Manning Marable, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Penguin, 2011)
Nearly 50 years after his death, Malcolm X remains a controversial figure. An 8th grade dropout (he ditched school when a white teacher told him it was unrealistic for a black kid to dream of being a ...
1 Touko 201230min
Paul Dickson, “Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick” (Walker & Company, 2012)
Mention the name Bill Veeck to a baseball fan and what will likely come to mind is the back-and-white image of three-foot, seven-inch Eddie Gaedel at the plate of a Major League game, swimming in his ...
30 Huhti 20121h 3min
Robert K. Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan....
23 Huhti 20121h
Leslie Brody, “Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford” (Counterpoint Press, 2010)
For years, biographers have been fascinated by the Mitfords, a quiet aristocratic British family with six beautiful daughters, nearly all of them famous for their controversial and stylish lives. The...
16 Huhti 201253min
Karen Abbott, “American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee” (Random House, 2012)
As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives–wherein the events of a subject’s life are tracked in the order that they occurred. This makes sense, as it’s how we live our lives,...
2 Huhti 201238min
William Kuhn, “Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books” (Anchor Books, 2011)
Nearly twenty years after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographers are not only continuing to tell her story but finding provocative new ways to do so. In particular, a big bravo to Willia...
15 Maalis 201248min
Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism” (MIT Press, 2011)
Zellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work ...
7 Maalis 201259min
Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011)
Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often...
1 Maalis 20126min
