New Books in Biography & Memoir

39:53

Elaine Pagels, "Miracles and Wonder:The Historical...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/05/12

Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesus (Doubleday, 2025) she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.The book reads like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question and answering

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53:53

Nechama Birnbaum, "The Redhead of Auschwitz: A True...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/05/07

Rosie was always told her red hair was a curse, but she never believed it. She often dreamed what it would look like under a white veil with the man of her dreams by her side. However, her life takes a harrowing turn in 1944 when she is forced out of her home and sent to the most gruesome of places: Auschwitz.Upon arrival, Rosie's head is shaved and along with the loss of her beautiful hair, she loses the life she once cherished. Among the chaos and surrounded by hopelessness, Rosie realizes the

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56:12

John Lee Hooker Jr., "From the Shadow of the Blues:...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/05/05

From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction, and Redemption (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) is powerful memoir of redemption from the son of blues legend John Lee Hooker. Born in Detroit and exposed to the music world from an early age, John Lee Hooker Jr. began singing as a featured attraction in his father's shows as a teenager. His father was a sharecropper's son who became known for hit songs like "Boogie Chillin," "I'm in the Mood," and "Boom Boom," and in 1972, he and his father

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51:15

Jerome Powell: “We don't think you're a straight...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/05/04

More than any one institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this second

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59:43

Janet Yellen: “She had a view that the world was on...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/05/03

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this

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44:27

Ben Bernanke: “Like being a paleontologist”

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/05/02

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this

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47:56

Alan Greenspan: “The man who knew”

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/05/01

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by a committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.In the first series of The Chair, Tim Gwynn Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's foundational Chairs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this

en

53:53

Chris Stowers, "Shoot, Ask...and Run" (Earnshaw Books...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/24

Chris Stowers, longtime photographer, credits a fellow journalist for the title of his latest memoir, Shoot, Ask...and Run (Earnshaw, 2025). The journalist’s advice to a young Chris, just starting out, went like this.Shoot: Take the photo when the opportunity arises. Then, if someone notices that you took a photo, “ask” for permission to use the photo. Finally, if the subject seems annoyed, “run”...particularly if he or she has a gun. Shoot, Ask...and Run is the second memoir from Chris Stowers,

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69:42

Alexandra Popoff, "Vasily Grossman and the Soviet...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/24

Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign oneself to obscurity, writing only for “the desk drawer” or “without permission.” Vasily Grossman challenged that binary choice, creating some of the most compelling and uncompromising fiction and journalism of the century, but also enduring heartbreaking censorship. Her excellent new biography, Vasily

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81:26

Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/22

In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022) explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an

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46:19

Ignat Solzhenitsyn, ed., "We Have Ceased to See the...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/20

We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (U Notre Dame Press, 2025) brings together ten of Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most memorable and consequential speeches, delivered in the West and in Russia between 1972 and 1997.Following his exile from the USSR in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived and traveled in the West for twenty years before the fall of Communism allowed him to return home to Russia. The majority of the speeches collected in this

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60:24

Kayla E.'s "Precious Rubbish" (Fantagraphics Books,...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/18

Kayla E.’s Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics, 2025), is an experimental graphic memoir drawn in a style that references the aesthetics of mid-century children’s comics and tells the story of a childhood shaped by maternal emotional dysregulation, rural poverty, and incest. The author’s childhood is portrayed as a collection of short-form comics and gag panels punctuated by interactive elements like paper dolls, satirical advertisements, games, and puzzles. While the work is concerned with violence and

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56:09

Erica Stern, "Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/17

Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story (Barrelhouse Inc., 2025) is a genre-bending expedition into childbirth. Seamlessly blending memoir, fiction, and research into the fraught history of birth—from midwives to Victorian-era sedation through the Natural Childbirth Movement and modern L&D suites—Frontier lays bare visceral truths that are too often glossed over, and offers an incisive look at the momentous and terrifying transformations of motherhood. As she prepared to give birth to her first child,

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50:10

Martha A. Sandweiss, "The Girl in the Middle: A...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/15

A haunting image of an unnamed Native child and a recovered story of the American West In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The

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70:57

Ulf Zander, "Raoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy" (Lund...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/14

Raoul Wallenberg: Life and Legacy (Lund UP, 2024) examines important events in the life of the Swedish diplomat, but this is not a traditional biography. Starting from Wallenberg’s time in Budapest during 1944–1945, the book analyses how Wallenberg went from being a highly sensitive topic in Swedish politics to becoming a personification of humanitarian effort during the Holocaust, as well as a ‘brand’ in Swedish foreign politics. Fictional portrayals of Wallenberg are another essential feature

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61:31

Mark Doyle, "John Cale's Paris 1919" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/10

John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the

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59:20

Karen A. Frenkel, "Family Treasures: Lost & Found"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/09

In this captivating memoir, journalist Karen A. Frenkel unravels her parents' and sole surviving grandparent's secret, riveting stories of survival during World War II.How do you shatter the silence that muffles family stories when those who knew what happened are gone? In Family Treasures: Lost & Found (Post Hill Press, 2025), journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Karen A. Frenkel, investigates her parents' unspoken WWII stories. Readers accompany Frenkel on her quest and discovery of

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46:44

Stephen J. Campbell, "Leonardo da Vinci: An...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/08

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) never signed a painting, and none of his supposed self-portraits can be securely ascribed to his hand. He revealed next to nothing about his life in his extensive writings, yet countless pages have been written about him that assign him an identity: genius, entrepreneur, celebrity artist, outsider. Addressing the ethical stakes involved in studying past lives, in Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press, 2025) Dr. Stephen J. Campbell shows how

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47:13

Loretta Vandi, "Eufrasia Burlamacchi" (Getty...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/07

Eufrasia Burlamacchi (Getty Publications, 2025) by Dr. Loretta Vandi is a timely exploration of the skilful illuminated manuscripts of Sister Eufrasia Burlamacchi (1478–1548) demonstrates her artistry within this sometime neglected artistic medium. Within the convent walls of San Domenico in Lucca where she lived and worked, Burlamacchi attained high levels of artistic proficiency through her knowledge of drawing and colour technique, composition, treatment of space and proportions. This book

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40:49

Seán Creagh, "Republican Solipsist: The Life and...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/06

Seán Creagh was born in County Monaghan in 1977. He attended Our Lady’s Secondary School in Castleblayney and later on Dundalk Institute of Technology. After moving to the U.S and developing an intense interest in Irish-American history he attended Northeastern Illinois University where he achieved an Honors Degree in History as well as Honors in Education. Today he is a middle school Social Studies teacher in Illinois.His first book was The Wolfhounds of Irish-American Nationalism. Listen to an

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