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
Timothy Shenk, “Maurice Dobb: Political Economist” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013)
The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the developmen...
22 Feb 20141h 3min
Robert Neer, “Napalm: An American Biography” (Harvard UP, 2013)
Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person. In recent years, the jettisoning of this traditi...
13 Feb 201447min
Michael O’Brien, ed., “The Letters of C. Vann Woodward” (Yale UP, 2013)
Few historians have influenced their field the way that C. Vann Woodward (1908-99) changed the writing of southern history. First at Johns Hopkins and then at Yale, Woodward’s books, reviews, and ment...
5 Feb 201457min
Adam Henig, “Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey” (2014)
Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televised ...
5 Feb 201444min
Patricia Ebrey, “Emperor Huizong” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ruler, scholar, patron, and human being. Emperor Huizo...
3 Feb 20141h 6min
