New Books In Biography

Jeremy Black’s impressive new book offers an enormously wide-ranging account of the social, political and religious cultures in which England’s greatest dramatist was formed and found success. England in the Age of Shakespeare (Indiana University Press, 2019) draws together Black’s expansive reading in Shakespeare’s contexts with extensive knowledge of the canon of his plays. Black, a professor of history at Exeter University, reads the plays as evidence of Shakespeare’s interest in his changing world. As an English writer, rooted in the very distinctive theological and liturgical arguments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare offers a moral vision of a turbulent and contradictory world. 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 most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogat

Sara Georgini is a historian and series editor for The Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a family biography that explores the Christian republicanism of John and Abigail Adams and how it shaped their view of the origins and destiny of the American nation under the guidance of divine providence. The book charts change in religious culture through the generations with profiles of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, the religious interiority of Charles Frances Adams, the cosmopolitan outlook of the skeptic Henry Adams and the religious renewal experienced by Brooks Adams. Each generation had to reevaluate the usefulness of Christian republicanism  from the new republic, antebellum reform, the Civil War and the emptied-out faith of the Gilded Age. Household Gods not only give us insight into a famous American family through their education, travels, religious inquiry and literary endeavors bu

Mahalia Jackson, the great mid-twentieth century gospel singer, thought of herself as an embodiment of the history of African Americans in the United States. She understood that her family’s background, as they moved from enslavement in Louisiana to farming in the same rural area to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century and then her own move to Chicago with the Great Migration was emblematic of the experiences of generations of black people. In Mahalia Jackson & the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mark Burford describes Jackson as both an exemplary figure and an exceptional figure. Ending the book in 1955 just as Jackson reached the height of her career after she released her first recording with a major label and was hosting her own television show, Burford uses the first part of Jackson’s career to tell the story of the development of gospel music set against her experiences, the networks within which she moved, and the overlapping contexts of black culture and American p

Alex Kay’s The Making of an SS Killer: the Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a must read for those interested in the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and World War II.  Focusing on the actions and consequences of a “front-line Holocaust perpetrator”, Kay’s biographies diverges drastically with the traditional bios of other more well-known Nazis.  Kay argues that Filbert chose to become an exceptional Nazi Party member and his career as well as his life hinged upon what seems to be an unquestionable dedication to the cause.  This book is not only well-researched, but intellectually tantalizing and addictive.  Kay’s narrative hooks you from his introduction and by the time the reader has finished, it is hard to believe that this is based on the facts of Filbert’s life and career.  Instead, it seems almost Hollywood-like in its tensions and its twist of an ending. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

As the wife of a Macedonian king and the mother of three sons who would succeed him, Eurydice played an important role in Macedonia at an important moment in the kingdom’s history. In Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power(Oxford University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney draws upon recent archaeological findings and other sources to reconstruct her role as queen and queen mother during this time. As Carney notes, many of the surviving materials of Eurydice conflict in their portrayal of her personality and actions. With her eldest son Alexander II barely old enough to rule when his father Amyntas III died in 370 BCE, Eurydice was bound to exert considerable influence on the throne, an influence that likely continued after Alexander’s succession by his brother Perdiccas III and even into the reign of Philip II as well. By analyzing the surviving works and detailing the available contemporary materials about Eurydice’s life, Connelly reveals the key role the queen played both in the reign of her so

Kate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography that addresses the puzzle and contradictions of the life of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drawn from never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how choices shaped her life. Beauvoir, a writer and feminist icon, won prestigious literary prizes and scandalized many with her now classic The Second Sex. She is now celebrated, but during her life she was a controversial figure both by conventional and feminists’ standards. As one who chose to write about lived ideas, both in fiction and essays, rather than build philosophical systems she was easily dismissed as Jean-Paul Sartre’s overly loyal side kick. Kirkpatrick shows how Beauvoir’s thinking evolved as a feminist and a philosopher – labels she was reluctant to embrace.  The author reexamines the overemphasis on Beauvoir’s atheism, t

Today I talked to Matthew Crow about his book Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.  Crow studies how Jefferson’s association with legal history was born out of America’s long history as part of an early modern empire and the political thought which preceded him. By examining how Jefferson’s own development within this world, Crow finds that legal history was a mode of organizing and governing collective memory, which Jefferson deployed in his own constitutional, political, and racial thinking. Matthew Crow Associate Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He specializes in Early American, intellectual, and constitutional history. 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/biography

I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more about Napoleon and his time there, but not that all that much it turns out. And then came Mark Braude’s The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile (Penguin Press, 2018)… This unexpected and absorbing book delves into the story of Napoleon’s exile on the island of Elba following his abdication in 1814. After his escape and return to France for the “100 Days,” Napoleon was, of course, finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. The Invisible Emperor explores a period in between the “bigger-ticket” events with which readers may be more familiar, a time and space in which Napoleon at once out of sight and more in contact with everyday people than perhaps at any other point in his career. Written in multiple short chapters comprising four parts that follow the seasons of Bonaparte’s ten-month stay on Elba, Th

"What I feel most moved to write, that is banned―it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the otherway I cannot." Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write "the other way," working exclusively for magazines. He earned more money from his stories than from the combined sales of his most well known novels, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man. In Herman Melville: Among the Magazines (University of Massachusetts Press 2018), Graham Thompson examines the author's magazine work in its original publication context, including stories that became classics, such as "Bartelby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno," alongside lesser-known work. Using a concept he calls "embedded authorship," Thompson explores what it meant to be a magazine writer in the 1850s and discovers a new Melville enmeshed with forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions. He reveals how Melville responded to the practical demands of magazine writing

In his new book, Envisioning A Tibetan Luminary: The Life of a Modern Bonpo Saint (Oxford University Press, 2018), William M. Gorvine provides a multifaceted analysis of Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859-1934), one of the most prominent modern representatives of the Tibetan Bön tradition. Engaging two written versions of Shardza’s life story as well as oral histories gathered during fieldwork in eastern Tibet and Bön exile communities in India, Gorvine explores the ways in which Shardza has been represented and what such representations can tell us about the religious communities in which Shardza operated as well as the genre of religious biography more generally. In the process, Gorvine also provides an accessible introduction to Bön, a religious minority that remains understudied by scholars of Tibet. This book will be of interest to those who are interested in religious biographies and how they related to the religious, literary, and historical contexts in which they were produced. Catherine Hartmann is a PhD c

From his accession to the Spanish throne in 1516 until his abdication in 1556, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V dominated Europe in a way that no ruler had since Charlemagne. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019), Geoffrey Parker draws upon an enormous array of documentation to provide readers with a better understanding of Charles and the many challenges he faced over the course of his decades-long reign. A member of the Habsburg dynasty, Charles stared assuming his inheritance at an early age due to the premature death of his father Philip the Fair. With his election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1520, Charles was sovereign over a realm stretching across central and northwestern Europe to Spain and her rapidly expanding empire in the Americas. The nature of his domains and the challenges he faced, from the persistent military clashes with his French counterpart Francis I to the rise of Lutheranism in Germany, forced Charles to adopt a peripatetic existence, spending much of his reign

There are few better guides to the “long eighteenth century” that J. C. D. Clark, emeritus professor of history at the University of Kansas, whose sequence of ground-breaking books have contested prevailing assumptions about religion, politics and early modernity even as they have worked to construct a chastened but compelling account of British and American society from the Restoration to the Great Reform Act. In his new book, Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), Professor Clark works to deconstruct grand narratives of the “rise of modernity” and the political hagiography that so often surrounds his subject. Paine emerges from this account as an individual whose contribution was made in terms of the traditional language of English reformism as well as the recently established arguments of deism, and whose contribution to the American and French revolutions was accidental – and perhaps even incidental. In this exciting new book,

For all of his fame as one of the seminal figures of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt is a person around whom many misconceptions congregate. In The Life and Legend of James Watt: Collaboration, Natural Philosophy, and the Improvement of the Steam Engine (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), David Philip Miller separates the man from the myth by detailing his numerous accomplishments and showing how the misconceptions formed. The son of a Scottish ships’ chandler, Watt demonstrated interest in both mathematics and technology at an early age. Trained in London as an instrument maker, Watt progressed into civil engineering after his return to Glasgow before turning his attention to improving the efficiency of the steam engines then in existence. His famous innovations proved enormously successful, and Watt’s development of the enhanced engines in partnership with Matthew Boulton made him wealthy enough to devote more time to scientific experimentation. As Miller demonstrates, many of Watt’s achievements

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the changing cultures of Australia and Germany over the past 160 years. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He’s the author of Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth (Camden House, 2018). After the renowned Prussian scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt left the Australian frontier in 1848 on an expedition to cross the continent, he disappeared without a trace. Andrew Hurley's book complicates that view by undertaking an afterlife biography of "the Humboldt of Australia." Although Leichhardt's remains were never located, he has been sought and textually "found" many times over, particularly in Australia and Germany. He remains a significant presence, a highly productive ghost who continues to "haunt" culture. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at

It is hard to overestimate the influence of John Rawls on political philosophy and theory over the last half-century. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and he is one of the few philosophers whose work is known in the corridors of power as well as in the halls of academe. Rawls is most famous for the development of his view of “justice as fairness,” articulated most forcefully in his best-known work, A Theory of Justice. In it he develops a liberalism focused on improving the fate of the least advantaged, and attempts to demonstrate that, despite our differences, agreement on basic political institutions is both possible and achievable. Critics have maintained that Rawls’s view is unrealistic and ultimately undemocratic. In John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice(Harvard University Press, 2019), Andrius Gališanka, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University, argues that in misunderstanding the origins and development of Rawls’s central argument, previous intellectual

On October 15, 1974, Johnny Carson welcomed his next guest on The Tonight Show with these words: “I imagine there are very few people who are not aware of Kathryn Kuhlman. She probably, along with Billy Graham, is one of the best-known ministers or preachers in the country.” But while many people today recognize Billy Graham, not many remember Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–1976), who preached faith and miracles to countless people over the fifty-five years of her ministry and became one of the most important figures in the rise of charismatic Christianity. In The Miracle Lady: Kathryn Kuhlman and the Transformation of Charismatic Christianity (Eerdmans, 2019),Amy Collier Artman tells the story of Kuhlman’s life and, in the process, relates the larger story of charismatic Christianity, particularly how it moved from the fringes of American society to the mainstream. Tracing her remarkable career as a media-savvy preacher and fleshing out her unconventional character, Artman also shows how Kuhlman skillfully navigated

Mary McLeod Bethune was often called the "First Lady of Negro America," but she made significant contributions to the political climate of Florida as well. From the founding of the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in 1904, Bethune galvanized African American women for change. She created an environment in Daytona Beach that, despite racial tension throughout the state, allowed Jackie Robinson to begin his journey to integrating Major League Baseball less than two miles away from her school. Today, her legacy lives through a number of institutions, including Bethune-Cookman University and the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation National Historic Landmark. In her new book Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State(The History Press, 2015), historian Ashley Robertson explores the life, leadership and amazing contributions of this dynamic activist. Adam McNeil is a PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

The carrier task force—the symbolic and physical manifestation of the United States’ ability to project naval and air power across the globe—came of age during the Second World War. Fighting the Imperial Japanese Navy, and closely supporting General MacArthur’s and Admiral Nimitz’s island-hopping campaign, the carrier and its air wing transitioned from being just one more tactical element within the fleet to the formidable strategic weapon we’ve come to know today. Instrumental in bringing about this change was Admiral John Sidney McCain—grandfather of the late Senator John McCain—and the subject of emeritus professor William F. Trimble’s most recent biography, Admiral John S. McCain and the Triumph of Naval Air Power (Naval Institute Press, 2019), published by Naval Institute Press. Taking a multidimensional approach, professor Trimble weaves together the narrative of McCain’s career with the history of a liminal moment in the Navy’s development as an institution, in the ascendency of naval aviation, and in

Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first full-length critical study of Rev. Dr. Prathia Laura Ann Hall (1940–2002), an undersung leader in both the civil rights movement and African American theology. Freedom faith was the central concept of Hall’s theology: the belief that God created humans to be free and assists and equips those who work for freedom. Hall rooted her work simultaneously in social justice, Christian practice, and womanist thought. Courtney Pace examines Hall’s life and philosophy, particularly through the lens of her civil rights activism, her teaching career, and her ministry as a womanist preacher. Moving along the trajectory of Hall’s life and civic service, Freedom Faith focuses on her intellectual and theological development and her radiating influence on such figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, and the early generations of womanist scholars. Hall was one of the first women ordained in the American Bapt