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New Books in Biography & Memoir

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

society & culture

All Episodes

58:11

Michael Backus, "The Heart Is Meat: An 80s Memoir"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/05

In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. I was newly arrived to New York City when I began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man barely out of college who had never

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54:14

Martha S. Jones, "The Trouble of Color: An American...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/04

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived

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58:46

Miriam Haughton, "The Theatre of Louise Lowe"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/02

Louise Lowe is a theatre and performance director, writer, choreographer, dramaturge, and, more recently, a television director and short film writer/director, working in Ireland and internationally. She is the Co-Artistic Director of ANU Productions, established with Owen Boss in Dublin in 2009. Lowe is known for facilitating and creating moments of interior reckoning for audiences through immersive performance techniques. These techniques engage spectators in affectively realised moments of

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67:24

Jason Cannon, "A Time for Reflection: The Parallel...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/04/01

Professional baseball has featured a bevy of superstars over the past century and a half, but only a few of them have impacted their sport and cities as deeply as Willie McCovey and Billy Williams. Born just a handful of miles apart in 1938, they grew up in and around one of the sport’s true cradles, Mobile, Alabama, on their way to producing two iconic careers in Major League Baseball. In A Time for Reflection: The Parallel Legacies of Baseball Icons Willie McCovey and Billy Williams (Rowman &

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51:55

Letizia Osti, "History and Memory in the Abbasid...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/29

Abu Bakr al-Suli was an Abbasid polymath and table companion, as well as a legendary chess player. He was perhaps best known for his work on poetry and chancery, which would have a long-lasting influence on Arabic literature. His decades of service at the court of at least three caliphs give him a unique perspective as an historian of his own time, although he is often valued as an observer rather than an interpreter of events for posterity.In History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing

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48:20

Mikhail Goldis, "Memoirs of a Jewish District...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/28

What was it like to work as a Jewish district attorney in provincial Soviet Ukraine in the post-Stalinist eras? What role did antisemitism and Holocaust memories play in solving and investigating the criminal cases? How does a detective’s mind work? The answers to these and many other fascinating questions are found in Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024). Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in

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31:09

Lincoln A. Mitchell, "Three Years Our Mayor: George...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/27

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a

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28:31

Donna Besel, "The Unravelling: Incest and the...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/27

In this NBN episode host Hollay Ghadery talks to bestselling author Donna Besel about her staggering memoir, The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family (University of Regina Press, 2021) which has been hailed as “a shattering story and an essential one, told with consummate honesty and courage.” —Joan Thomas, author of Five Wives The Unravelling is a brave, riveting telling of the destruction caused by sexual assault within a family, and the physical, psychological, emotional,

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37:10

Simon Morrison, "Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/25

Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage. In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky's complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition,

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55:30

Heather Akou, "Afterthought: A Family Story" (Indiana...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/22

Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila Slaback, who grew up in a dysfunctional, working-class family in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. In her short adult life, she gave birth to seven children with at least four different men and died in 1958 at age thirty-six. She was a real person, but her family was not proud of her story. This book is my best attempt to recover it.This work of

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43:02

Jon Chapple, "Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/20

Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer is an in-depth, spiritual biography of a British fighter pilot (WW I), Ronald Nixon (1898-1965). Raised in an intellectually vibrant family, educated at Cambridge, he had a religious experience during one of his flights as a RAF pilot, and when the war ended, he embarked on a religious/philosophical journey that carried him to India, first as a university professor, and then into the religious world of his mentors, the university's vice-chancellor, G.N

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47:27

Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/18

The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Due to her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker rather than a disciple of some supposedly great man like Isaac

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64:48

Douglas Field, "Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin,...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/15

A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestos of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge

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49:06

Patrick Beldio, "The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/14

The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga (Lexington Books, 2024) analyzes the contributions of the Mother (née Mirra Alfassa, 1878-1973) to the Integral Yoga that she and Sri Aurobindo (né Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950) co-created for his ashram. Scholars have ignored Mirra for Aurobindo, which prevents a full understanding of their spiritual practice. Scholars have also avoided examining work Aurobindo produced after they began their partnership in 1920 until his death

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58:45

Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, "Stepan Bandera: The Life...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/13

Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist (Ibidem Verlag, 2014) is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian

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51:14

Ariane Sherine, "The Real Sinéad O'Connor" (White...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/08

Sinéad O'Connor, renowned for her angelic voice and activism, overcame a tumultuous upbringing to become a global protest singer and advocate for social justice.O'Connor achieved worldwide success as an angel-voiced, shaven-headed Irish singer of heartfelt songs, but she was far more than just a pop star - she was also an activist and a survivor. Reeling from a troubled childhood at the hands of her violent mother, she spent 18 months living in a former Magdalene Laundry due to her truancy and

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47:36

Rachelle Bergstein, "The Genius of Judy: How Judy...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/07

Everyone knows Judy Blume. Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn to them? And why are we still talking about them now in the 21st century? In The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (Atria, 2024), her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey. The books she wrote starred regular

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50:15

Elizabeth T. Craft, "Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M....

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/05

George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. He could, quite literally, do it all. In his day, he was famous as the "Yankee Doodle Boy" from his hit song and as the "Man Who Owned Broadway" from his musical of the same name. Cohan's songs and shows captured the spirit of an era when staggering social change gave new urgency to efforts to define Americanism. Elizabeth Craft’s Yankee Doodle Dandy:

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45:04

Arwen P. Mohun, "American Imperialist: Cruelty and...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/05

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new imperial order in Africa. Richard Dorsey Mohun spent his career circulating among the eastern United States, the cities and courts of Europe, and the African continent, as he served the US State Department at some points and King Leopold of Belgium at others. A freelance imperialist, he implemented the schemes of American investors and the

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48:49

John Coakley ed et al., "The Problem of Piracy in the...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/03/04

In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerbated existing and created new problems of piracy across the globe. The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam UP, 2024) addresses these early modern problems in three sections: first, states' attempts to exercise jurisdiction over seafarers and their actions; second, the multiple predatory marine practices considered 'piracy'; and

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