Ernest Harsch, “Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary” (Ohio UP, 2014)
Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during a military coup that brought down his govern...
10 Okt 20141h 13min
Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013)
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were w...
2 Okt 201432min
Karen Abbott, “Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War” (Harper, 2014)
If group biography is one of the exciting new trends in life-writing (and some say it is), Karen Abbott– the historian, not to be confused with the novelist-proves one of its deftest practitioners- fi...
8 Sep 201428min
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
