Charlotte Witt, “The Metaphysics of Gender” (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011),...
15 Huhti 20121h 11min
Elizabeth West, “African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being” (Lexington Books, 2011)
Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to...
9 Huhti 201244min
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
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, “Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color” (Rutgers UP, 2012)
One lesson that the ever-present trickster figure in African American folklore teaches is how to use signifying to protect one’s intimate self. A challenge of writing Dorothy West’s life is getting be...
9 Maalis 20121h 11min
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
Mia Bay, “To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells” (Hill and Wang, 2009)
I can’t remember when I first saw one of those horrible photographs of a lynching, with crowds of white people, kids included, laughing and pointing at the mangled black body hanging from a tree. I do...
24 Helmi 20121h 16min
Vincent Carretta, “Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage” (University of Georgia Press, 2011)
Few people can claim to have created a literary genre… Phillis Wheatley did. By the time she was twenty, her name- taken from the slave ship that carried her to America and the family that bought her ...
16 Helmi 201252min
