Melanie C. Hawthorne, "Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisele d'Estoc" (U Nebraska Press, 2014)
"Why write the biography of a nobody?" That is the question with which Melanie C. Hawthorne begins Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisele d'Estoc (University of Nebraska Press,...
11 Aug 201429min
Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” (Yale UP, 2014)
For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as op...
28 Jul 201454min
James Carter, “Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Centur...
11 Jun 20141h 11min
Tina Santi Flaherty, “What Jackie Taught Us” (Perigree Paperback, 2014)
Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in Constructing American Lives (1999), in nineteenth...
20 Mai 201427min
Donna-Lee Frieze, “Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin” (Yale UP, 2013)
It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their t...
1 Mai 201438min
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, “Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War” (Knopf, 2013)
Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett‘s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio is a book with a big mission: to write inventively about the life of someone with whom most everyone out...
27 Apr 201435min
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, “HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton” (Crown Publishers, 2014).
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are the co-authors of authors of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (Crown Publishers 2014). Allen is White House bureau chief at Bloomberg; Parnes is...
7 Apr 201420min
Will Swift, “Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage” (Threshold Editions, 2014)
In America, biographies of Presidents and First Ladies are a staple of the genre, but the relationship that exists between the two receives surprisingly less exploration, as though the biographies nee...
5 Mar 201445min
