[Cross-posted from New Books in Language] Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life?

When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics.

In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and “Calvinist linguistics”.

Forty years after its debut, The Mary Tyler Moore Show remains one of the most beloved and successful television sitcoms of all time. But Jennifer Keishin Armstrong‘s Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And all the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic (Simon & Schuster, 2013) isn’t a simple episode recap. Rather, it’s a deep excavation of the show’s history from the perspective of the cas came t, the producers, a fan, and- perhaps most fascinating- the writers.

You might ask, How is this biography? It is because, ultimately, Armstrong is writing about lives- the lives of the people involved in the show, the lives from which they pulled their material, and how their lives together, often haphazardly, to produce extraordinary TV.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show depicted a woman’s work life, so it’s not too surprising that Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted does the same. However, the workplace that emerges is a revelation: with men recognizing the value of women’s stories and actively seeking women for the writing staff; with women writers mining their own lives for material and producing scripts that incorporate the everyday experiences of women, which were- at that time- seldom represented on TV.

We remember The Mary Tyler Moore Show because it was well-crafted and funny. But, as Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted reminds us, the show came about in an environment that promoted equality and where the gifts of women were encouraged. Such environments are, sadly, still rare.

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without these delightful illusions… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.’ Chanel’s is a life that, all these years later, still reads as radical, which puts into perspective how terribly shocking it must have appeared in the early 20th century.

Chaney has chosen an unusually challenging subject. Mired in myths, some of them of her own devising, the image of Chanel that has been passed down to us is clouded at best and, as Chaney acknowledges, quoting L.P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’

The story of Chanel’s life emerges in more muted tones than one might expect, with gray areas aplenty, from which it is unreasonable to demand clarity or place judgment.

And yet Coco Chanel remains an uncompromising account. Chaney doesn’t ignore Chanel’s capacity for storytelling but, rather, explores the meanings of her stories, their unrealities, and the significance of the details that Chanel chose to omit. She doesn’t side-step the controversies surrounding Chanel’s life during the occupation of Paris, but instead grapples head-on with the moral ambiguities and compromises that occurred during the Occupation and in Vichy France.

What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a complex, intelligent, unapologetic, incredibly hard working woman.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Pop Music] Who is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released records with a number of different labels over the next twenty-six years, and finally received a paltry $100,000 from a law suit she filed against Motown in the late eighties. Whatever the case, Benjaminson shows well how Mary Wells star still shines bright. Her songs are known by most everyone, they are ingrained in the American popular psyche.

Peter Benjaminson is the author of The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, The Story of Motown, and co-author of Investigative Reporting. He has written numerous articles for the Detroit Free Press and Atlanta Journal-Constitution among others.

Dana Andrews was one of the major films stars of the 1940s, and yet he was never nominated for an Academy Award. The posterboy for the ‘male mask’ archetype that typified the decade, Andrews portrayed the ‘masculine ideal of steely impassivity’  in such classics as Laura and Fallen Angel. In Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) biographer Carl Rollyson cracks the mask, providing intimate insight into Andrews’s extraordinary talent and his life.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rollyson’s account is that, in the end, Andrews appears to have been beloved by everyone. Often, biographies- particularly biographies of Hollywood stars- batter one’s affection for their subjects, illuminating horrible personality traits or an atrocious work ethic or a cruelty towards children, animals, and/or wives. Hollywood Enigma does no such thing. Rather, it tells the story of a man who, in Rollyson’s words, ‘always showed up for work on time, always knew his lines, and was never less than a gentleman.’

That Hollywood Enigma is about a nice man doesn’t make it any less interesting. Origin stories in biographies are notoriously tedious- long lists of grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, like something out of Genesis- but Rollyson lays out Andrews’s story at a brisk and engaging pace. Born in rural Mississippi (a town with such an exquisite sense of humor that it christened itself ‘Don’t’ solely so that its postal abbreviation might be ‘Don’t, Miss.’), he grew up in Texas then moved to California, where he worked as an accountant, a gas station attendant, and at various other odd jobs before an employer helped finance his lessons in opera. That, in turn, led to a gig at the community theater and, nine years after setting foot in L.A., Andrews appeared onscreen.

Andrews would a remain a popular star through the 1940s, only to drift into B-movies in the 1950s and 1960s. But he would resurface in the 1970s,  hitting upon something of a second act when he began publicly discussing his struggle with alcoholism. Andrews helped de-stigmatize alcoholism- a disease that was still taboo- while also reframing the way people thought about alcoholics.

Hollywood Enigma is, ultimately, the story of a man who, in an industry known for its frivolity and excesses, stood out as an enigma precisely because he knew who he was.

The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women (think Juliette Récamier, Natalie Barney, and Perle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and contemporary art.

In the early 20th century, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salons in Florence and New York drew astonishing talents to her doorstep. Her gift for bringing artists together so they might collaborate and draw inspiration from one another played out even more grandly at the art colony she and her third husband founded in Taos, New Mexico. Over the years, they would play host to such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Though she’s remembered more for her gift for building artistic communities, Luhan was an artist in her own right. Her book Winter in Taos is considered a classic of New Mexican literature and her four-volume memoir vividly explores the changes in Victorian sexuality, politics, art, and culture as the modern age approached. However, despite their candor, the memoirs were not wholly forthcoming: Luhan’s writings about her struggles with depression, sexuality, and venereal disease were restricted at the behest of her family until the year 2000.

In her excellent biography, The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture (University of New Mexico Press, 2012), Lois Rudnick- who has been studying Luhan’s life for over 35 years- explores these newly available documents, presenting Luhan’s writing alongside her own analysis, to draw new conclusions about Luhan’s life, loves, and work.

It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip Bishop‘s biography, The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop (Lyons Press, 2011), which charts the simultaneous rise of the former President and the author’s own great-granduncle.

The author does an excellent job illustrating the dynamics of the relationship between Roosevelt and Bishop. For it was to Bishop’s benefit to know Roosevelt, but it was also advantageous for Roosevelt to cultivate an ally in the press like Bishop. Theirs was a mutually beneficial relationship, and the author does an exceptional job of showing how it strengthened and altered with the passage of time, changes in status, increased physical distance, etc. These are the external forces that shape long-term friendships, but they’re seldom explored so intimately and eloquently in biographies of men.

The Lion and the Journalist covers a lot of ground. There’s publishing, politics, PR, and the Panama Canal. It’s an unusual historical mélange, but it’s riveting. The Lion and the Journalist is also an especially rich entry into the genre of biographies about biographers and their subjects. For it was Bishop who penned the first biography of Roosevelt, laying the foundation from which all future biographers would begin.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Dance] What does it mean for a contemporary scholar to be trusted with the unfinished autobiography of a dance legend? How does one ensure that the integrity of their research matches the depth of life experience embodied in their subject’s narrative? Who is best served by the sharing of the untold stories of those whose narratives have been historically marginalized? And what does it mean for today’s dancers to learn about those who have paved the way for them under harsh and unjust circumstances? These were the questions I had in mind when I was lucky enough to interview historian and dancer Yaël Tamar Lewin, author of Night’s Dancer, The Life of Janet Collins (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), a soaring work that includes Ms. Collin’s unfinished autobiography.

Born in 1917, Janet Collins was raised in Los Angeles and has the historic distinction of being the first African – American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. A dancer with demonstrable skill in both ballet and modern dance vocabularies, Janet’s career included performances on television, in film and on Broadway. Despite her triumphs as an artist, Ms. Collins faced intense racial bias throughout her career as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. An accomplished painter and deeply spiritual person, Janet’s story is tenderly and meticulously recounted in both her own words and through Ms. Lewin’s wonderful research. The book stands as a testament to any dancer today wishing to fulfill their artistic potential in a world that can be unwelcoming and cold. Notably, Yaël’s research on Collins began during her own undergraduate studies and took shape over several years during which a trusting relationship budded between subject and author. This model of scholarship and the resulting work shares lessons on how to handle the narrative of a beloved artist with care. Yaël Tamar Lewin is a writer, editor, choreographer, and alternative medicine practitioner. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University, and has performed with several dance companies, including her own. She lives in New York.

I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive.

How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50.

One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men’s lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie.

From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a breath of fresh air.

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 brazenly at her hip as her presence nearly obscures that of her husband, who hovers  in the background like a specter. They are Edith and Newton Stokes.

As biographer Jean Zimmerman details in her excellent duel biography of the couple, entitled Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). ”Both were progressives, and both believed in doing great deeds, whether it was reforming tenements in Newton’s case or getting the vote for women in Edith’s. They fell in love when they were children, a love that lasted until they were parted by death.”

Edith eventually became President of the New York Kindergarten Association and of the Municipal Art Commission. Newton spent over a decade laboring on a six-volume history of the city entitled the Iconography of Manhattan.

They were a couple defined by the city. Writes Zimmerman: “Edith and Newton were New York City to the bone. He, raised in an Italianate residence at Madison Avenue and 37th Street, which after his time there would become J. P. Morgans townhouse and then a celebrated museum of the arts. She, born a little farther afield, in still countrified Staten Island. They were in love and in Manhattan, which represents an unparalleled state of bliss. They led not so much independent as interdependent lives.”

Love, Fiercely provides a fascinating and rich perspective on the rise of New York, the tensions of Gilded Age courtship, the evolving freedoms of women,  and the shifting dynamics of a long marriage.

From the moment it first hit the headlines in August 1933, the case of Violette Nozière captivated France, embodying the prevailing uneasiness regarding class, gender, and sexuality.

It was a damn good story, one whose details shifted with the passing weeks and months, and it was precisely this “troubling ambiguity” that so captured the nation’s attention. As Sarah Maza writes in her excellent new biography, Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (University of California Press, 2011): “The controversy around Violette was constant and wrenching, yet never clearly burst into the open. It was disturbing in an entirely new way.”

The Nozière case came at a time when both French intellectuals and the masses were particularly enamored of crime culture, and it was rendered all the more beguiling by the fact that nobody knew who to root for: the father who abused his daughter, the daughter who killed him, and the mother who repudiated her in court. All of the protagonists, at one time or another, seemed incredibly sketch.

The Nozières were a typical lower middle class family in which something had gone horribly wrong and, as new information was revealed, sympathies shifted over and over again. Were Violette’s parents ambitious upstarts or representative of the upwardly mobile lower middle class? Had they lost control of their willful daughter or enabled her wildness by granting her excessive freedoms? Was Violette a horrible monster or the victim of sexual abuse?

Maza gorgeously weaves together social history, crime culture, gender theory, and thorough research to present the complexities of the crime. Simultaneously, she incorporates small details regarding everyday, inter-war Parisian life, which grounds both Violette and her crime in a concreteness that is often missing in history books.

She writes: “The story of a specific girl in a particular family matters because when social scientists use expressions like ‘geographic mobility,’ ‘growth of the service sector,’ or ‘democratic consolidation,’ there is a danger not just that we will put down what we are reading but, more importantly, that we will forget that these were experiences that affected the real lives of people in concrete and dramatic ways.”

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 traditions and flavor of his hometown and, therefore, uniquely qualified to write about it.  His novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, is considered one of the best ever written about New Orleans.

As Cory MacLauchlin writes in his new biography, Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (Da Capo Press, 2012) ”Toole selected, merged, refined, and wove characters together with all the absurdities that form the human condition. And there on the once blank sheet of paper in his private room in Puerto Rico emerged the city he had known all his life, his New Orleans.”

MacLauchlin’s task is comparably challenging. He’s got an academic struggling to be a writer, a writer struggling to get published, and a man struggling to survive… and that’s just John Kennedy Toole! But MacLauchlin pulls it off. Deftly avoiding the problems that sometimes plague literary biography, Butterfly in the Typewriter is tightly written and populated with such memorable characters that it’s of interest even if one is unfamiliar with Toole’s work.

Perhaps most impressive is the author’s unwillingness to dabble in speculation, a reticence that is increasingly rare and, as a biographer, sometimes taxing to maintain. As MacLauchlin writes: “In my pursuit to understand Toole, I neither aimed to diagnose him, nor cast him in the mold of tortured artist [...] I have sought to understand Toole on his own terms [...] to compose a biographical narrative in which Toole would recognize himself if he were alive to read it.”

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 all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the Stockholm 1912 games. But his victory was marred by a controversial International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruling that stripped him of his medals six months later.

In Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Bison Books, 2012), the first comprehensive biography of Thorpe, biographer Kate Buford explores how Thorpe’s Native American heritage shaped his life, but also the impact Thorpe himself had upon American sports. Ultimately, he was the country’s first celebrity athlete, excelling at both baseball and football. His life was memorialized in a 1951 film and, in 1963, Thorpe was among the charter class inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Despite his other successes, the revocation of Jim Thorpe’s medals remains a source of contention for his admirers, Buford among them.In 1982, the IOC approved the reinstatement of Thorpe’s medals and during London 2012, the Hammersmith tube station has been temporarily renamed in Thorpe’s honor. But, despite public outcry, the IOC still refuses to enter Thorpe’s scores into the official record of Olympic events.

As Buford writes: “A gentle person, intelligent and funny, with many flaws, Jim Thorpe was not a complicated man. But what happened to him was.”

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 oversimplification of the facts that Anne Sebba seeks to correct in her excellent new biography That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (St. Martin’s Press, 2012).

The first woman to write a full biography of the Duchess, Sebba provides a much-needed rehabilitation of this polarizing figure. The bite of the title succinctly captures the bitterness and antipathy directed towards Wallis Simpson- during her life and after- but Sebba’s impeccable research illuminates a woman far more complex than the popular imagination has allowed. This is myth-busting to the nth degree.

With access to previously undiscovered letters, Sebba creates an account of the Duchess’s life that is, at times, downright revelatory. For instance, Wallis Simpson didn’t intend to marry the Prince of Wales. Who knew?! As Sebba writes: “She was not in love with Edward himself but in love with the opulence, the lifestyle, the way doors opened for her, the way he made all her childish dreams come true. She was sure it was a fairytale that would end, but while it lasted she could not bring herself to end it herself.”

Ultimately, this was the stuff of tragedy rather than fairytale, but the story is riveting nonetheless. “That Woman,” an American woman who captivated a Prince to the point of obsession. As Sebba writes: “Few who knew them well would describe what they shared as love.”

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 “arguably the first media celebrities.” Upon their arrival at Louis XIV’s Court of Versailles, the sisters made a splash when Marie and the young King promptly fell in love. Ultimately, the couple’s relationship– which climaxed with a forced separation and Marie’s confinement in a convent– reads like something out of Shakespeare.

Forced into advantageous mismatches that were, at turns, oppressive and abusive, the sisters jumped back into public view when Hortense, donning men’s clothing and making use of the new post coach service, left her husband and took to the road. Marie promptly joined her.

At a time when it was borderline scandalous for women to travel unaccompanied by men, much less divorce them, the sisters darted about Europe, seeking refuge from the husbands who actively pursued them. The story of their escape seemed like something out of a novel and, for years, the whole of Europe was riveted. As Goldsmith writes, the sisters were “admired by libertines, feminists and free-thinkers but viewed by others as frivolous at best and threats to civil society at worst.”

Both women penned memoirs, with that of Hortense being the first memoir written to which a woman signed her name. What is perhaps most striking about the sisters now is how brazenly unapologetic they were. As Hortense writes: “I know that a woman’s glory lies in her not giving rise to gossip, but one cannot always choose the kind of life one would like to lead.” She and her sister landed lives of adventure.

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. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now.

In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences.

While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension of La Nouvelle Revue Française,  she demonstrates the rare coming together of an artist and the art of his time to form “un present parfait.”

It was a year that influenced not only his poetry but also his prose. As Hargrove writes, the theater Eliot encountered while in Paris “may have been the inspiration for the difficult dramatic goal which Eliot later set for himself: to write verse drama in an age conditioned to prose and to write of spiritual and moral concerns in an age largely devoid of and unsympathetic to them.”

But perhaps most impressive- especially to any lover of Paris- is Hargrove’s meticulous recreation of the city as it was then. Through chapters on sport, popular entertainment, transportation, etc., she elegantly situates the young poet amid a city so alive it seems to strain against the page. The end result is a book that leaves the reader longing for both the poetry and Paris.

The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012), Sally Bedell Smith peels back the layers of mystique to reveal the very shy woman who is the current Queen. It isn’t so much a dismantling as a reevaluation, an effort to appreciate a figure who— though part of an institution that is seen by some as vestigial— is nonetheless deeply impressive and truly beloved.

Smith interviewed over 200 people, 160 of whom are on the record as the queen’s relatives and friends—a fact that suggests that the 40 individuals who opted for anonymity are even grander higher ups. Though the book is not “authorized,” it carries significant clout. Buckingham Palace also offered Smith limited access to the Queen, so the author could see her subject in action and play witness to her quiet charm. That’s the biggest stamp of approval for which a royal writer can hope.

Like many royal biographies, Elizabeth the Queen is filled with small, gossipy tidbits. We learn what the Queen eats for breakfast and what she carries in her ubiquitous handbag. But Smith also offers substantive insight into the less examined areas of the queen’s life, in particular her religious faith, her life pre-ascension and her relationship with the Queen Mother. The end result is a lively portrait of a hard-working woman who, in her own way, has represented “a new Elizabethan age.”

Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind- be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and merchandise. So it’s not only refreshing but downright commendable that in their biography, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011), Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr. managed to stumble upon a story that has been almost entirely ignored until now. Rather than focusing the biography on an individual involved with Gone With the Wind, the authors explore the life of the novel itself, from its inception through to its future.

What emerges from their narrative is a fascinating perspective on the life of a tremendously successful book– a story that’s equal parts legal thriller and manners drama, and peopled by a cast of colorful characters. We’ve flapper Peggy Mitchell, her stern husband, and her lawyer brother, whose Southern affability is put to the test by the slew of glitzy publishing people they encounter in New York, all of whom seem to bungle the novel’s publication in one way or another.

Thanks to that bungling, the case of Gone With the Wind provides a crash course in the history of United States copyright law and that may be the enduring legacy of Brown and Wiley’s book. It leaves one with a renewed appreciation for the grit and determination of Miss. Mitchell- an oftimes undervalued literary figure, who fought viciously to retain her authorial rights around the world, during war-time and in an age long before email.

Nearly 50 years after his death, Malcolm X remains a controversial figure. An 8th grade dropout (he ditched school when a white teacher told him it was unrealistic for a black kid to dream of being a lawyer), he rose to prominence as the second most influential minister in the Nation of Islam, only to dramatically break with the Nation and convert to Sunni Islam the year before he was killed.

As the nickname “Detroit Red”—gained during his hustling days in Harlem—implies, Malcolm X makes for a sneaky biographical subject. In the public imagination, he’s largely defined by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley and published shortly after his death. However, as the late Columbia University scholar Manning Marable reminds us in his ground-breaking biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Penguin, 2011), The Autobiography is a text and not a history. The Autobiography itself was a reinvention.

The winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History, Malcolm X is an attempt to reshape the narrative of Malcolm X’s life and to prompt further investigation into the circumstances surrounding his death, but the book’s greatest contribution may turn out to be its portrayal of Malcolm himself. In contrast to the near messianic figure of The Autobiography, the Malcolm that emerges in Marable’s telling is profoundly flawed and hauntingly human.

He is also vividly alive. “He lived the existence of an itinerant musician,” writes Marable, “traveling constantly from city to city, standing night after night on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an instrument. He was consciously a performer, who presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger and impatience the black masses felt.” The snappiness of Marable’s prose leaves one with the sensation that Malcolm X must’ve been standing over the author’s shoulder for the full twenty years it took him to write the book. Detroit Red— whistling, snapping, hustling, along.

For years, biographers have been fascinated by the Mitfords, a quiet aristocratic British family with six beautiful daughters, nearly all of them famous for their controversial and stylish lives.

There’s Nancy, the novelist who had a love affair with Charles de Gaulle’s Chief-of Staff; Pamela, the only sister who opted for a quiet life; Diana, the family beauty who married a Guinness then ditched him in favor of the founder of the British Union of Fascists; Unity, who had a crush on Hitler and unsuccessfully attempted to kill herself on the eve of World War II; Jessica, who eloped with a Communist at the age of 17; and Deborah, who married the Duke of Devonshire. In Leslie Brody’s Irrepressible (Counterpoint Press, 2010), it’s Jessica Mitford—known throughout her life as Decca— who, at long last, has the chance to shine.

She was a rebel almost from infancy. As Brody writes, “Soon after Jessica Mitford moved with her family to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, she began to plot her escape from it.” Her escape was spectacular, to be sure. As a teenager, she eloped with Winston Churchill’s nephew and ran off to the Spanish War. The couple eventually settled in America, where Mitford would remain after his death, later remarrying and becoming a journalist. Ultimately, she would be most famous for her exposé of the American funeral industry, which was published in 1963 as The American Way of Death, but her work on civil rights and social justice was equally influential.

Throughout Irrepressible, Brody includes direct quotes that let Mitford’s unique perspective shine through. And, as a white British woman with Communist leanings, Jessica Mitford provides a view of America- a country with an independent streak as fierce as her own- unlike that of any other. She was a “muckraker” in the truest and best sense of the word.

As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives—wherein the events of a subject’s life are tracked in the order that they occurred. This makes sense, as it’s how we live our lives, but there are advantages that come with non-linear structure. In the case of Karen Abbott’s American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life & Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (Random House, 2012), the benefit is that the book reads like a slick, sexy film noir and it is virtually impossible to put down.

The life of Gypsy Rose Lee- “this Dorothy Parker in a G-string”, famous for her “burlesque of burlesque”- is perhaps best likened to a Greek drama. The relationship between Gypsy, her controlling mother and the younger sister who stole her name offers enough material for a whole master’s thesis on Freud, and that’s just one of the many tangled relationship dynamics here worthy of analysis. And yet, Abbott exercises masterful control over her colorful cast of characters, all while guiding three separate narrative strands.

We enter the narrative at three distinct points and flip between them throughout: Gypsy, post-1939; Gypsy, pre-1939; and the Minsky Brothers burlesque clubs in the 1920s. If you’re not a biographile, the transitions might even slip by unnoticed, incrementally heightening the drama with each page until, at the book’s crescendo, you find you’re almost winded. American Rose is an ambitious story told in an ambitious style and, much like modern art, it looks effortless because it is impeccably well done.

Nearly twenty years after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographers are not only continuing to tell her story but finding provocative new ways to do so. In particular, a big bravo to William Kuhn for considering the former First Lady in a context that (a) has nothing to with her husbands, and (b) brings fresh perspective.

Jackie’s post-”Camelot” years—namely, her marriage to Onassis and her publishing career—are often given short shrift, but Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books (Anchor Books, 2011) steps in to fill the later gap and it’s downright revelatory.

What we read reveals much about who we are. That’s the idea behind Reading Jackie and it seems simple enough. But, in viewing Jackie Onassis’s life through the lens of the books she edited, Kuhn produces something quite sophisticated- a nuanced portrait of a thwarted artist for whom reading was a vital means of participating in the art world. As Kuhn writes: “That sense early on of what she could not do was at the nub of Jackie’s self-image as a reader. Coupled with the sense of limitation was a determination to work around it, to participate in the creative and artistic activity that gripped her imagination.”

It’s a daring approach and more than a little meta —to write a biography examining a series of books with the claim that they comprise the biographical subject’s autobiography— but Kuhn more than pulls it off. He clearly delights in both his subject and her work, and one leaves Reading Jackie not only with an appreciation of Jackie Onassis’s books, but also a renewed appreciation of her- this woman “who helped put enduring statements of why art matters into print.”

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s.

And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death.

In light of this tendency,  Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II.

And the music! That voice! ”Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title.

“That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does.

*No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press.

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 upon arrival- would be known throughout the world.

Extraordinarily well-educated for a woman of her time and place- much less a slave- Wheatley began writing poetry at a young age. The 1773 publication of her first book, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, brought her fame and, ultimately, freedom.

Though she’s celebrated as the mother of African American literature and her poems are taught in schools to this day, Wheatley remains a shadowy figure. In Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (University of Georgia Press, 2011), Vincent Carretta lets the light in.

It’s a daunting task. When one is writing about 18th people of African descent, sources are often scarce. But Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, rises to the challenge and painstakingly pieces together what is known about Wheatley’s life. In particular, Carretta illuminates how Wheatley’s evangelical Christianity was a subtle rebellion against slavery and also the means by which she got her words into print.

The Phillis Wheatley that emerges in Biography of a Genius in Bondage is an alarmingly modern character- canny, innovative and determined to get her poems into print. That she was able to do so as a woman in the 18th century is impressive. That she was able to do so as a slave is extraordinary.

“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 Chicago Tribune’s founder, the cousin of the Tribune’s editor and the sister of the founder of the New York Daily News, Patterson’s family were said to have ink in their veins and she was no exception. By the  early 1930s, this titian-haired heiress was the only female editor of a U.S. major metropolitan daily.

Patterson’s life held tremendous contrasts—great beauty, big scandals and bitter animosities and intrigue— all of which Amanda Smith elegantly explores in Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson (Knopf, 2011).  As the title indicates, there is no shortage of drama here.

The heiress to a newspaper fortune, the young Cissy Patterson slinked through Gilded Age society, famous for her inimitable gait. Following the trend of Americans making socially advantageous marriages to European aristocrats, Patterson wed a Russian count who abused her and kidnapped their only child. It’s an incredible story given new life through Smith’s research, which uncovered sources that reveal how- through the intervention of Patterson’s family, President Taft and the Russian Czar- Patterson’s three-year-old daughter was finally returned home.

As a society girl, a Countess, an essayist, a rancher, a novelist and, most memorably, a newspaperwoman, Cissy Patterson pushed the boundaries of what women of her time were expected to do and her newspaper was almost a mirror of her self. Under her leadership, the Washington Times (later the Washington Times-Herald) became DC’s most profitable paper thanks to Patterson’s gossipy editorials, her fierce isolationism and her distinctive editorial bite. There was venom in her pen and readers were hooked.

It’s a testament to Smith’s skill as a writer that even the ancillary characters in Newspaper Titan seem to burst fully alive from the page, giving the reader insight not only into Patterson’s social circle but also an unusually keen sense of the personalities with whom she tussled.

Ultimately, by Newspaper Titan’s end, the impression one gains of Cissy Patterson is that of a woman who prized newsprint over people, a woman who was delightful after a drink but whose claws came out after three. Patterson was the first to admit this. She was quoted telling TIME, “The trouble with me is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch.” And yet, it’s that same cattiness that made her an influential force in the development of tabloid media then and which makes her such a beguiling biographical subject now.  As Cissy Patterson herself said: “I’d rather raise hell than raise vegetables.”

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 his new biography, entitled Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball (Hill and Wang, 2011), Burgos explores the nuances of baseball’s color line through the story of the Negro League owner, Alex Pompez.

The son of a Cuban father and a “mulatto” mother, Pompez, a black Latino, was an influential force in the integration of Negro League baseball and, by extension, the Major Leagues. Importing talent from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico and the Dominican Republic for his Cuban Stars, he assembled the most racially diverse team within the Negro League.

An outrageously successful entrepreneur, Pompez overcame the two primary problems facing Negro League owners: a lack of capital and a lack of stadiums. Using the money earned through his Harlem numbers racket, Pompez both financed the Cuban Stars and purchased the Dykeman Oval in which they played.

As Burgos writes in Cuban Star, “Pompez was a trailblazer who over the span of seven decades—from his Negro League days through his major-league scouting work—opened pathways for talent from once-insignificant baseball territories.” In recognizing and importing Latin American talent and supporting players as they transitioned to life in the U.S., Pompez had a lasting impact on the face of major league baseball. His influence is still visible in the names gracing rosters today.

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 advocacy of eugenics and her supposed socialist tendencies. Though she was a pivotal 20th century figure, Sanger’s own voice has been drowned out by the cacophony of controversy.

As renown feminist historian Jean H. Baker writes in Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, “She has been written out of history, thereby easily caricatured and denied the context required for any fair appraisal of her life and work.”  In Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, Baker strips away the layers of myth and inaccuracy to reveal how truly radical Sanger’s ambitions were.

A staunch advocate of the freedom and privacy of women, Sanger was determined that family planning must be seen as a basic human right. To that end, she opened clinics, challenged the obscenity laws and wrote explicit pamphlets on contraceptives. Undaunted by a stint in jail and constant bouts with the law, Sanger did everything in her power to help women take control of their reproductive lives.

Baker’s portrait of Sanger is fascinating because it captures the broad sweep of Sanger’s ambitions for the movement, but also because it illustrates how, to an extraordinary degree, Sanger did precisely what she said she would do. In 1931, in her autobiography Sanger wrote: “I resolved that women should have the knowledge of contraception. I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard. No matter what it cost. I would be heard.” And she was.

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, Stacy Schiff establishes that this was primarily because Cleopatra’s story was penned by a crowd of Roman historians for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.”

Schiff exhibits no such discomfort and, in brilliant contrast, seems to revel in her subject’s lively intelligence. She establishes from the out-set that, above all, Cleopatra was a consummate politician—a visionary who shaped her own persona and her people’s perception through both exceptional leadership and canny political stagecraft.

One of the most significant contributions of Cleopatra: A Life is that it provides us with the least tainted view of the Egyptian queen to date. Schiff assiduously teases out the motivations of Cleopatra’s chroniclers, and the result is a compelling rendering wherein the myths surrounding the last Egyptian queen are not only deconstructed but their origins are also explained. With the veils of myth removed, the Cleopatra that emerges in Schiff’s sensitive and probing portrait is a smarter, wiser woman, and one of the strongest, most influential rulers of the ancient world.

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 enthusiastic about the First Amendment following the publication of Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized book Oprah: A Biography, which is now out in paperback.

The match-up of the daytime television queen and the unauthorized biographer, Kitty Kelley, is one for the ages. The author of eight books— five of them New York Times number one bestsellers, all of them about living people and none of them authorized— Kelley has spent thirty years writing unflinchingly candid accounts of the most influential celebrities of our age. Even the New Yorker allowed that “A Kitty Kelley biography of Oprah Winfrey is one of those King Kong vs. Godzilla events in celebrity culture.”

With the help of over 800 interviews and four years of research, she provides an insightful analysis of Winfrey’s cultural significance, as an African-American woman and a survivor of sexual abuse. But, perhaps the biggest contribution of Oprah: A Biography is that it picks away at the seemingly impenetrable persona Winfrey has presented and paints a nuanced portrait of a woman far more complicated, ambitious and interesting than the one seen on TV.

The public image of Kurt Vonnegut is that of a crusty, irascible old man.  Someone with whom one would want to drink, but never ever fall in love. The Vonnegut we meet in Charles J. Shields’s insightful new biography, And So It Goes. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt, 2011), is much the same. However, in Shields’s capable hands, Vonnegut’s crustiness is cast in a new light, and his black humor is leavened by the humanist sensibilities it cloaked. With the icon stripped away, we’re left to confront a real human being, and a life that was provocative in ways one might not imagine.

There are nearly 1,900 citations in And So It Goes, a fact that belies the book’s incredible readability. As a rave review in The New York Times noted, this is not a stodgy affair, but “an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography.” Shields eloquently tracks the soap operatic elements in the iconoclastic writer’s life, while also offering acute analysis on his private self and celebrity persona.

And So It Goes is full of memorable snapshots, but my favorite is this: “At home, [Kurt] secretly pored over an unabridged dictionary from his parents’ large library because he ‘suspected that there were dirty words hidden in there’ and puzzled over illustrations of the ‘trammel wheel, the arbalest, and the dugong.’” You can just see him—the man who bucked twentieth-century literary tradition—a curly-haired kid, canvassing the dictionary for words that were forbidden.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.” The charismatic leader is not like us. In fact, he is not like anyone. He is sui generis, a mysterious force of nature, a sort of political demiurge.

According to Jonathan Steinberg, Weber may well have had Otto von Bismarck in mind when he defined charismatic authority. In his wonderful Bismarck: A Life (Oxford UP, 2011), Steinberg argues that Bismarck’s successes (and some of his failures) can be largely attributed to the awesome force of his personality. Not “social structures.” Not “historical patterns.” Not “underlying forces.” But charisma pure and simple. Time and again Steinberg finds those around Bismarck attesting to the fact that he just wasn’t like everyone else. He was smarter, wittier, stronger, more willful, more cunning, more temperamental, and in most ways larger than life. And this was the nearly uniform (though not always positive) assessment of the some of the most impressive figures of his day. It’s a compelling case.

And it provokes a question about German political culture, for Bismarck was not the first or the last “genius” to rule some or all of the Reich. Fredrick the Great preceded him, and Hitler followed. What are we to make of that? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] [This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast.] Author Megan Marshall has recently written a well-received biography of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). The Peabodys were key players in the founding of the Transcendentalist movement in the early to mid 19th century. Elizabeth, the oldest, was intellectually precocious, learning Hebrew as a child so she could read the Old Testament. Mary was the middle sister, somewhat subdued by the dominant – and bossy – qualities of Elizabeth, and by the attention paid to the youngest, Sophia, who was practically an invalid. Nonetheless, Mary managed to become a teacher, writer and reformer. Sophia, beset by devastating migraines, spent most of her early years in bed. But when she had the strength, she painted. In an interview with ThoughtCast, Megan Marshall continues the tale…

[Crossposted from New Books in History] [This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh's ThoughtCast] At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expanding list of American war dead, Carol Bundy’s biography of a Union officer who sacrifices his life in the Civil War is eerily apt. The Nature of Sacrifice. A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005) tells the story of the short, heroic life of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., an elite young cavalryman who embodied the promise of his generation. An ardent abolitionist and reformer, Lowell was also a brilliant battlefield strategist, and he turned the tide at the Battle of Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, a crucial victory for the North just two weeks shy of Lincoln’s re-election. Shot twice during the fighting, Lowell died at dawn the following day.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.  It does what all good history books should do–tell you something you thought you knew but in fact don’t–but it does it ON EVERY PAGE. I thought Vermeer was X; now I know he was Y. I thought Vermeer was influenced by X; now I understand he was influenced by Y; I thought Vermeer painted X; now I realize he painted Y. I could go on and on, revelation after revelation. The biggest news–or rather the bit that will get the most press–is that a handful of “Vermeers” were in fact painted by his daughter, Maria. Vermeer’s Family Secrets is remarkably well researched and convincingly argued. It’s also lavishly illustrated. So are a lot of art history books. But this one is also intelligently illustrated: the way the pictures are arrayed serves the book’s many arguments. They are not simply eye-candy; they are also brain-candy. And the book is written in a clever, engaging, dry style. The short “Acknowledgments and Preface” are worth the price of admission. A word about that price. I confess I get all the books I do on this show free, thanks to the publishers. So I don’t know how much they cost. I thought this one, judging by the production value, was going to run somewhere around $100. That’s steep. But my friends, I’m delighted to tell you that you can buy this book for the low, low price of $32.85 from Amazon. It would make a great holiday gift. Since I have a copy on hand, I think I’ll give it to my brother-in-law (don’t tell him…).

[Crossposted from New Books in History] Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably see one, or at least its vapor trails. Go to your local airport and you can fly in one pretty inexpensively. Heck, if you like, you can learn to pilot one yourself at any one of hundreds of flying schools. There is just nothing unusual or even very exciting about airships.

It wasn’t always so. In the first quarter of the 20th century, airplanes were new. People had long dreamed of flight (see “Icarus and Daedalus”) and by the 19th century they’d done a little of it in balloons. But most folks could hardly conceive of a man (or woman) taking to the air like a bird. But men (and soon women) did just that. To many contemporary observers, flying in winged airships was nothing short of a miracle. Surely, pundits claimed, conquest of the air would usher in a new modern age.

It did, but not in all the ways expected. As Thomas Kessner shows in his wonderfully told The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation (Oxford University Press, 2010), the experience of Charles Lindbergh is a case in point. To be sure, Lindbergh was an extraordinary pilot—skilled, meticulous, and remarkably brave. That, however, did not set him apart from the hundreds of other fly boys of the age. What did set him apart was: 1) luck (many of his contemporaries died in crashes, and he nearly did on many occasions); 2) a single insight, doggedly pursued (that a plane with one engine, one pilot, and an 2,385 pounds of fuel could make it from New York to Paris); and 3) the fact that after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic he became the most famous person in the world. Tom pays due attention to all three of these characteristics, but I found the last of them—Lindbergh’s incredible celebrity and its impact on him and the world—the most interesting. It’s arguable that Lindbergh was the first “superstar.” Though he had indeed done something extraordinary, he was the creation of a finely tuned, corporate-backed publicity campaign and a frenzied, tireless, and completely meritorious press corps. The people around Lindbergh understood that if they handled his “image” correctly they all could make a fortune. And so they took this gangly, taciturn, strangely aloof son of the prairie and made him the symbol of all that was good (and marketable) in the newly christened air age.

The problem was that, eventually, Lindbergh refused to play along. He was who he was, and who he was was a loner. Celebrity wore on him. Now when most people get tired of attention, they go home. But after the Paris flight Lindbergh had no home. His entire life was public. So he did what so many frustrated celebrities with considerable resources (think Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, J. D. Salinger) after him have done: he became a crank. He tried to find a way to live for ever, dabbled in ‘scientific racism,’ and eventually got mixed up with the Nazis. Lindbergh, the arch-individualist, got tired of having people tell him who he was; he wanted to be his own man. And, in the end, he was, for good and ill.

The lesson? If you are in the business of making and selling role models, it’s probably not a good idea to pick a 27-year old who has focused his life on some narrow pursuit to the exclusion of all others, even if he’s really good at it. You just don’t know what they’re going to “be” when they grow up. (For more, see “Michael Jackson,” “Lindsey Lohan,” “LeBron James,” etc., etc.)

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] Memorial day is coming up, and maybe you are going to take a little car trip. It might even be a “road trip,” one of the great American enterprises (which isn’t to say other folks don’t take them, but Americans can rightly say they invented this genre of fun). In 1953, Harry and Bess Truman took a road trip in a shiny new Chrysler. Without any secret service protection at all. Harry wanted to see what it was like to be a private citizen again. He did and he didn’t, as Matthew Algeo explains in his charming new book Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure. The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (Chicago Review Press, 2009). Even in those days, it was hard for ex-presidents to keep a low profile. Harry and Bess did their best, but people wanted to see them and talk to them. They did. Perhaps that’s what Harry wanted all along. It’s hard to say. But this much is sure: no American president could do anything similar today. George Bush (either one) can’t go to the store to buy a gallon of milk without his “detail,” and he probably couldn’t get fifty feet from his door without encountering a mix of well-wishers and protesters. Harry and Bess met a horde of the former and none of the latter. The presidency has changed, and so has America. Read all about it in this most readable of books.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] When we speak of the “Age of Discovery,” we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. But the “Age of Discovery” continued well into the seventeenth century as Europeans continued to travel the globe in search of riches, fame and adventure. And after they made port at home, they often “wrote” books about their travels for readers eager to hear about what was “out there”–or at least what these travelers said was “out there.” Take the subject of Kees Boterbloem new book The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys. A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). Sturys was an illiterate, itinerant, indefatigable Dutch sail maker. He went everywhere, did everything, and when he got back from his adventures he was asked by some profit-seeking Dutch publishers to “contribute” his tales to a book about his travels. Of course Stuys could neither read nor write, but that didn’t stand in the way of the publishers. They assigned him a ghost writer who listened to Struys’ stories and, where he found them wanting, embellished them with material purloined from other travel books. The results were part fact, part fiction, and all international bestseller. It was in such books that Europeans learned about the “discoveries,” and by such books that modern publishing was born. We should thank Kees for telling us the tale in this fascinating account.

By the way, Kees is also editor of The Historian, a journal of popular history that you should really read.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] “Swords and Sandals” movies always amaze me. You know the ones I’m talking about: “Spartacus,” “Ben-Hur,” “Gladiator,” and the rest. These movies are so rich in detail–both narrative and physical–that you feel like you are “there.” But the fact is that we don’t and really can’t know much about “there” (wherever “there” happens to be in the Ancient World) because the sources are very, very thin. As Joyce Tyldesley points out in her terrific Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (Basic Books, 2008), Cleopatra is a mystery and necessarily so. We don’t know who her mother was, when she was born, what she looked like, whom she married, and a host of other details about her life. That means, of course, that every dramatist from Shakespeare on has been, well, making stuff up about Cleopatra. Actually, many of the “primary sources” about her are full of invention because they were written long after the events they describe by Roman authors who just didn’t like her very much. They did like a good story, so they embellished, as any good storyteller will. Joyce is an excellent storyteller herself, but she takes no poetic license. She tells us just what can be known–and trust me, that’s more than enough to hold our attention! This book is a great read for anyone interested in learning about the real world of Ptolemaic Egypt.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] If you study pre-modern history in any depth, one of the most startling things you will discover is that “traditional” societies usually had an adversarial relationship with “nature.” They fought the wild tooth and nail in a never-ending effort to bring it under human control. It never really occurred to them that this effort at pacification–and the wanton destruction it brought–was wrong. On the contrary, it was man’s right. As the Hebrew Bible says, God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Nature was ours, to do with as we pleased.

John Muir was among the first people to take a different and more “modern” view. He, like others of the Romantic movement, felt that nature and divinity were intertwined. We should no more destroy a wilderness than we should take the Lord’s name in vain, for both the one and the other were sacred. In his remarkable A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford UP, 2008), Donald Worster tells us how Muir came by these rather odd sentiments and how he put them into practice. You know about Muir’s work: the Sierra Club, Yosemite National Park, Sequoia National Park, Muir Woods National Monument. Now read Worster’s wonderful biography and learn about the man himself.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Party created a large, well-funded cultural elite of which only two things were expected. First, that they practice their art. Second–and here’s the rub–that they tow the Party’s ideological line. Art under Communism was intended to enlighten the working class. In practice, that meant hewing to hackneyed tropes (“Socialist Realism”). Worse still, the Party could and did change its line at will. What was “progressive” one day could be “reactionary” the next. This made the lives of Soviet artists unpredictable. It was hard to say what the Party bosses’ would want from one year to the next. In his masterful The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford UP, 2009),  Simon Morrison offers an excellent example and analysis of the dilemmas Soviet artists faced. When Prokofiev came back to the Soviet Union in 1935, he was asked to accommodate his work to the “needs of the Party.” He did so and became a Party darling. But then things changed. Stalin–an expert in all things–decided that Prokofiev’s work was too “formal” (whatever that meant). And so he was out of favor, and remained so for the rest of his life. When he died–ironically on the same day as Stalin–his passing was hardly noticed. It’s a sad and instructive story, and we should all thank Simon Morrison for telling it.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010).

Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there were one. He believed in the Nazi cause with his heart and soul. He wanted to create a new Germany, and indeed a new Europe dominated by Germans. As the Gauleiter of Wartheland (an area of Western Poland annexed to the Reich), he was given the opportunity to help realize the Nazi nightmare in the conquered Eastern territories. But, as Epstein shows, he was often hindered both by his own personality and the chaos that characterized Nazi occupation of the East. Grieser emerges from Epstein’s book as someone who wanted to be a “model Nazi,” but couldn’t really manage it because he was a crooked timber working in a crooked system. His personal life was an embarrassing tangle of marriages, affairs, and break-ups that at points threatened his career. His professional life was marked by ambition, ego-mania, and fawning, none of which endeared him to most of his colleagues and superiors. And his murderous attempts to “work toward the Führer” in the Wartheland–by displacing Poles, murdering Jews and other “undesirables,” and populating the East with Germans–were stymied by the cross-cutting jurisdictions, conflicting agendas, and professional jealousies that were one of the hallmarks of Nazi rule. Grieser did his best (or his worst, depending on how you look at it) to Germanize the Wartheland. He improvised, maneuvered, and “worked the system” such as it was in pursuit of the Nazi totalitarian project. Thankfully, he failed, demonstrating again that totalitarian dreams, though they can be horribly distructive, are a far reach from totalitarian realities.

[Crossposted from New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies] When you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.  But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror?  We’ve learned a lot about Ezhov’s involvement in the Terror since the opening of Soviet archives in 1991. We know about his fanaticism, how he manufactured confessions, was present at his victims’ torture, and even kept the bullets that killed his victims, wrapped and labeled them, and tucked them in his desk.  Less is known about Ezhov before he became the personification of Stalinist political violence.

To understand Ezhov’s life before the Terror, we have to turn to J. Arch Getty’s book Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iron Fist (Yale UP, 2008).  Getty’s focus isn’t on Ezhov, Stalin’s “iron fist,” but on Ezhov the “good party worker.”  In particular, Getty is interested in Ezhov’s meteoric rise through the Party ranks to become the head of the NKVD and, by 1936, the second most powerful person in the Soviet Union.  Ezhov’s story is a mixture of hard work and ambition, patrons and clients, devotion, and Manichean political culture  in post-revolutionary Russia.  How did Ezhov successfully navigate all this?  The answer to this question says less about Ezhov as an individual than it does about the Soviet system in the 1920s and 1930s.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybody and his brother is going to start digging into your past to see what kind of “dirt” they can find. It’s true now, and it was true when Thomas Jefferson was running for president in the late eighteenth century. Jefferson had had an eventful, largely public life, so there was a lot of “material” to be mined by his foes. Most of the accusations “didn’t stick,” but one that did was that he was a coward. Jefferson was the governor of Virginia during a good portion of the Revolutionary War and, as such, charged with defending the place (and the Revolution) against the British. As Michael Kranish shows in his terrific book Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War (Oxford UP, 2010), he had a rough time of it. Jefferson had no military experience, didn’t like “standing” armies, and received only tepid support from his continental allies. The British invaded, invaded, and invaded again. Jefferson fled, fled, and fled again. What was he supposed to do? His political opponents didn’t care if he had no choice but to run or not—the fact that he didn’t stand and fight was enough to prove he was a “coward.” This charge wounded Jefferson deeply and he fought it for much of his life.

The episode sort of reminded me of a certain presidential candidate a few years back and (shameful, in my opinion) questions about his military service.

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[Crossposted from New Book in History] Today we are happy to have Colin Grant on the show. Colin is that rare breed of writer who is also an excellent historian. Or is that “rare breed of historian who is also an excellent writer?” I’m not sure, but I can tell you that Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford UP, 2008) is a great book. The subject matter couldn’t be more interesting and the prose is as delightful as it is instructive. There are many laugh-out-loud, I-wish-I were-that-clever sentences in this book: “Scott was not to know that the UNIA leader was of the school of thought that translated ‘no’ as ‘maybe’ and maybe’ as ‘yes.’” And many others that will make you sad. Grant is that kind of writer and Garvey that kind of figure. Go buy this book. Then read it.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out.

France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic settlement. So which was it to be: France a nation of free-thinking citizens or France a nation of Catholic Frenchmen? The question was not definitively answered during the Dreyfus Affair, but new (and somewhat disturbing) possibilities were sketched out. The analysis of these new paths is one (among many) of the great strengths of Ruth Harris‘s new book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt, 2010) . She shows that both sides—the Dreyfusards (aka “Intellectuals”) and the Anti-Intellectuals—used the Affair to elaborate their visions for France and, in the process, worked themselves into a tizzy. They began to believe things that, well, only a lunatic could believe. French political culture entered a kind of surreal moment (a bit like American political culture during the O.J. trial if you ask me). Alas, the French didn’t quickly come back to reality after the Affair ended. They organized parties and continued to fight. And they are still fighting.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But no dunks! Russell’s opponents in college and the NBA rarely fared any better. Sports talk is full of hyperbole, but in Russell’s case most of it is true. In his time, he was far and away the best player to ever step on the court and, for most of his career, he completely owned every court he stepped on. He was so dominant that they changed the rules so less gifted players would have a chance.

Bill Russell, however, was not only a surpassingly great basketball player, he was also an African American star in an era in which being an African American star (or just being an African American) was very complicated. Today we are used to seeing outstandingly successful blacks in all (or almost all) spheres of life. In the mid-1950s that just wasn’t true. The American ruling elite was lily white, and that’s the way most white Americans thought it should be. Bill Russell (and Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Willie Mays, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, among others) were anomalies: they were black, but they were both extraordinarily accomplished and remarkably famous. They couldn’t just be athletes; they had to be symbols of some promising (or frightening) new world as well. That’s quite a burden to bear.

In King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (University of California Press, 2010), Aram Goudsouzian has done a great service by detailing the ways Russell bore this weight, and the ways in which he fought to throw it off. Aram makes clear that Russell was a conflicted soul. He lacked self-confidence, but he was brusk and even arrogant. He was friendly and gregarious to some, but often simply rude to others. He was hot tempered, but he affected a cool, distant demeanor. He believed he was a man of principle (and convinced others he was), but he periodically abandoned his family for a playboy lifestyle. If Russell couldn’t be honest about himself, he insisted on being honest about everything and everyone around him. He meant what he said and said what he meant–about race, about sports, about anything that bothered him. He was a sort of athletic Socrates, always questioning and never fully accepting the way things were. And, like Socrates, Russell was willing to suffer for his beliefs. As Aram points out, he did in many ways. But in the process he gained the respect of almost everyone he encountered. He was a hard man to like, but he was an easy man to admire.

I should add that if you like white-hot game narratives, this book is full of them. Remember this?: “Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones… Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over… It’s all-l-l-l over!” Johnny Most, RIP.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] This week we feature an interview with Abigail Foerstner about her new book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles (University of Iowa Press, 2007). Dr. Foerstner teaches news writing and science writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. In addition, Dr. Foerstner served as a staff reporter for the suburban sections of the Chicago Tribune for ten years, where she wrote articles about science and the environment. She is the author of Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers (University of Iowa Press, 2000), as well as multiple articles on science, history and the visual arts. Her newest book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Light Miles, took her seven years to research and write. Carl McIlwain, research professor of physics at University of California at San Diego, claims that “This in-depth portrayal of the life and work of an important twentieth-century scientist should take an important place both as a biography of an interesting life and as a resource for future historians of space physics.”

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] When I was in high school I had several friends who went to Wichita’s only prep school. They were nice guys, played D&D, and said they were “Libertarians.”  I thought that “Libertarian” might have something to do with the library, so I wanted to have nothing to do with it. But they really wanted to spread the Gospel. So I listened. What they said made sense. We’re born free. We should be able to do whatever we want so long as we don’t hurt anyone. The authorities should get off our backs. Now this, I thought, was philosophy for a 16-year old.

They told me to read Ayn Rand. I didn’t. Her books had too many pages. But my mother did, and I noticed a lot of other folks I knew did to. Rand, I was told, was a genius. I never really understood the Rand phenomenon until I read Jennifer Burns‘ page-turning biography Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009). Almost by accident, the foreigner Rand tapped into a deeply-rooted American desire to be LEFT ALONE. All teenagers want to be left alone, but America is the only country in world history to have a political culture built on the idea. Rand’s radical, romantic individualism was the pitch-perfect echo of Americans’ frustration with the growth of the modern state (and teenagers’ frustration with the stupidity of their parents). That and she was really entertaining. She wrote, said, and did outrageous things. She said they were all consistent with her philosophy, “Objectivism.” Maybe. But they were also consistent with amphetamine addiction. It goes without saying that her personal life was a train-wreck, though a very interesting one given that it was informed by a philosophical system (and drug abuse). The American desire to be LEFT ALONE has not vanished (cf. Ron Paul), and neither has America’s fascination with Rand’s remarkable life. We should thank Jennifer for telling us about it.

Thanks to Anne is a Man! for suggesting this book. If you like podcasts, you should visit his site.

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