Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, "Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper" (Duke UP, 2021)
Isabel Rosario Cooper, if mentioned at all by mainstream history books, is often a salacious footnote: the young Filipino mistress of General Douglas MacArthur, hidden away at the Charleston Hotel in ...
17 Jun 202141min
Mark Mordue, "Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave" (HarperCollins, 2020)
Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave (HarperCollins, 2020) is the first volume of a long-awaited, near-mythical biography of Nick Cave by award-winning writer, Mark Mordue. A beautiful, profound and poeti...
16 Jun 20211h 40min
Bob Kuska and Archie Clark, "Shake and Bake: The Life and Times of NBA Great Archie Clark" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Shake and Bake is the story of Archie Clark, one of the top playmaking guards in the 1970s pre-merger NBA. While not one of the game’s most recognized superstars, Clark was a seminal player in NBA his...
14 Jun 202152min
Alexander Nemerov, "Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York" (Penguin Press, 2021)
At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succe...
14 Jun 202159min
Peter C. Mancall, "The Trials of Thomas Morton" (Yale UP, 2019)
Every good story needs a villain, and some of the early chroniclers of the pilgrim and puritan settlements found all they needed for this type of character in Thomas Morton. Peter C. Mancall tells the...
14 Jun 202148min
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, "The Inheritance" (Duke UP, 2021)
Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s inheritance was passed down not through blood or soil but through a framed map of Trentino, Alto Adige—the region where family's ancestral alpine village is found. Far more th...
9 Jun 20211h 11min
Bethany Hicok, "Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive" (Lever Press, 2020)
What more can we learn about legendary American writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), dubbed by Bethany Hicok “the most stunning poet of the twentieth century”, by exploring the wonderful archives of her...
8 Jun 202130min
Mary D. Garrard, "Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic relationship to politic...
8 Jun 20211h 4min
