Neil McKenna, “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England” (Faber & Faber, 2013)
There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be. It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degree, casually combative. For biography has long been a...
10 Jan 201452min
Lawrence J. Friedman, “The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet” (Columbia UP, 2013)
Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sold m...
2 Jan 201452min
Brian Jay Jones, “Jim Henson: The Biography” (Ballantine Books, 2013)
In the field of children’s programming, few people- with the possible exception of Fred Rogers- are as beloved as Jim Henson, a contributor to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, but most famous fo...
6 Dec 201359min
Thurston Clarke, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President”
John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke writes in the preface of his new biography JFK’s Las...
22 Nov 201330min
Peter Savodnik, “The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union” (Basic Books, 2013)
For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we kn...
21 Nov 201356min
Mark R. Cheathem, “Andrew Jackson, Southerner” (Louisiana State University Press, 2013)
What do most Americans know about Andrew Jackson, apart from that he’s on the $20 bill and that he apparently had great hair? Probably not much. Maybe that he was a two-term president who pioneered th...
16 Nov 20131h 7min
Jeremy Dauber, “The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem” (Schocken, 2013)
The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterl...
8 Nov 201345min
Elizabeth Winder, “Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953” (Harper, 2013)
It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20t...
18 Okt 201336min
