperor are made clear by the author, who details how they created not just the structure of administration France uses to this day but more modern and uniform states thr

What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person’s fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg‘s new book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography (MacLehose Press, 2016). A diplomatic envoy in Hungary, Wallenberg has been lauded throughout the world for his efforts to save Jews living during World War II. But, his fate following his arrest in 1945 remains unknown and, as a result, his story has no clear end. In her excellent biography, Carlberg excavates the details of Wallenberg’s end, but she also digs deeply into the story of his life- shedding light upon a time that is often eclipsed by all that came after. It’s a time which is essential to any understanding of the man Wallenberg was,the course he pursued, and the hero he’s remembered as.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Peter L. Laurence is an associate professor of urban design, history and theory at Clemson University School of Architecture. His book Becoming Jane Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an intellectual biography of the architecture critic and neo-functionist Jane Jacobs and how she came to write the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Beginning with Jacobs’s arrival in New York City in 1934 with only a high school diploma and writing aspirations Laurence follows her career to the pages of Architectural Forum under the editorial direction of Douglas Haskell. At the magazine she honed her critical skills and was exposed to the latest in urban design and renewal working with leading architects and planners. Laurence argues that there are persistent myths about Jacobs, including her status as a housewife and an amateur urban activist who surprisingly wrote a classic, or a genius. Rather, Jacobs transformed herself into a sophisticated critic influenced by the ideas of a wide ci

Considered by many to be the greatest American film ever made, Citizen Kane was the product of Orson Welles, who made a movie that is still groundbreaking today. In his new book Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), Harlan Lebo presents a wonderful overview of the film on its 75th anniversary. He used previous interviews with some of the people involved in the production, along with archival information not previously used by other writers. He is able to show how the movie deserves its reputation as a masterpiece.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

“There still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography or autobiography should look like,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 classic, Writing A Woman’s Life, noting, “Even less has been told of the life of the unmarried woman.” One can only hope that Kate Bolick‘s Spinster is a sign that, nearly thirty years later, the circumstances Heilbrun described are, at long last, about to change. Bolick burst onto the national scene when her article in The Atlantic, entitled “All the Single Ladies,” went viral in November 2011. But Spinster is a departure from her reportage rather than a continuation or a sequel– a biographical/autobiographical/sociological mash-up that is engaging, observant, and fiercely critical. Examining the socio-historical phenomenon of the feme sole, Bolick mines her own experiences and the lives she’s read about to examine how, as Heilbrun suggested, we use the stories of other lives to navigate our own. “Taken together,” Bolick writes of the people whose lives interested

In Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Indiana University Press, 2013), Shai Held, Co-Founder, Dean and Chair in Jewish Thought at Mechon Hadar, offers a sympathetic, yet critical, examination of the thought of this influential mid-twentieth century theologian, scholar, and activist. Held identifies a central theme that runs through all of Heschel’s writing: the idea of transcendence–the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. For Heschel, prayer is the paradigmatic spiritual act, one that tries to bring God back into the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In anticipation of Super Bowl 50, Sports Illustrated and WIRED magazines teamed up to speculate about the state of football fifty years from now, at the time of Super Bowl 100. Of course, the big question that arises when considering the future of the football is whether the sport will even exist decades from now, given the evidence of severe brain disease in many former players. Historian Julie Des Jardins argues that if we want to gain a better understanding of the current challenges to football, it’s best to look back to its early decades. Football had its critics from the very beginning, when young men were severely injured and even killed on the field. The sport had to reform itself to survive. As Julie shows in her new biography of legendary Yale coach Walter Camp, even the founding father of American football recognized that change was necessary for the game to continue. In Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man (Oxford University Press, 2015), Julie presents the first scholarly biography of the man

On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents. At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that unsettled Paris for years. Were the Nozieresan upstanding middle-class family? Was Violette a victim of sexual assault, her father a heinous predator? Was Violette a sexual degenerate? In an age of unprecedented social mobility, had the family tragically overstepped, with the parents granting a wild daughter too much freedom? No one knew. It was the perfect cautionary tale of the time- giving voice to concerns of contemporary France’s, fears of changing attitudes towards gender, class, industry, economics, art, everything. In Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris, Sarah Maza weaves together social history with an astute analysis of the times to paint a vivid portrait of Noziere’s society, her circumstances and her crime. It’s a gripping tale that provides an intimate glimpse into a period that is oft

John Allen Paulos, who has accomplished the unheard-of double of writing best-sellers about mathematics and inserting a word (‘innumeracy’) into the language, has attempted another ambitious feat – bringing mathematics to bear on one of the few subjects it has yet to examine: biography and autobiography. A Numerate Life (Prometheus Books, 2015) is simultaneously a charming memoir and a highly entertaining venture into mathematics, literature, and philosophy. This is one of those rare books that, when you have finished a section, you are torn between going on to the next section and re-reading the last section to make sure that you got everything out of it. The subtitle of the book is “A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours”. You’ll be a little skeptical about that subtitle before you read the book, but when you finish it, you’ll realize the subtitle nails it — he’s talking, not just about himself, but about you. fascinating read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor in writing, literature and publishing. Her book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Mariner Books, 2013) won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Marshall has written a beautiful and detailed portrait of the nineteenth-century political thinker, women’s rights advocate, and writer Margaret Fuller. Fuller’s childhood begins in Cambridgeport, MA where under the tutelage of her demanding father, Timothy Fuller, she was immersed in the classics excelling in language, literature, and philosophy. Her prospects limited by her gender, considered plain and often lonely, Fuller went on to build an intellectual life and relationships with the leading transcendentalists. Her New England circles included the most prominent thinkers of her day, the Channings, the Peabody sisters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Nathaniel Hawthrone. Frequently earning a living as a teacher, she went on to write and edit the transcendentalist journal The Dial and bega

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A “midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s” who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it’s hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this modern scientist, from his early relationships with Freud

Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This story of Dai Zhen begins before his birth and ends after his death, extending from a moment in which the Jesuits were denounced as “seditious foreigners” in 1664, to around 1800, when Dai’s classical vision was used by the Qing state as a kind of political-scientific legitimation of their rule. Dai Zhen’s methodology became the groundwork for a new political philosophy, and China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen (University of Washington Press, 2015) takes that methodology and Dai’s technical accomplishments seriously. Hu’s book embeds a history of Dai’s work and legacy within a broader treatment of the work of European scholars and their legacy in shaping eighteenth and nineteenth century discourse, and it offers a fascinating window into an important aspect of the history of Qing sc

Muhammad is remembered in a multitude of ways, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. And through each retelling we learn a great deal not only about Muhammad but about the social milieu of the authors. In The Lives of Muhammad (Harvard University Press, 2014), Kecia Ali, Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, explores how several central components of the Muhammad biographical narrative are reframed by various authors within modern accounts. We find that biographers’ notions of historicity changed over time, emphasis on the miraculous and supernatural events in Muhammad’s life are interpreted differently, and Muhammad’s network of relationships, including successors, companions, and family members gain wider interest during this period. We also find that from the nineteenth century onwards, Muhammad is often framed within the history of ‘great men,’ alongside figures like Jesus, Buddha, or Plato. Descriptions of Muhammad’s life cross a range of genres, such as hagiographical, polemical, political, o

As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one encounters tangible pieces of the subject’s life- letters, diaries, receipts, knick-knacks; one never knows what one will find. But how to incorporate that experience into a book? This is one of many compellingly original angles that Daisy Hay brings to the story of Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli in her new book, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015) The story of Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli occurs in a moment of changing attitudes towards marriage, celebrity and love- a moment more often seen through the eyes of men and viewed in terms of “history.” Using the Mary Anne Disraeli archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford- assembled by Mrs. Disraeli herself- Hay opens up this story in two ways: by bringing the voices and experiences of women into it, and by considering the Disraeli’s as “born storytellers” in 19th centu

In his new book Lee J. Cobb: Characters of an Actor (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014),Don Dewey discusses Lee J. Cobb’s career, both from his importance as a character actor and follower of the Method acting school. He also reviews Cobb’s importance to the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)hearings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Sally G. McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock professor of history at Davidson College. In her book Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (Oxford University Press, 2015) McMillen has given us a rich biography of the life and times of the abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone. Born in 1818 into a farming community in Massachusetts, Stone a precocious and determined girl set her sights not on marriage but on education and self-development leading her to a earning a degree from Oberlin College. Against her parents’ wishes for their daughter, she chose to pursue a career as a public speaker on behalf of abolition and women’s rights. Rising from relative obscurity she became known as a passionate and persuasive speaker crisscrossing the country and speaking to thousands. Her gender, her confident demeanor, and the unpopular views brought both admiring and hostile audiences. Along the way, she forged political alliances and personal friendships with the leading abolitionists and women’s rights advocates i

As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli, it’s a sentence many people might assume was being applied to Coco Chanel, for Chanel looms large as the fashion designer of the last century. But Schiaparelli was, as Secrest reveals, more than a fashion designer: she was an artist. And, through her collaborations with SalvadoreDali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others, she was in the vanguard of surrealism and transformed women’s fashions into an art form. Who was Schiap? It’s hard to know. But then we can never know everything about another person, which iswhat makes reading biography so beguiling: the illusion that we could. It’s a circumstance Secret openly acknowledges. “A great many aspects of Elsa Schiaparelli’s life will probably never be known,” Secrestwrites. “She was not much of a letter writer… If she