Jean Zimmerman, “Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
The portrait is startling. Painted by John Singer Sargent, “Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes” depicts a woman dressed casually, almost masculinely, save a voluminous white skirt. Her hand is held braze...
1 Nov 201229min
Cory MacLauchlin, “Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces” (Da Capo, 2012)
If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, you can appreciate the challenge of putting the city’s joie de vivre into words.However, as a New Orleans native, John Kennedy Toole was steeped in the traditi...
4 Sep 201244min
Paul Gutjahr, “Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy” (Oxford UP, 2011)
When I was in Seminary I was assigned many theological tomes to read and one was especially difficult to get through. It was Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge. This work was dense, long, and I must...
11 Aug 201253min
Dave Oliphant, “KD: A Jazz Biography” (Wings Press, 2012)
Texas poet/author/historian Dave Oliphant‘s KD: A Jazz Biography (Wings Press, 2012) is a poetic tribute to the life of Jazz trumpeter and one of the original Jazz Messengers, Kenny Dorham. Dorham, wh...
10 Aug 201256min
Kate Buford, “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe” (Bison Books, 2012)
If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best...
1 Aug 201234min
Anne Sebba, “That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)
The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up the throne. It’s precisely this oversimplificatio...
17 Juli 201241min
Elizabeth Goldsmith, “The King’s Mistresses” (PublicAffairs, 2012)
As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were...
29 Juni 201243min
Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010)
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eli...
15 Juni 20121h 1min
