New Books In Biography

Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) by Jin Y. Park, professor of philosophy and religion at American university, is an account of the Korean Buddhist nun, Kim Iryŏp’s life and philosophy, which takes place from 1896-1971. Park eclectically references philosophers, feminists, and Buddhists from a variety of traditions as the context for the events that led to Iryŏp’s transition from a well-known feminist, and writer to a Buddhist nun. More than a story of Kim Iryŏp’s life, Park’s work sees to provide a platform for Kim Iryŏp’s to speak, and answer the questions, “How and why do women engage with Buddhism?” Trevor McManis is an undergraduate student in the Geography program, at California State University, Stanislaus and an aspiring Buddhist Studies Scholar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its diffe

In his latest book, journalist Jay Weiner details the extraordinary life of Professor Hy Berman. Written as an autobiography co-authored by Weiner, Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota’s Greatest Public Historian (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) captures the eloquent, profound, and often humorous voice of one of Minnesota’s most influential citizens. Professor Berman, who passed away in 2015, puts his remarkable life experience on display from his humble beginnings as the son of Jewish immigrants in New York, to his important work alongside Hubert Humphrey and two-time Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich. Filled with funny anecdotes and thoughtful wisdom about how and why we study history, this book truly represents “the last lecture of Minnesota’s greatest public historian.” Jay Weiner spent most his career as a Twin Cities-based journalist, first at the Star Tribune and later at MinnPost, covering sports business issues, the Olympics and, eventually, Minnesota politics. He went on to become the

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz's rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz's life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life. From Left to Right is structured in four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Dawidowicz's childhood,

Alan Taylor is the author of Thomas Jefferson’s Education published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2019. Thomas Jefferson’s Education tells the story of how Jefferson’s vision for educating the next generations of American came to be. Taking readers through Virginia’s, at time struggling, educational infrastructure, Taylor shows how Jefferson’s experience with education was both shaped by and contributed to his own vision of what a university should look like. Culminating in what is today the University of Virginia, Jefferson’s goals were, as Taylor points out, both achieved and left by the wayside in the complicated development of a university and education system. Taylor is Professor of History and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair at the University of Virginia. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/bio

Limning – the painting of miniature portraits – was an important art form in 16th-century Europe. Among its greatest practitioners was Nicholas Hilliard, who enjoyed an international reputation for his skill in crafting the finely wrought images. In Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist (Yale University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Goldring explains how a young man from a family of Exeter goldsmiths became one of the premier artists of his age. Timing was a key factor, as the ascent of the Catholic Queen Mary to the throne in 1553 led the Protestant Hilliard family to decamp for the continent. Exposure to the art styles there influenced the young Hilliard, who after returning to England and completing his apprenticeship as a goldsmith quickly established himself as the foremost miniature portraitist in England. Goldring shows how both Hilliard’s technical skills and his court connections played equal roles in his prominence, over a career that led to a period at the court of the French king Henri III and lasted thr

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen (Yale University Press, 2019), acclaimed historian of 18th-century French history and the biographer of Louis XVI, John Hardman redresses the balance, corrects and tears away the smears and calumny and sheds fresh light and understanding on Marie-Antoinette’s story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the last years of the ancien regime. Drawing on new and or rarely used sources, he describes how, from the outset, Marie-Antoinette refused to prioritize the foreign policy of her mother, the Queen-Empress Maria-Theresa, bravely took over the helm from Louis XVI after the collapse of his morale, and, when revolution broke out, listened to the Third Estate and worked closely with repentant radicals to give

Today I talked to Alfred S. Posamentier, a co-author (with Christian Spreitzer) of Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians (Prometheus, 2020). This charming book is more than just mathematics, because mathematicians are not just makers of mathematics. They are human beings whose life stories are often not just entertaining, but are sometimes interwoven with important historical events. Of course you get the math in this book –but I would have read this book just for the fascinating anecdotes. Just for openers, how many other disciplines have people who made remarkable contributions but were arrested for revolutionary activities in their teens, and then killed in a duel at age 21? This is the story of Evariste Galois, just one of the 50 fascinating lives you'll read about in this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's influence on the remapping of borders was profound. But it was his impact on the modern political structuring of Eastern Europe that would be perhaps his most enduring international legacy: neither Czechoslovakia nor Yugoslavia exist today, but their geopolitical presence persisted across the twentieth century from the end of World War I to the end of the Cold War. They were created in large part thanks to Wilson's advocacy, and in particular, his Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, which hinged in large part on the concept of national self-determination. But despite his deep involvement in the region's geopolitical transformation, President Wilson never set eyes on Eastern Europe, and never traveled to a single one of the eastern lands whose political destiny he so decisively influenced. Eastern Europe, invented in the age of Enlightenment

Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives. In The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Rebecca E. Zietlow recounts the intellectual development of Ashley as an abolitionist and how he sought to turn freedom into a reality for millions of African Americans. As Zietlow explains, an important strain in Ashley’s thinking was his commitment to the free labor ideas prominent in the Democratic Party in the antebellum era. As a committed abolitionist, he played a prominent role in the emergence of the Republican Party in Ohio in the 1850s culminating in his election to Congress in 1858. As a representative during one of the critical period in the nation’s history, Ashley was at the forefront of Con

Many books have been written about Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusscherre and the other great players on the New York Knicks championship teams of the 1970s, though much less attention has been focus on the orchestrator of those teams: Red Holzman. Holzman was a fantastic player and scout before compiling 613 wins (a number which hangs in the rafters at Madison Square Garden) over 14 seasons as the coach of the Knicks. Holzman was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame and was named one of the top 10 coaches in NBA History. But not much is known about the soft-spoken and private Holzman, as he was the type of person to downplay his own accomplishments. Former MSG president Dave Checketts once said, “Red was the finest human being I’ve ever known.” In Red Holzman: The Life and Legacy of a Hall of Fame Basketball Coach (Sports Publishing, 2019), author Mort Zachter has taken on the challenge of sharing this coach’s incredible story. From humble beginnings as the son of immigrant parents grow

In Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sarah Abrevaya Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of one Sephardic family, with roots in the city of Salonica, then in the Ottoman Empire, now Thessaloniki in Greece. The story begins with one of the prominent Jewish citizens of that thriving port city, then follows the family in its dispersion through nine countries across three continents during the most tumultuous and violent years of the twentieth century. This fascinating book is not only a masterful work of archival research but of storytelling. Professor Stein deftly portrays the vivid personalities that comprise the family, even as she teaches valuable lessons about the Sephardic culture in which they were firmly implanted. Professor Stein also ponders important questions about the nature of personal, family, and cultural memories, and the importance of the vanishing art of written correspondence -- and the wa

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analysis of how conditions of political change and fragmentation generate intellectual debates and fermentation on the often-conflictual interaction of certainty, continuity, and community in Muslim thought and practice. Focused on the thought and career of the prominent 11th-century Muslim scholar al-Juwayni (d. 1085), Siddiqui examines the hermeneutical choices, operations, and conundrums that go into the negotiation of epistemic certainty in the realms of law and theology with the imperative of historical change and dynamism. The distinguishing hallmark of this book is the way it conducts a thoroughly interdisciplinary examination of early Muslim intellectual thought by putting Islamic law, theology, and politics into a productive and rather profound conversation. The outcome is a study that combines philological prowe

In Exile Within Exiles: Herbert Daniel Gay Brazilian Revolutionary (Duke University Press, 2018), James N. Green tells the story of Herbert Daniel, a significant and complex figure in Brazilian leftist revolutionary politics and social activism from the mid-1960s until his death in 1992. As a medical student, Daniel joined a revolutionary guerrilla organization but was forced to conceal his sexual identity from his comrades, a situation he described as internal exile. After a government crackdown, he spent much of the 1970s in Europe, where his political self-education continued. He returned to Brazil in 1981, becoming engaged in electoral politics and social activism to champion gay rights, feminism, and environmental justice, achieving global recognition for fighting discrimination against those with HIV/AIDS. In Exile within Exiles, James N. Green paints a full and dynamic portrait of Daniel's deep commitment to leftist politics, using Daniel's personal and political experiences to investigate the oppositi

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell.  While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend

Rupert Lewis has written a biography of Marcus Garvey published by the University Press of the West Indies in 2018. His book Marcus Garvey documents the forging of Garvey’s remarkable vision of pan-Africanism and highlights his organizational skills in framing a response to the radical global popular upsurge following the First World War (1914–1918). Central to Garvey’s response was the development of organizations under the umbrella of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which garnered the transnational support of several million members and sympathizers and challenged white supremacist practices and ideas. Garvey established the ideological pillars of twentieth century pan-Africanism in promoting self-determination and self-reliance for Africa’s independence. Although Garvey travelled widely and lived abroad in New York and London, he spent his early years in Jamaica. Rupert Lewis traces how Garvey’s Jamaican formation shaped his life and thought and how he combated t

Starting in the early 1930s, a small group of academics and writers met weekly in a pub in Oxford, England to discuss literature, religion, and ideas. Known as the Inklings, it was in part from their companionship that some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature were produced. In their book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski focus on four key members of the group to show how their interactions shaped the development of their thinking and of the writings they produced. As Carol Zaleski explains, the four men came to Oxford from different backgrounds and professing different ideas, all of which were at play in their wide-ranging conversations. In gatherings in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College they read aloud drafts of their works, with their subsequent suggestions helping such works as Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet t

As the leader of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles during the 1980s, Father Luis Olivares brazenly defied local Catholic authorities and the federal government by publicly offering sanctuary to Central American migrants fleeing political violence and civil war, and later extending it to undocumented Mexican immigrants unable to legalize their status after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Twenty-five years after the priest’s death, Mario T. García has written the definitive account of Olivares’ life and the beginnings of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles. In Father Luis Olivares, A Biography: Faith Politics and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles (UNC Press, 2018), García traces Olivares’ humble beginnings as a poor boy growing up in San Antonio’s west side barrio to his improbable rise as the “Gucci priest” of the Claretian order. After becoming involved with the Farmworker Movement, which led to an unexpected meeting with César Chávez in the mid-1970s, O

Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University, USA. F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. Professor Boettke correctly argues that: ‘There is certainly little doubt that Hayek was among the most prodigious classical liberal scholars of the twentieth century. Though his 1974 Nobel Prize was in Economic Science, his scholarly endeavors extended well beyond economics.' Peter argued that his political influence (Thatcher, Reagan...) is overemphasized because '...his relationships with those in political power was remote at best as Hayek was never a political consultant to any leader in power; he was