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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:

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67:44

Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/06

Our book is: Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra (UNC Press, 2025), by Ericka Verba, which explores the life of Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967). Parra is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Canción (New Song). Her renowned song "Gracias a la vida" has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez,

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49:18

Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon:...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/06

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 (U Chicago Press, 2024) which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels.After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to

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51:42

Ann Schmiesing, "The Brothers Grimm: A Biography"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/04

Ann Schmiesing, Ph.D. is Professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, with research interests spanning 18th and 19th-century German and Norwegian literature and culture. In our interview we discuss her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale UP, 2024), their first biography in over half a century. We talk about what led her to Germanic studies and fairy tales in particular. We discuss the revelations in her book dealing with their lives and work, their

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36:55

Jean Strouse, "Family Romance: John Singer Sargent...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/04

At the height of his career, Sargent painted twelve portraits of the Wertheimer family, commissioned by Asher Wertheimer, a German-Jewish London art dealer who became his greatest private patron and close friend. Their portraits, later gifted to the National Gallery, stirred both admiration and controversy, challenging societal norms. In Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers (FSG, 2024), Jean Strouse's historical narrative explores the decline of the British aristocracy and the

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79:59

Elio Zarmati, "Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/03

Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025) is a first-person memoir written from the standpoint of a Jewish boy growing up in Egypt during the watershed years that shaped the Middle East into the powder keg it is today.Described as the “Holden Caulfield of the Nile” for his rebellious attitude, the boy witnessed—between the ages of seven to fourteen—the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk and gave rise to the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser;

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38:02

Alexis Wolf, "Transnational Women Writers in the...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/03

What were two Irish sisters doing in Russia during the early years of the nineteenth century, editing the French-language memoirs of a princess who had been a close confidante of Catherine the Great? Author Alexis Wolf is in conversation with Duncan McCargo about a remarkable transnational story she has unearthed through meticulous archival research. Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840 (Boydell Press, 2024) highlights the centrality of non-canonical, middle-ranking women

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56:17

Yves Rees, "Travelling to Tomorrow: How Australia's...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/02

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk.As explored by Dr. Yves Rees in Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America (New South, 2024), a century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across the Pacific to make their fortune. In doing so, they reoriented Australia towards the United States years before

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33:30

Lionel Barber, "Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/02/01

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son (Atria, 2024), the first Western biography of Son, the self-professed unicorn hunter, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most

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66:55

About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/30

Today I talked to Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal about About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote speculative fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. Her radical imagination links the realities of living in a British colony to the technological and scientific

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38:12

Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/30

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that

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68:39

Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/29

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and

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63:52

Christopher Burnham, "Sir Ronald Storrs: Personality...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/28

This volume utilises the personal papers of Sir Ronald Storrs, as well as other archival materials, to make a microhistorical investigation of his period as Governor of Jerusalem between 1917 and 1926.It builds upon Edward Said’s work on the Orientalist ‘determining imprint’ by arguing that Storrs took a deeply personal approach to governing the city; one determined by his upbringing, his education in the English private school system and his service as a British official in Colonial Egypt. Burnham

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51:37

Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/27

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Keller uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures

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30:08

The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/25

The Great Gatsby is often called the great American novel. Emblematic of an entire era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of illicit desire, grand illusions, and lost dreams is rendered in a lyrical prose that revives a vanished world of glittering parties and vibrant jazz, where money and deceit walk hand in hand. Rich in humor, sharply observant of status and class, the book tells the story of Jay Gatsby's efforts to keep his faith - in money, in love, in all the promises of America - amid the

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69:25

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/23

Henry Christophe was born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and fought to overthrow the British in North America before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue—as Haiti was then called—to end slavery. He rose to power and became their king. In his time, he was popular and famous the world over. So how did he become an enigma?In The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, Dr. Marlene L. Daut reclaims the life story of this

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35:16

Patchen Barss, "The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/18

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists.Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and

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60:04

Michael Ray Richardson, "Banned: How I Squandered an...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/18

Michael Ray Richardson was a star in the making. After a stellar collegiate career at the University of Montana, where he was voted first team All-Big Sky Conference as a sophomore, junior, and senior, the future seemed bright. Taken fourth overall in the 1978 NBA Draft by the New York Knicks, Richardson was billed as “the next Walt Frazier.” In just his second professional season, he became the third player in NBA history to lead the league in both assists and steals—both Knicks team records

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59:19

Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/09

Our book is: Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts To Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025) by Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham, which is an inspiring new narrative of the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Frances Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their

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57:26

Joel Whitebook, "Freud: An Intellectual Biography"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/07

We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing that tradition with his clinical and philosophical knowledge of recent advances in psychoanalytic theory.The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the

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62:54

Amy Aronson, "Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life"...

New Books in Biography & Memoir ·

2025/01/05

Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) gives us the life of a women’s rights activist, labor lawyer, radical pacifist, writer and co-founder of what became the Civil Liberties Union. Her life was shaped by key relationships including with her mother Annis Ford Eastman and a close relationship with her brother

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