New Books in Biography

Interviews with Biographers about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
1401
Sharon Kirsch, "Gertrude Stein and the Reinvent...
Stein re-emerges as a major twentieth-century rhetorician, not a spin doctor, as the word might suggest to some, but as someone who follows as sure as she remakes the rules of writing, expression, and language...
38 min
1402
Matilda Rabinowitz, "Immigrant Girl, Radical Wo...
Rabinowitz, born in 1887 in Ukraine, described her experiences as an immigrant, factory worker, single mother by choice, and union organizer...
57 min
1403
Dannel Jones, "An African in Imperial London: T...
In 1919 a man named Ohlohr Maigi died of tuberculosis in London, in deep poverty...
61 min
1404
Harvard S. Heath, "Confidence Amid Change: The ...
With his secretary’s coaxing over the course of nineteen years, McKay documented how he charted a steady course through institutional storms...
55 min
1405
Brian Cremins, "Captain Marvel and the Art of N...
Cremins explores the history of Billy Batson, a boy who met a wizard that allowed him to transform into a superhero. When Billy says, “Shazam!” he becomes Captain Marvel...
64 min
1406
John West, "Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, ...
John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to become the poet laureate and historiographer royal of Charles II’s new regime...
35 min
1407
Erika Dyck, "Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters ...
Erika recounts the special relationship between two intellectual juggernauts, Huxley and Osmond, and their discussions about drugs, addiction, and death and dying...
53 min
1408
Barbara K. Gold, "Perpetua: Athlete of God" (Ox...
One of the first and most famous of Christian martyrs was Perpetua, who died in Carthage in the early 3rd century CE.
53 min
1409
Linda M. Grasso, "Equal under the Sky: Georgia ...
Grasso provides an in-depth look at O'Keeffe's ambivalent relationship with feminism from her early beginnings as a New Woman of the 1910s, to the support she received from women to become a national icon for feminism...
61 min
1410
Quincy D. Newell, "Your Sister in the Gospel: T...
A free black woman from Connecticut, Jane Manning James positioned herself at the center of LDS history with uncanny precision...
52 min
1411
Stephen Fritz, "The First Soldier: Hitler as a ...
A necessary volume for understanding the influence of World War I on Hitler’s thinking, this work is also an eye-opening reappraisal of major events like the invasion of Russia and the battle for Normandy...
74 min
1412
John W. Tweeddale, "John Owen and Hebrews: The ...
John Owen is one of the most significant seventeenth-century Protestant theologians...
36 min
1413
Nico Slate, "Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Di...
Slate explores the ways that Gandhi linked his diet to nonviolent political action through protesting salt taxes, fasting for peace, and abstaining from chocolate produced by slave-like labor...
52 min
1414
Matthew W. King, "Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood...
Matthew W. King tells the story of Zawa Damdin, one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject...
61 min
1415
Peter B. Josephson and R. Ward Holder, "Reinhol...
Josephson and Holder note that their “focus is Niebuhr himself and what the encounter between his own theology and his practical political experience might reveal in our contemporary situation.”
56 min
1416
Harold J. Cook, "The Young Descartes: Nobility,...
Harold J. Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy...
31 min
1417
William Poole, "Milton and the Making of Paradi...
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is widely recognised as the greatest epic poem in the English language...
45 min
1418
Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: V...
Krementsov provides a fascinating analysis of the vicissitudes of Russian attempts to improve the human species...
79 min
1419
Joan Watts, "The Collected Letters of Alan Watt...
The second in a two-part interview about Alan Watts
55 min
1420
Jeffrey S. McDonald, "John Gerstner and the Ren...
One of the most important trends within evangelicalism over the last half-century has been a renewal of Reformed theology...
34 min
1421
Anne Watts, "The Collected Letters of Alan Watt...
The first in a two part interview about Alan Watts.
66 min
1422
Kenneth I. Helphand, "Lawrence Halprin" (Librar...
49 min
1423
Pu Wang, "The Translatability of Revolution: Gu...
Wang's is the first study of the whole life of Guo Moruo, the ‘writer, poet, dramatist, Marxist historian, paleographer . . . revolutionist and cultural fighter.'
63 min
1424
René Weis, "The Real Traviata: The Song of Mari...
Though she died in 1847 at a young age, Marie Duplessis inspired one of the greatest operas ever composed...
46 min
1425
Harold Holzer, "Monument Man: The Life and Art ...
Holzer chronicles the career of French, who became best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 
64 min