Shows / New Books in Biography & Memoir
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: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Mary Frances Phillips, "Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins" (NYU Press, 2025)
In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Ruby Lowe on John Milton’s Definition of Free Speech
British poet John Milton published one of the earliest and still tremendously important defenses of free speech for our modern world. From his famous pamphlet…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Caroline Topperman, "Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family's Search across History for Belonging" (HCI, 2024)
NBN host Hollay Ghadery interviews Toronto author Caroline Topperman about her new book, Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family's Search Across History for…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Kenneth Roth, "Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments" (Knopf, 2025)
For three decades, Kenneth Roth led Human Rights Watch, transforming it from a small advocacy group into one of the most influential human rights organizations…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Jay Prosser, "Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns" (Black Spring Press, 2024)
A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn
Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian Dr. Amrita…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Alisse Waterston, "My Father's Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century" (Routledge, 2024)
On the podcast today I am joined by Presidential Scholar and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at John Jay College, City University of New York, Alisse…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Jeff Copeland, "Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn" (Feral House, 2025)
In Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn (Feral House, 2025), Jeff Copeland brings readers into Hollywood in the 1980s and shares his story of writing a book about…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Stan Bunger, "Mornings with Madden: My Radio Life With An American Legend" (Triumph, 2024)
John Madden is synonymous with football. He was the television face and voice of the nation's most popular sport, the namesake of its best-selling sports video…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Ann Schmiesing, "The Brothers Grimm: A Biography" (Yale UP, 2024)
Ann Schmiesing, Ph.D. is Professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, with research interests spanning 18th and…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Jean Strouse, "Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers" (FSG, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Alexis Wolf, "Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840" (Boydell Press, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Elio Zarmati, "Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Yves Rees, "Travelling to Tomorrow: How Australia's Modern Women Pioneered Our Romance with the United States" (New South, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Lionel Barber, "Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son" (Atria, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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?…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Christopher Burnham, "Sir Ronald Storrs: Personality and Policy in Mandate Palestine, 1917-1926" (Routledge, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Vera Keller, "Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Michael Ray Richardson, "Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA Career Before Finding My Redemption" (Sports Publishing, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Patchen Barss, "The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius" (Basic Books, 2024)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Joel Whitebook, "Freud: An Intellectual Biography" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Amy Aronson, "Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life" (Oxford UP, 2019)
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…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Stuart Elden, "The Early Foucault" (Polity Press, 2021)
What were the key ideas and influences on Michel Foucault’s early career? In The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020)
As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Donna Tesiero, "A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Abolition of Slavery in the North" (McFarland, 2024)
At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018)
The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Emily Herring, "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" (Basic Books, 2024)
Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri Bergson…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Harvey J. Kaye, "The British Marxist Historians" (Zero Book, 2022)
The British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Susanna Ashton, "A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (New Press, 2024)
In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Peter Salmon, "An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida" (Verso, 2020)
Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Daniel B. Hinshaw, "Journey to Simplicity: The Life and Wisdom of Archimandrite Roman Braga" (St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2023)
Today I talked to Daniel B. Hinshaw about his book Journey to Simplicity: The Life and Wisdom of Archimandrite Roman Braga (St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2023)…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Linda M. Clemmons, "Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville & the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876" (SDHS Press, 2023)
For much of her life, Angelique Renville had decisions made for her. Where to live, who to live with, where to attend school, what to do with her land. That…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Joseph McBride, "George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director" (Columbia UP, 2024)
The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Paul French, "Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced U.S.-born fiancee of King Edward VIII, they often…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)
Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Emanuela Trevisan Semi, "Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual, Between Colonized and Colonizers" (Centro Primo Levi, 2018)
Emanuela Trevisan Semi’s Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual, Between Colonized and Colonizers (Centro Primo Levi, 2018) is an insightful…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Beth Kaplan, "Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin" (Syracuse UP, 2007)
Born of an Anglican mother and a Jewish father who disdained religion, Kaplan knew little of her Judaic roots and less about her famed great-grandfather until…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
David J. Collins, SJ, "Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician" (Penn State UP, 2024)
David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, 2024)…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Rebecca Brenner Graham, "Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany" (Citadel Press, 2025)
She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
F. K. Clementi, "South of My Dreams: Finding My American Home, A Memoir" (U South Carolina Press, 2024)
South of My Dreams: Finding My American Home, A Memoir (U South Carolina Press, 2024) by F. K. Clementi follows the adventures and misadventures of Fania, a…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Henri Colt, "Becoming Modigliani" (Rake Press, 2024)
Becoming Modigliani (Rake Press, 2024) is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.; Written…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Marlene L. Daut, "The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe" (Knopf, 2025)
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) is the essential biography of the controversial rebel, traitor, and only…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Jane Austen's Darkness: A Conversation with Julia Yost
In this episode of Madison's Notes, we sit down with Julia Yost, senior editor at First Things and author of the new book Jane Austen's Darkness (Wiseblood…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Julie Salverson, "A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Scriptwriter's Daughter" (Wolsak and Wynn, 2024)
A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Screenwriter’s Daughter (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) by critically acclaimed author Julie Salverson braids together personal…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Keith Gandal, "Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis While Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis While Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things (U Michigan Press, 2024) is an…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Seth Rogovoy, "Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Seth Rogovoy's latest book for Oxford University Press is called Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2024). Often…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Mary Ellen Curtin, "She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where Americans stood…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Denys Turner, "Dante the Theologian" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole. That is the…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Cornelia M. Spelman, "Solace" (Jackleg Press, 2024)
How do we become the persons we are? Cornelia Maude Spelman's Solace (Jackleg Press, 2024) seeks to answer that question. A portrait of the emotional legacies…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Connie DeNave, "The Image Maker: Shattering Rock and Roll's Glass" (2023)
In The Image Maker: Shattering Rock and Roll's Glass Ceiling (2023), Connie DeNave shares her experiences in the public relations world during the British…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Karen M. Dunak, "Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life" (NYU Press, 2024)
When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Peter Worthing, "General He Yingqin: The Rise and Fall of Nationalist China" (Cambridge UP, 2016)
General He Yingqin: The Rise and Fall of Nationalist China (Cambridge UP, 2016) is a revisionist study of the career of General He Yingqin, one of the most…
- New Books in Biography & Memoir
Deborah Parker, "Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters" (Villa I Tatti, 2024)
In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and…