Vincent Carretta, “Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage” (University of Georgia Press, 2011)
Few people can claim to have created a literary genre… Phillis Wheatley did. By the time she was twenty, her name- taken from the slave ship that carried her to America and the family that bought her ...
16 Feb 201252min
Amanda Smith, “Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson” (Knopf, 2011)
“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.” That was the Medill family editorial policy and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson embraced it enthusiastically. The granddaughter of the Ch...
1 Feb 20121h 2min
Adrian Burgos, Jr., “Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball” (Hill and Wang, 2011)
The integration of baseball is most often cast in terms of black and white, but biographer Adrian Burgos, Jr.— a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign– is out to change that. In hi...
26 Jan 201254min
Randy Roberts, “Joe Louis: Hard Times Man” (Yale UP, 2010)
“I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” To Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was an inspiration and an...
17 Jan 201258min
Jean H. Baker, “Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion” (Hill and Wang, 2011)
Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social liberalism while liberals shy away from her perceived ad...
22 Dec 20111h 5min
Stacy Schiff, “Cleopatra: A Life” (Back Bay Books, 2011)
Aside from being aesthetically equated to Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra has not fared well in history. In her riveting biography Cleopatra: A Life (Back Bay Books, 2011), which is now out in paperback, ...
7 Dec 201141min
Frank Wcislo, “Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915” (Oxford UP, 2011)
When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important ...
2 Dec 20111h 23min
Kitty Kelley, “Oprah: A Biography” (Three Rivers Press, 2011)
When she emerged triumphant in a legal battle with the Texas beef industry, Oprah Winfrey took to the steps of the Amarillo court house and declared: “Free speech rocks!” She was likely a little less ...
15 Nov 201154min
