New Books In Biography

Joseph Lister changed the world of medicine. In her book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Scientific American, 2017), Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris explores the gruesome world of surgery in the 19th century. At this time even a successful surgeries had extremely high mortality rates due to persistent infections. Hospitals were terrifying places filled with death and anyone who could afford it opted to have surgeries in their own home. It is in this world that a Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister changed medicine forever. Lister bought into germ theory and claimed that they were the source of infection. At the time, this claim was considered ludicrous. He fought infection through the use and evangelization of antiseptics. Although everyone initially bought into his claims, Joseph Lister left the world of medicine a much different place than the one he entered. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leade

Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains in his biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019) however, this was just one product of his wide-ranging literary efforts. The son of a cutler, Diderot underwent training for a life in the church, only to abandon it for an uncertain literary career. Initially finding success as a translator, his early works gained Diderot both acclaim and led to his imprisonment for several months. It was soon after his release that Diderot began work on the Encyclopédie, a years-long project that proved an important vehicle for spreading many of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Curran demonstrates that editing the Encyclopédie served as a way for Diderot to advance his views while avoiding the brunt of the controversy they engendered, with many of his later, often radical works not published until many years

One of the most recent additions to the well-known and highly regarded Eerdmans series, the Library of Religious Biography, is The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Eerdmans, 2017), by R. David Cox, a professor of history at Southern Virginia University. Professor Cox’s book presents his perennially controversial subject was a consistently religious thinker, working from the deist and evangelical influences of Lee’s parents towards the religious convictions and commitments of his maturity. But what does Christian faith look like in times of civil war? Did Lee think about slavery within any kind of religious frame? And how could a man of sincere, if evolving, Episcopal faith come to terms with the fact that hundreds of thousands of men had died under his leadership? In today’s podcast, Professor Cox steers us through these troubled times. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author mo

From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate. One of the central figures in this debate was the great writer, journalist, public intellectual – and pious Muslim from Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, better known by his pen-name, Hamka. Largely self-taught, Hamka was one of Indonesia’s most prolific writers. Between the 1920s and his death in 1981 he penned novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs, self-help books, travel books, histories, and many studies of Islam, including a famous thirty-volume commentary on the Qur’an. In Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), James R. Rush traces the development of Hamka’s thinking as expressed through these works against the backdrop of Indonesia’s tumultuous modern history, including late Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, the In

For all of the books written about Winston Churchill, much remains to be said about his extensive life and career. In Churchill: Walking With Destiny(Viking, 2018), Andrew Roberts takes advantage of newly available archival holdings – most notably the diaries of King George VI – to add to our understanding of this vitally important figure. Churchill’s life was never short of drama; born in Blenheim Palace, he spent his early years as a correspondent and a soldier in Britain’s imperial wars before embarking on his long political career. Initially a Conservative like his father, he rose rapidly after joining the Liberal Party, though he switched back after the First World War. His period in the political wilderness in the 1930s was the result of his stands on India and the threat posed by Nazi Germany, with his return to office coming only with Great Britain’s entry into the Second World War. As Roberts explains, his successful wartime leadership came in the face of numerous domestic and international challenge

Whether you love him or hate him, it is indisputable that few, if any, other 20th-century American presidents were as historically consequential as Woodrow Wilson. Historian Patricia O’Toole explores the many complexities and ramifications of the Wilson presidency in her book The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (Simon and Schuster, 2018). As we near the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, O’Toole follows Wilson’s attempt to establish a League of Nation which, while ill-fated in his time, still laid the groundwork for the United Nations. She tackles Wilson’s sorry legacy of racially segregating parts of the federal civil service, arguing Wilson was driven by a desire to accommodate Southern Democratic legislators in order to win their support for his progressive economic agenda. Whether despite or because of his uncompromising, moralistic nature, she concludes that his forceful embrace of internationalism and democracy defined the 20th century and helped transform the world. Bi

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Despite ranking among the most influential people in English history, Thomas Cromwell has long eluded biographers and historians. In Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Viking, 2018), though, Diarmaid MacCulloch provides readers with the definitive study of this key figure in the English Reformation. Drawing upon the full range of the available archival material and his own deep understanding of the era, MacCulloch shows how Cromwell’s views and achievements often belie the historical reputation that has formed around him. The son of a yeoman, Cromwell emerged by dint of his abilities and language skills to become a trusted servant of the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, in the 1520s. When Wolsey lost favor because of his failure to obtain for Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Cromwell survived and established himself as a trusted adviser to the king. By 1534 he cemented his position as Henry’s chief minister, becoming the political architect of England’s break with the Catho

Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding is the first comprehensive biography of John W. Campbell, who, as a writer and magazine editor, wielded enormous influence over the field of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “His interests, his obsessions, and his prejudices shaped what science fiction was going to be,” Nevala-Lee says. Many people are familiar with Campbell’s name because it’s on the award given out every year by the World Science Fiction Society—the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. (This year, the award went to Rebecca Roanhorse, who was on the podcast in September; other winners who’ve been on the show include Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, and Mur Lafferty.) From 1937 through the 1960s, Campbell used the magazine Astounding Science Fiction (now named Analog) to popularize science fiction and its potential to predict the future. But he also used the magazine to promote pseudosciences (like psionics and dianetics), and his legacy is tarnished by views that were “clearly racist.” “He was quite content

Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer in his own day who sharpened his acute literary talents, Peter Zinoman observes in the opening pages of Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (University of California Press, 2014), “as a lower-class, untraveled, half-educated, opium addicted, colonized subject from a remote outpost of France’s second-rate empire”. He died in 1939, aged just 28. Today he is remembered as a literary giant, for Zinoman, comparable to Orwell in the English-reading world. Like Orwell, he was a complex and defiant figure whose work crossed genres and drew deeply on his rich life experiences as well as his wide reading in literature, politics, and psychology. His views on a range of topics attracted heated debate in his own lifetime, in which he engaged vigorously. He had a persistent interest in sexuality

In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse intellectual history of Buganda, an East African kingdom that came to be incorporated into the modern state of Uganda.  Earle constructs the intellectual biographies of four important Ganda activists who articulated and debated ideas about kingship, political pluralism, citizenship, and justice. Their views on state and society were drawn from a diverse range of sources such as religious texts, classical political thinkers and local histories. Earle’s book shows that often used distinctions between “sacred” and “secular” or “African” and “European” oversimplify and obscure what was a more pluralistic intellectual milieu.  In writing this book, Earle uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources among which are several private archival collections that had not been previously available to historians. The book is c

Today we are joined by Howard W. Rosenberg, author of Ty Cobb Unleashed: The Definitive Counter-Biography of the Chastened Racist (Tile Books, 2018). In this deeply researched volume, Rosenberg achieves what many biographers have failed to do: to put Cobb into the context of his times. That means seeing Cobb not as a man of the twenty-first century, but as he was perceived during and after his 24-year career in major league baseball. Rosenberg pulls no punches as he critiques several recent biographies about Cobb and demonstrates how some information in those works were either glossed over or lifted out of context. He also provides balance, giving credit where it is due as he focuses on several books. Rosenberg compiles an impressive list of facts, figures, notes, quotes and anecdotes about Cobb, particularly after his playing days. There are also plenty of vintage photographs and vintage editorial cartoons. Rosenberg lets his research do the talking and tackles the extent of Cobb’s racism. While the Georgia

When he was elected president of China in 1912, Yuan Shikai was hailed as his nation’s George Washington, yet four years later he would die as the leader of a country in turmoil after a failed bid to become its emperor. In Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal (University of British Columbia Press, 2018), Patrick Fuliang Shan uses recent studies of Yuan’s career to examine this controversial figure in a new light. A member of a prominent family of public servants, Yuan’s failure to pass the civil service exams led him instead to adopt a more congenital career in the military. There he quickly established a reputation as an effective imperial official and military reformer, most notably in training China’s first modern army in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War. His subsequent success in a series of increasingly prominent postings culminated in his appointment as Foreign Secretary in 1907, only to be dismissed a year later when his patroness the Dowager Empress Cixi died. Recalled in 1911 to deal with the rebel

Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events of his life and shows how they can inform many of the concepts for which he is best known. The son of a clergyman, Nietzsche excelled at university and became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel without even taking a degree. It was at that time he began a long-term friendship with Richard Wagner and often traveled to Bayreuth. Yet Nietzsche soon drifted away from philology towards philosophy, which led to his dismissal from his teaching post. As Prideaux shows, Nietzsche overcame ill health, physical handicaps, and the poor reception of his work to develop his ideas, and was on the cusp of gaining a wider audience when a mental breakdown led him to spend the last years of his life institutionalized, little knowing of the growing impact his books and ideas were having on European thought. Le

Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, yet the complete extent of this shy, intelligent, and secretive man’s betrayal of his country and his friends, family and colleagues, has never been explored—until now. Drawing on a wealth of previously classified files and unseen family papers, A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean (W.W. Norton, 2018) meticulously documents this extraordinary story. In the first full biography of Maclean, author and publisher, Roland Philipps unravels Maclean’s character and contradictions. Like many members of his generation, Maclean became infatuated with Communism during his school days, even before his time at Cambridge. The very model of a perfect diplomat, he rose through the ranks of the diplomatic service rapidly, never arousing suspicion of his treasonous double life. He married an American woman despite his sexual ambivalence and increasing antip

Jack Benny was one of the first crossover stars in broadcast comedy, rising from the vaudeville circuit to star in radio, film, and television. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley chronicles Benny’s career in her book, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (University of California Press, 2017). The book recently received a Special Jury Prize from the Theatre Library Association. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of various books on film history, including At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period in which Roosevelt exhorts an America prone to isolationism to join the war against Germany, only for the war to take the life of one of his sons. Pietrusza tracks how Roosevelt’s alters America’s political history, abandoning his “Bull Moose” party and re-uniting the Republicans in hopes of strengthening American foreign policy. And the author chronicles Roosevelt’s heartbreak, unable to die a glorious death on the battlefield himself, but bereaved to see his son die from a policy he advocated. Pietrusza also offers evidence of a controversial theory: that a depressed Roosevelt ultimately took his own life with an overdose of morphine. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided

Paul Bjerk’s compact biography Julius Nyerere, published as part of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series follows closely on the heels of his monograph on the same subject – Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 – published in 2015 by the University of Rochester Press, about which Bjerk was interviewed on the New Books in African Studies podcast. Similar to the monograph, in this short work, Bjerk foregrounds Nyere’s political biography – the founding of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU); his leadership of an independent Tanzania; and his eventual consecration as an icon of postcolonial Africa. Additionally however, considerable time is spent on Nyerere’s personal arc from intellectually gifted rural youth, to principled if flawed leader of an independent nation, to, having foregone many of the trappings of political office, elder statesman living the end of his life much as he began it. The podcast conversation delves deeply in

Among the many personages associated with the Peloponnesian War, none are as colorful as the Athenian general Alcibiades. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (Harvard University Press, 2018), David Stuttard recounts the dramatic life of this controversial figure. A scion of a wealthy family, Alcibiades was adopted by the statesman Pericles after his father died in battle. Growing up he demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, which in combination with his fortune made him a prominent figure at a young age. Yet Alcibiades desired more, and sabotaged the peace agreement with the Spartans orchestrated by Nicias in an effort to prolong the war so as to gain new opportunities for glory. The Sicilian Expedition presented him with just such an opportunity, though controversial actions attributed to Alcibiades and his friends undermined his standing. Faced with mounting opposition, Alcibiades defected, first to Sparta, then to Persia before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general. Though Alcibiad

Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorjé (1284-1339). In this book, Gamble gives an account of Rangjung Dorjé’s life based on his autobiographical liberation stories and songs, connecting him to the teaching and practice lineages with which he was involved, the communities that supported him, and the physical and sacred spaces that he inhabited. The book highlights the ways in which Rangjung Dorjé’s autobiographical writing and his later biographies worked to deliberately construct and solidify his authority and place within the Karmapa lineage. In our conversation, Gamble discusses the broader context of her book, as well as the relevance of Rangjung Dorjé’s life to contemporary issues in Tibetan Buddhist lineages. She also explains how snowboarding has influenced her scholarly work.