New Books In Biography

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life(Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without these delightful illusions… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.’ Chanel’s is a life that, all these years later, still reads as radical, which puts into perspective how terribly shocking it must have appeared in the early 20th century. Chaney has chosen an unusually challenging subject. Mired in myths, some of them of her own devising, the image of Chanel that has been passed down to us is clouded at best and, as Chaney acknowledges, quoting L.P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do

Dana Andrews was one of the major films stars of the 1940s, and yet he was never nominated for an Academy Award. The posterboy for the ‘male mask’ archetype that typified the decade, Andrews portrayed the ‘masculine ideal of steely impassivity’ in such classics as Laura and Fallen Angel. In Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews(University Press of Mississippi, 2012) biographer Carl Rollyson cracks the mask, providing intimate insight into Andrews’s extraordinary talent and his life. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rollyson’s account is that, in the end, Andrews appears to have been beloved by everyone. Often, biographies- particularly biographies of Hollywood stars- batter one’s affection for their subjects, illuminating horrible personality traits or an atrocious work ethic or a cruelty towards children, animals, and/or wives. Hollywood Enigma does no such thing. Rather, it tells the story of a man who, in Rollyson’s words, ‘always showed up for work on time, always knew his lines, and was never less than a ge

The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and contemporary art. In the early 20th century, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salons in Florence and New York drew astonishing talents to her doorstep. Her gift for bringing artists together so they might collaborate and draw inspiration from one another played out even more grandly at the art colony she and her third husband founded in Taos, New Mexico. Over the years, they would play host to such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Though she’s remembered more for her gift for building artistic communities, Luhan was an artist in her own right. Her book Winter in Taos is considered a classic of New Mexican literature and her four-volume memoir vividly explores the changes in Victorian sexuality, politics, art, and culture as the moder

It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip Bishop‘s biography, The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop (Lyons Press, 2011), which charts the simultaneous rise of the former President and the author’s own great-granduncle. The author does an excellent job illustrating the dynamics of the relationship between Roosevelt and Bishop. For it was to Bishop’s benefit to know Roosevelt, but it was also advantageous for Roosevelt to cultivate an ally in the press like Bishop. Theirs was a mutually beneficial relationship, and the author does an exceptional job of showing how it strengthened and altered with the passage of time, changes in status, increased physical distance, etc. These are the external forces that shape long-term friendships, but they’re seldom explored so intimately and eloquently in bi

I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive. How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50. One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men’s lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie. From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a breath of fresh air

The portrait is startling. Painted by John Singer Sargent, “Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes” depicts a woman dressed casually, almost masculinely, save a voluminous white skirt. Her hand is held brazenly at her hip as her presence nearly obscures that of her husband, who hovers in the background like a specter. They are Edith and Newton Stokes. As biographer Jean Zimmerman details in her excellent duel biography of the couple, entitled Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). “Both were progressives, and both believed in doing great deeds, whether it was reforming tenements in Newton’s case or getting the vote for women in Edith’s. They fell in love when they were children, a love that lasted until they were parted by death.” Edith eventually became President of the New York Kindergarten Association and of the Municipal Art Commission. Newton spent over a decade laboring on a six-volume history of the city entitled the Iconography of Manhattan. They were a couple defined by t

If you’ve spent any time in New Orleans, you can appreciate the challenge of putting the city’s joie de vivre into words.However, as a New Orleans native, John Kennedy Toole was steeped in the traditions and flavor of his hometown and, therefore, uniquely qualified to write about it. His novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, is considered one of the best ever written about New Orleans. As Cory MacLauchlin writes in his new biography, Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (Da Capo Press, 2012) “Toole selected, merged, refined, and wove characters together with all the absurdities that form the human condition. And there on the once blank sheet of paper in his private room in Puerto Rico emerged the city he had known all his life, his New Orleans.” MacLauchlin’s task is comparably challenging. He’s got an academic struggling to be a writer, a writer struggling to get published, and a man struggling to survive… and that’s just John Ken

When I was in Seminary I was assigned many theological tomes to read and one was especially difficult to get through. It was Systematic Theology by Charles Hodge. This work was dense, long, and I must confess, wound up mostly unread. So when I came across Dr. Paul Gutjahr‘s Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2011), I knew I had to find out why someone would write a biography about this man. It turns out there is much more to Hodge than I imagined. Dr. Gutjahr sets Charles Hodge in context and takes us through all of his 80 years letting us see into his family, friendships and battles. He concludes showing how Hodge is still influencing Christianity in America today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Texas poet/author/historian Dave Oliphant‘s KD: A Jazz Biography (Wings Press, 2012) is a poetic tribute to the life of Jazz trumpeter and one of the original Jazz Messengers, Kenny Dorham. Dorham, who played with some of the jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, Monk and many, many others, is less well known than many of his contemporaries, but Oliphant’s highly allusive and alliterative rhythms and rhymes open one’s ears, eyes and heart to the Texas-born and raised trumpet player. Oliphant describes Dorham’s small town roots: Ken’s prodigious ear at five years old Could pick out keyboard boogies cold & from Sis’s 78s he could already tell Louie on trumpet an equal of Gabriel Oliphant also describes touches on Dorham’s gigs and experiences in New York City, the West Coast, Paris, South America, Scandinavia, and his untimely death from kidney disease at the age of 48 in 1972. a brain filled with unseen notes heard within his inner ears then out of tubes & a gold or silver bell

If you watched the U.S. broadcast of the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, you may have heard Matt Lauer and Bob Costas mention Jim Thorpe during Sweden’s entrance. Thorpe, arguably the best all-around athlete in U.S. history, won Olympic gold in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the Stockholm 1912 games. But his victory was marred by a controversial International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruling that stripped him of his medals six months later. In Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (Bison Books, 2012), the first comprehensive biography of Thorpe, biographer Kate Buford explores how Thorpe’s Native American heritage shaped his life, but also the impact Thorpe himself had upon American sports. Ultimately, he was the country’s first celebrity athlete, excelling at both baseball and football. His life was memorialized in a 1951 film and, in 1963, Thorpe was among the charter class inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Despite his other successes, the revocatio

The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up the throne. It’s precisely this oversimplification of the facts that Anne Sebba seeks to correct in her excellent new biography That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). The first woman to write a full biography of the Duchess, Sebba provides a much-needed rehabilitation of this polarizing figure. The bite of the title succinctly captures the bitterness and antipathy directed towards Wallis Simpson- during her life and after- but Sebba’s impeccable research illuminates a woman far more complex than the popular imagination has allowed. This is myth-busting to the nth degree. With access to previously undiscovered letters, Sebba creates an account of the Duchess’s life that is, at times, downright revelatory. For instance, Wallis Simpson didn’t intend to marry the Prince of Wales. Who knew?! As Sebba writes: “She was

As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were “arguably the first media celebrities.” Upon their arrival at Louis XIV’s Court of Versailles, the sisters made a splash when Marie and the young King promptly fell in love. Ultimately, the couple’s relationship– which climaxed with a forced separation and Marie’s confinement in a convent– reads like something out of Shakespeare. Forced into advantageous mismatches that were, at turns, oppressive and abusive, the sisters jumped back into public view when Hortense, donning men’s clothing and making use of the new post coach service, left her husband and took to the road. Marie promptly joined her. At a time when it was borderline scandalous for women to travel unaccompanied by men, much less divorce them, the sisters darted about Europe, seeking refuge from the husbands who actively pursued them. The story of t

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now. In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences. While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of an artist and the art

The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012), Sally Bedell Smith peels back the layers of mystique to reveal the very shy woman who is the current Queen. It isn’t so much a dismantling as a reevaluation, an effort to appreciate a figure who– though part of an institution that is seen by some as vestigial– is nonetheless deeply impressive and truly beloved. Smith interviewed over 200 people, 160 of whom are on the record as the queen’s relatives and friends–a fact that suggests that the 40 individuals who opted for anonymity are even grander higher ups. Though the book is not “authorized,” it carries significant clout. Buckingham Palace also offered Smith limited access to the Queen, so the author could see her subject in action and play witness to her quiet charm. That’s the biggest stam

Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns came upon an encampment of Kwevkepayas (a branch of Yavapais) sheltering in the shadow of rock overhang above the Salt River Canyon. The soldiers wasted no time on the formalities of battle. They rained down fire, bullets ricocheting from the roof the cave, felling the refugees below. They even pushed down boulders. None survived. Well, almost none. A few days prior, the advancing soldiers had come across a young boy of eight or nine looking for a missing horse. “They made a rush for me,” Hoomothya would later write. “They pulled me over rocks and bushes. The men didn’t care whether I got hurt or not.” But unlike Burns’ Kwevkepaya siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfather, the invaders did not kill him. In fact, the man responsible for his family’s extermination would adopt the young Hoomothya as something between a son and a servant, renaming him Mike B

In December of 2011, Oprah Winfrey appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to talk about her new big plans and her inspirations for the future. Oprah replied, “For me at this particular time in my life I recognize that everything is about moving closer to that which is God. And without a full, spiritual center — and I’m not talking about religion — I’m talking about without understanding the fullness from which you’ve come, you can’t really fulfill your supreme moment of destiny. And I think everybody has a supreme moment of destiny.” Oprah has been providing the path to achieve this (Aha!) moment for decades now through the rituals of contemporary consumer culture and spirituality that enable individuals to live their best life. Kathryn Lofton, Professor of Religion at Yale University, cleverly unravels Oprah’s story within the broader context of American religiosity and the academic study of religion in her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (University of California Press, 2011). In this excellent work, Lofton contends

Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind– be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and merchandise. So it’s not only refreshing but downright commendable that in their biography, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011), Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr. managed to stumble upon a story that has been almost entirely ignored until now. Rather than focusing the biography on an individual involved with Gone With the Wind, the authors explore the life of the novel itself, from its inception through to its future. What emerges from their narrative is a fascinating perspective on the life of a tremendously successful book– a story that’s equal parts legal thriller and manners drama, and peopled by a cast of colorful characters. We’ve flapper Peggy Mitchell, her stern husband, and her lawyer brother, whose Southern affability is put to the test by the slew of glitzy publishing peopl

Nearly 50 years after his death, Malcolm X remains a controversial figure. An 8th grade dropout (he ditched school when a white teacher told him it was unrealistic for a black kid to dream of being a lawyer), he rose to prominence as the second most influential minister in the Nation of Islam, only to dramatically break with the Nation and convert to Sunni Islam the year before he was killed. As the nickname “Detroit Red”–gained during his hustling days in Harlem–implies, Malcolm X makes for a sneaky biographical subject. In the public imagination, he’s largely defined by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley and published shortly after his death. However, as the late Columbia University scholar Manning Marable reminds us in his ground-breaking biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Penguin, 2011), The Autobiography is a text and not a history. The Autobiography itself was a reinvention. The winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History, Malcolm X is an attempt to reshape the narrative

Mention the name Bill Veeck to a baseball fan and what will likely come to mind is the back-and-white image of three-foot, seven-inch Eddie Gaedel at the plate of a Major League game, swimming in his St. Louis Browns uniform, the opposing catcher having just caught a pitch well over his head. Gaedel’s sole appearance for the Browns in 1951 is part of the lore of baseball, and it is often cited as the prime example of Veeck’s antics and his irreverence as a team owner.  As owner of the Browns, the Cleveland Indians, and the Chicago White Sox, as well as owner of the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers and executive for the Chicago Cubs, Veeck was famous–and infamous–for his promotions and publicity stunts. Veeck wanted to bring people to the ballpark, and he was willing to try any scheme to do that: giving away 100 dollar coins frozen in a block of ice, serving free breakfast cereal for morning games, inviting fans to bring their detested disco records for an on-field demolition, or sending a midget into a Major Le

There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan. Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s (after one season as a running back in the NFL), winning three batting titles and numerous selections to All-Star teams. And the third is Frank “Lefty” O’Doul. A power-hitting outfielder who won two National League batting titles, O’Doul was a member of two teams of American players who toured Japan in 1931 and 1934. O’Doul fell in love with Japan during these visits.  He returned to the country in 1935 to assist in the creation of the Tokyo Giants, a professional team that toured the United States. And he came back again in 1949, this time as the manager of the minor-league San Francisco Seals. With much of the country still in ruins from the war, the Seals’ four-week tour lifted Japanese morale and helped re