New Books In Biography

Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network.  Cosell was known for an inflated sense of self-importance, but in this claim he was accurate.  From his interviews of Muhammad Ali on Wide World of Sports in the Sixties, through his 13-year tenure in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, Cosell came to be the most prominent personality in sports television and one of the most recognizable figures–certainly, the most recognized voice–in all of American popular culture. Throughout his career, Cosell aspired to be more like the trusted journalist Cronkite than the entertainer Carson.  And one of the main points of historian John Bloom’s biography, There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), i

I can’t remember when I first saw one of those horrible photographs of a lynching, with crowds of white people, kids included, laughing and pointing at the mangled black body hanging from a tree. I do know that such images were part of my childhood mental archive of atrocities, together with stacks of dead bodies in the liberated concentration camps and naked children running from napalm in Vietnam. Images like that made me a historian. But I didn’t have to live any of that history. Ida B. Wells did. A young journalist, she happened to be out of town when a game of marbles escalated into the lynching of three men who were pillars of the Memphis black community. She knew all of them; one was a close friend. Ida B. Wells was nobody’s fool – she’d already sued two train companies for denying her a seat in the “Ladies’ Car” and she’d long written about racial injustice. But she wasn’t prepared for the viciousness of this lynching, or for the subsequent defamation of its victims in the white press. She published

Few people can claim to have created a literary genre… Phillis Wheatley did. By the time she was twenty, her name- taken from the slave ship that carried her to America and the family that bought her upon arrival- would be known throughout the world. Extraordinarily well-educated for a woman of her time and place- much less a slave- Wheatley began writing poetry at a young age. The 1773 publication of her first book, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, brought her fame and, ultimately, freedom. Though she’s celebrated as the mother of African American literature and her poems are taught in schools to this day, Wheatley remains a shadowy figure. In Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (University of Georgia Press, 2011), Vincent Carretta lets the light in. It’s a daunting task. When one is writing about 18th people of African descent, sources are often scarce. But Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, rises to the challenge and painstakingly piece

“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page.” That was the Medill family editorial policy and Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson embraced it enthusiastically. The granddaughter of the Chicago Tribune‘s founder, the cousin of the Tribune‘s editor and the sister of the founder of the New York Daily News, Patterson’s family were said to have ink in their veins and she was no exception. By the early 1930s, this titian-haired heiress was the only female editor of a U.S. major metropolitan daily. Patterson’s life held tremendous contrasts–great beauty, big scandals and bitter animosities and intrigue– all of which Amanda Smith elegantly explores in Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson (Knopf, 2011). As the title indicates, there is no shortage of drama here. The heiress to a newspaper fortune, the young Cissy Patterson slinked through Gilded Age society, famous for her inimitable gait. Following the trend of Americans making socially advantageous marriages to Eu

The integration of baseball is most often cast in terms of black and white, but biographer Adrian Burgos, Jr.— a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign– is out to change that. In his new biography, entitled Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball (Hill and Wang, 2011), Burgos explores the nuances of baseball’s color line through the story of the Negro League owner, Alex Pompez. The son of a Cuban father and a “mulatto” mother, Pompez, a black Latino, was an influential force in the integration of Negro League baseball and, by extension, the Major Leagues. Importing talent from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico and the Dominican Republic for his Cuban Stars, he assembled the most racially diverse team within the Negro League. An outrageously successful entrepreneur, Pompez overcame the two primary problems facing Negro League owners: a lack of capital and a lack of stadiums. Using the money earned through his Harlem numbers racket, Pompez both financed the Cu

“I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” To Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was an inspiration and an idol. “I just give lip service to being the greatest,” said Ali in 1981, after Louis’ death. “He was the greatest.” Yet, while Jackie Robinson is now one of the most revered athletes in American history and Ali remains a cultural icon, the man who paved the way for both is lesser known today, more a distant folk hero than a historical figure whose accomplishments are understood and respected. Unlike Robinson, Louis was not the pioneering black athlete in his sport, and unlike Ali, he did not translate his success in the ring into a platform for larger media fame and political statements. Nevertheless, as Randy Roberts shows in his acclaimed biography Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (Yale University Press, new in paperback in February 2012), the heavyweight champion was an athlete without peer in his sport, one of the

Forty-five years after her death, the reproductive rights activist Margaret Sanger remains a polarizing figure. Conservatives attack her social liberalism while liberals shy away from her perceived advocacy of eugenics and her supposed socialist tendencies. Though she was a pivotal 20th century figure, Sanger’s own voice has been drowned out by the cacophony of controversy. As renown feminist historian Jean H. Baker writes in Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, “She has been written out of history, thereby easily caricatured and denied the context required for any fair appraisal of her life and work.” In Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, Baker strips away the layers of myth and inaccuracy to reveal how truly radical Sanger’s ambitions were. A staunch advocate of the freedom and privacy of women, Sanger was determined that family planning must be seen as a basic human right. To that end, she opened clinics, challenged the obscenity laws and wrote explicit pamphlets on contraceptives. Undaunted by a stint i

Aside from being aesthetically equated to Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra has not fared well in history. In her riveting biography Cleopatra: A Life (Back Bay Books, 2011), which is now out in paperback, Stacy Schiff establishes that this was primarily because Cleopatra’s story was penned by a crowd of Roman historians for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Schiff exhibits no such discomfort and, in brilliant contrast, seems to revel in her subject’s lively intelligence. She establishes from the out-set that, above all, Cleopatra was a consummate politician–a visionary who shaped her own persona and her people’s perception through both exceptional leadership and canny political stagecraft. One of the most significant contributions of Cleopatra: A Life is that it provides us with the least tainted view of the Egyptian queen to date. Schiff assiduously teases out the motivations of Cleopatra’s chroniclers, and the result is a compelling rend

When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important economic and political developments in the Old Regime’s last quarter century. As Finance Minister he oversaw the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. As a diplomat, he was Russia’s chief negotiator of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty that ended his country’s disastrous war with Japan. As Prime Minister, Witte authored the October Manifesto which crowned a series of sweeping reforms of Russia’s political system with a parliament, the State Duma. But as Frank Wcislo emphasizes in his biography, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Witte was also a great storyteller, as exemplified in his memoirs The Notes of Count Witte. Wcislo shows in this fascinating book how Witte’s stories reveal the times of the man as a man of the times. Witte was an arch

When she emerged triumphant in a legal battle with the Texas beef industry, Oprah Winfrey took to the steps of the Amarillo court house and declared: “Free speech rocks!” She was likely a little less enthusiastic about the First Amendment following the publication of Kitty Kelley‘s unauthorized book Oprah: A Biography, which is now out in paperback. The match-up of the daytime television queen and the unauthorized biographer, Kitty Kelley, is one for the ages. The author of eight books– five of them New York Times number one bestsellers, all of them about living people and none of them authorized– Kelley has spent thirty years writing unflinchingly candid accounts of the most influential celebrities of our age. Even the New Yorker allowed that “A Kitty Kelley biography of Oprah Winfrey is one of those King Kong vs. Godzilla events in celebrity culture.” With the help of over 800 interviews and four years of research, she provides an insightful analysis of Winfrey’s cultural significance, as an African-Amer

On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a young family: he and his wife, Teresa, had just adopted a baby girl only six months earlier. And Robert was also at the top of his professional career. He was the star goalkeeper for the club Hannover 96 of the Bundesliga, and he was expected to be the starting keeper for the German national team at the World Cup in South Africa. But despite this success, and the new addition to his family, Robert was unable to overcome a severe clinical depression that had gripped him for months. Only a small circle of family and friends knew of the depth of his illness. For others, both those who knew Robert personally and those who knew of him only as one of Germany’s best footballers, his death was an incomprehensible shock. Ronald Reng was among those stunned by Robert Enke’s death.An award-winning German sports journalist based in Barcelona, Ronnie had meet Robert in 20

The public image of Kurt Vonnegut is that of a crusty, irascible old man. Someone with whom one would want to drink, but never ever fall in love. The Vonnegut we meet in Charles J. Shields’s insightful new biography, And So It Goes. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt, 2011), is much the same. However, in Shields’s capable hands, Vonnegut’s crustiness is cast in a new light, and his black humor is leavened by the humanist sensibilities it cloaked. With the icon stripped away, we’re left to confront a real human being, and a life that was provocative in ways one might not imagine. There are nearly 1,900 citations in And So It Goes, a fact that belies the book’s incredible readability. As a rave review in The New York Times noted, this is not a stodgy affair, but “an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography.” Shields eloquently tracks the soap operatic elements in the iconoclastic writer’s life, while also offering acute analysis on his private self and celebrity persona. And So It Goes is full of memorabl

I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts education, which convinced me that there was really nothing I couldn’t master but gave me little or no indication of what I should do (beyond platitudes like “discover myself” and “do good”). So I thrashed about, armed with an ounce of knowledge and a ton of arrogance. I was insufferable. I won’t go into details, but let me just say my quest to discover who I was ended rather badly, albeit not in the long term. Life taught me what my liberal arts education couldn’t: that I was who I was and not much more. Having read Rosamund Bartlett‘s excellent Tolstoy: A Russia Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), I’m left wondering if Tolstoy ever came to this realization. Throughout his life, he searched for his true self. His launching pad was not a liberal arts education, but rather an aristocratic background, a flock of tutors, and a

Many scholars consider August Wilson to be the premier American playwright of the 20th Century. Alan Nadel is surely one of their number. In the early 1990s, he focused our attention on Wilson’s plays in the outstanding collection of essays May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (University of Iowa Press, 1993). Since the publication of that work, Wilson completed his magnum opus–a ten-play cycle–shortly before his death in 2005. So now Nadel has followed up his first essay collection on Wilson with a second: August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle (University of Iowa Press, 2010). This volume, as Nadel asserts, is for the trained cultural critic and everyday reader. My opinion is that the volume, like the first one, is centrally important to literary critics, performance scholars, and your average serious theatre goer, as well as to anyone interested in 20th-Century American culture. Listen to the interview, read the book, and share your thoughts. Learn more about

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.” The charismatic leader is not like us. In fact, he is not like anyone. He is sui generis, a mysterious force of nature, a sort of political demiurge. According to Jonathan Steinberg, Weber may well have had Otto von Bismarck in mind when he defined charismatic authority. In his wonderful Bismarck: A Life (Oxford UP, 2011), Steinberg argues that Bismarck’s successes (and some of his failures) can be largely attributed to the awesome force of his personality. Not “social structures.” Not “historical patterns.

This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast.] Author Megan Marshall has recently written a well-received biography of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). The Peabodys were key players in the founding of the Transcendentalist movement in the early to mid 19th century. Elizabeth, the oldest, was intellectually precocious, learning Hebrew as a child so she could read the Old Testament. Mary was the middle sister, somewhat subdued by the dominant – and bossy – qualities of Elizabeth, and by the attention paid to the youngest, Sophia, who was practically an invalid. Nonetheless, Mary managed to become a teacher, writer and reformer. Sophia, beset by devastating migraines, spent most of her early years in bed. But when she had the strength, she painted. In an interview with ThoughtCast, Megan Marshall continues the tale… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support

[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expanding list of American war dead, Carol Bundy‘s biography of a Union officer who sacrifices his life in the Civil War is eerily apt. The Nature of Sacrifice. A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005) tells the story of the short, heroic life of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., an elite young cavalryman who embodied the promise of his generation. An ardent abolitionist and reformer, Lowell was also a brilliant battlefield strategist, and he turned the tide at the Battle of Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, a crucial victory for the North just two weeks shy of Lincoln’s re-election. Shot twice during the fighting, Lowell died at dawn the following day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It does what all good history books should do–tell you something you thought you knew but in fact don’t–but it does it ON EVERY PAGE. I thought Vermeer was X; now I know he was Y. I thought Vermeer was influenced by X; now I understand he was influenced by Y; I thought Vermeer painted X; now I realize he painted Y. I could go on and on, revelation after revelation. The biggest news–or rather the bit that will get the most press–is that a handful of “Vermeers” were in fact painted by his daughter, Maria. Vermeer’s Family Secrets is remarkably well researched and convincingly argued. It’s also lavishly illustrated. So are a lot of art history books. But this one is also intelligently illustrated: the way the pictures are arrayed serves the book’s many arguments. They are not simply eye-candy; they are also brain-candy. And the book is written in a clever

When you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror? We’ve learned a lot about Ezhov’s involvement in the Terror since the opening of Soviet archives in 1991. We know about his fanaticism, how he manufactured confessions, was present at his victims’ torture, and even kept the bullets that killed his victims, wrapped and labeled them, and tucked them in his desk. Less is known about Ezhov before he became the personification of Stalinist political violence. To understand Ezhov’s life before the Terror, we have to turn to J. Arch Getty’s book Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iron Fist (Yale UP, 2008). Getty’s focus isn’t on Ezhov, Stalin’s “iron fist,” but on Ezhov the “good party worker.” In particular, Getty is interested in Ezhov’s meteoric rise through the Party ranks to become the head of the NKVD and, by 1936, the second most powerful person in the Soviet Union. Ezhov’s story is a mix

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010). Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there were one. He believed in the Nazi cause with his heart and soul. He wanted to create a new Germany, and indeed a new Europe dominated by Germans. As the Gauleiter of Wartheland (an area of Western Poland annexed to the Reich), he was given the opportunity to help realize the Nazi nightmare in the conquered Eastern territories. But, as Epstein shows, he was often hindered both by his own personality and the chaos that characterized Nazi occupation of the East. Grieser emerges from Epstein’s book as someone who wanted to be a