Elizabeth Taylor's Reading List

"With new evidence, Eig enriches our understanding of King and rescues the civil rights leader from what he describes as “the gray mist of hagiography.” He traces the arc of “Little Mike,” son of a Georgia sharecropper, to national prominence as an eloquent advocate for Black rights, as well as a crusader against the Vietnam War and poverty, all the way to Memphis and the Lorraine Motel balcony. Building on more than 200 interviews and recently released FBI files, Eig made national news by debunking a famous quotation about Malcolm X attributed to King, tracks fissures in the civil rights movement, and reveals King’s womanizing. Since the National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists, King: A Life was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. This year two prizes were conferred, and the other equally brilliant biography was Ilyon Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife , which reconstructs an enslaved couple’s daring, arduous escape from Georgia in 1848 to freedom. Widely praised as a biographer, Jon Eig has written about iconic athletes, like baseball players Lou Gehrig ( Luckiest Man ) and Jackie Robinson ( Opening Day ), and more recently Muhammad Ali ( Ali: A Life ) . He also wrote The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution , which has been adapted to the stage. “This set of books, each in its distinctive way, contributed to a substantial revision of history” Even with his track record of prodigiously researched biographies of 20th-century icons, we wondered whether Eig’s biography of King would substantially enrich our understanding of the civil rights leader, particularly after such robust Pulitzer Prize winners as David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Biography, 1987) and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 (History, 1989). Considering Eig’s King alongside the works of Garrow and Branch reveals that cradle-to-grave biographies are more than paint-by-number books. Within the constraints of that canvas, the shapes and hues can be wildly different. Considering these books together was an object lesson not only in interpretation but also in approach and reveals that new evidence is to be discovered and interpreted."

"Yes, this is quite a detective story—the discovery of an unpublished 19th-century manuscript, and then the historical excavation work to identify its author by more than her pen name. This is biography as active team sport! Brief background: About two decades ago, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. purchased a handwritten, unpublished manuscript titled The Bondswoman’s Narrative at an auction. He authenticated the gathered pages, handwritten in the 1850s by a woman using the name Hannah Crafts. Thought to be the earliest novel by a Black, it was a harrowing saga describing the cruel abuse the protagonist endured before escaping to freedom. In detailing these horrors of her daily life, the author left clues to her true identity. Furman University professor Hecimovich worked with the tools of a gumshoe, the sensibilities of a literary scholar, the nuanced perspective of a historian, and the congeniality of a tour guide as he shared with readers his search through public records, handwritten diaries and almanacs, wills, and slave inventories. He finally revealed the writer to be Hannah Bond, who had learned to read and write as an enslaved house servant in North Carolina before escaping to the North."

"Anna May Wong’s likeness appears on a U.S. silver quarter, yet today she is largely forgotten. Huang’s biography, though, is more than an act of reclamation. Daughter of the Dragon is the capstone in Huang’s ambitious trilogy—each an NBCC finalist —spotlighting Asian American cultural icons, starting with fictional Honolulu cop Charlie Chan, then the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker. We admired Huang’s deftly drawn portrait of Wong. A beguiling and unique beauty, Wong rose to prominence in the swirl of anti-Asian hostility. In his deeply researched biography, Huang argues that Wong was seen as too Asian by some and too American by others, and that she overacted to explode stereotypes of Asian Americans. He explains the “delicate dance between stereotype and imagination, convention and subversion” that has made Anna May Wong “both revered and reviled.” “Between Madame Butterfly and the dragon lady, there lies the alluring art through which Anna May continues to haunt us all,” Huang writes."

"Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique challenged the midcentury myth of suburban women’s domestic fulfillment, tapped into the often-inchoate frustrations of housewives and mothers, and ignited the second wave of the ‘contemporary’ women’s movement when it was published in 1963. Friedan’s manifesto sold more than a million copies and won legions of fans who had silently shouldered the drudgery of housework and the glorification of motherhood. Yet, within a few years, Friedan was mocked and shunned by younger feminists who protested that she was too white and middle-class, and that her focus on legal and economic equality was too narrow. Through nearly 100 interviews with those who knew Friedan and her own deep archival research, Shteir argues for an understanding of Friedan beyond her image as a pugnacious rebel detached from the newer generation of feminists like Gloria Steinem. Shteir’s biography is a perfect fit for Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series, as she captures young Betty Friedan, a “short, pudgy bibliophile” and a precocious Jewish girl from a Reform, upper-middle-class family in St. Louis, as she endured hostility and anti-Semitism. Interested in labor, unions and theater, Friedan was a quarrelsome nonconformist with a temper who graduated from Smith College, was a fractious founder of the National Organization for Women, visionary and paranoid, unyielding in continuing conflicts that by her death in 2006 had cemented her image as uncompromising and resistant to a capacious women’s movement — one that was in sync with calls for racial equality and anti-war activity. Shteir’s recognition of her accomplishments and appreciation of her principles go a long way to rewrite Friedan’s life and legacy."

"Winnie and Nelson is more than a dual biography. In his powerful book, Jonny Steinberg, a South African journalist, penetrates the mythology of the Mandelas’ fraught marriage to tell the story of apartheid. Steinberg writes a portrait of the Mandela marriage as a window to a country struggling to come to terms with itself. Both Nelson and Winnie Mandela were wounded souls, deeply scarred by apartheid, by the time they met at a bus stop in the Black township of Soweto. Social worker Winnie was just 20 years old, and Nelson was nearly two decades her senior, married, a father of small children, and was on trial for treason when they married 15 months later. During his nearly three decades of imprisonment, Winnie was allowed to visit only a few times, and she became more militant and prone to violence as Nelson became more conciliatory. The author of earlier books about South Africa and its transition to democracy, Steinberg shares with readers his discomfort in benefiting from transcripts of secretly taped, verbatim transcripts of Mandela’s conversations with his few visitors—Winnie, his children, and government officials, with whom he discussed secret matters—including one who stole the transcripts which eventually ended up in a private collection. Steinberg is empathic in his depictions of Winnie and Nelson Mandela, and it is painful to read about this deeply wounded couple, battling both the state and one each other. Ezra Pound famously observed that poetry is “news that stays news.” The same can be said for biography. These works of biography illustrate that the boundaries between history and news are porous, and that new evidence can be uncovered from both the best-known figures and the obscure."

"You have that just right: Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo through the life of Tsuneno, daughter of a Buddhist priest in a rural province at a moment that Japan ’s transformation is taking root. Tsuneno attends school, learns to sew and dreams of the big city. At age 12, she is married off and dispatched to an even more remote province. Three failed marriages later, she literally walks for weeks on a horrific journey to reach Edo where, impoverished and degraded, she proves to be a skilful survivor, finding a form of independence to which she clings, even after she marries a louche of a samurai . She dies in 1853, just before Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan. She was remarkably resilient and tenacious, but Tsuneno was also rebellious, troublesome and not entirely likeable. And her death brought me to tears. Stanley renders Tsuneno’s messy life, unique struggles and the quotidian particulars of her world so richly that this Japanese woman from another era becomes achingly human and resonant. Tsuneno emerges as a sort of everywoman who transcends time and is more than a vessel to represent Edo’s transformation into Tokyo and Japan’s path to power. “It’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city” Stanley, an historian of early and modern Japan, happened to find a letter from Tsuneno hidden in an archive online which led her to Japan and the discovery of a rich archive of letters written by Tsuneno which had been saved by her family, along with a trove of documents. Stanley is quite understated about this dedication and accomplishment. As she explains in the book, she reads and speaks Japanese, but the brushstrokes of 200 years ago posed quite a challenge. Stanley photographed everything from the archive, and painstakingly translated it all to create a narrative of Tsuneno’s life through her very detailed and personal letters. Stanley has recovered a lost world. Drawing on her knowledge of the history, Stanley contextualizes the letters, which enhances their power. So, it’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city and its evolving culture. This biography is such a sharp reminder of the importance of archives. I fear that we will soon face a future in which we will have to rely on redacted government documents. The victors will dominate the narrative, and the stories of the powerless will vanish unless we work to preserve them. With email replacing letters and so much news disappearing online, we need a coordinated effort to create new archives, especially for those who may not have reached a moment of fame, or infamy. I try not to look at the publishing history of books as they come up for awards and, instead, focus on the book itself. So I don’t know the particulars here, but kudos to Scribner on this one. My sense, though, is that there’s increasing enthusiasm to recover forgotten, overlooked figures and histories and that Stanley’s book could find a wide audience. While we—the NBCC—consider Stranger in the Shogun’s City a biography, if I were pitching this book I could see it as work of history or narrative nonfiction , a book to assign in East Asian history classes, or those involving gender and women. From the publishing perspective, there have been bestselling novels like Shogun by James Clavell and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden that were made into films. And, of course, I would like that the universal quality in Stranger in the Shogun’s City would have publishers clamoring."

"I’m not sure that the ‘Bloomsberries,’ as Virginia Woolf named them, were sombre in Carter’s vivid depictions! The Price of Peace is a biography of an eminent, visionary economist, the story of how John Maynard Keynes came to his revolutionary ideas, refined and advanced them through his life and how they came to dominate economic thought. Carter makes a bold move as a biographer: Keynes dies in 1946 on page 390, but Carter gallops on for a good 250 more pages, tracing the battles over Keynesianism as they evolved through the New Deal, McCarthyism and the 2008 financial crisis. Carter captures the ideological warfare between luminary intellectuals like James K. Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and even extends to the monumental 2015 National Book Critics Circle finalist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century . Carter begins his book with Keynes in midlife, as he’s falling in love with the Russian ballerina who became his wife, a critical turning point that informed his philosophy—and illustrates Keynes as a tangle of paradox. He was a pacifist who advocated for war. He was married to a woman but had serious amorous relationships with men. He’s so interesting, and was, at that time, quite radical. People are still debating his ideas, he was really ahead of his time. Clearly Keynes is comfortable with contradiction and his ideas are often counterintuitive—the notion, as Paul Krugman put it: “Your income is my expense and my income is your expense.” Spending more to get out of a financial depression continues to be debated. Back to your question about intellectual biography, Carter’s book illustrates that ideas originate in lived experience, and he illuminates Keynes’s experience and shows how it took root. One may think of Keynes as an economist, but Keynesianism is much more than that—he has views on war, art, culture and a vision of fairness. Keynes had a dream of a fairer and more fulfilling life for all. Carter’s writing about economic theory is so lucid, so colourful, and such a pleasant surprise for me. Indeed, that is right. We can see the drama playing out today in America with the intense battles over President Joe Biden’s Covid stimulus and relief bill. Carter seems to suggest that Keynes would have been frustrated by growing inequality and that his radical vision withered, leaving us with the question of whether good ideas can triumph on their own. The question Carter poses was: did Keynes believe that good ideas would triumph on their own? One comes away from this book thinking that Keynesianism is not a school of thought as much as a spirit of radical optimism. Perhaps not salacious but absolutely interesting to read about. At Cambridge Lytton Strachey was impressed by Keynes’s “active brain” and recruited him to the group although he was just a freshman. Keynes and Strachey were lovers but it was a rivalrous friendship, and Keynes made a habit of poaching Strachey’s lovers. He wasn’t an artist, as others were in Bloomsbury; Keynes expressed feelings of inferiority and Strachey and Clive Bell sneered at his aesthetic judgement. Keynes’s time with the Bloomsbury set, Carter argues, was a formative experience in which Keynes became skeptical of rules of conduct and edicts from the ruling elite and developed political sympathies and keen interest in the Liberal Party. His relations with the Bloomsbury crowd seemed to provide him with a keen understanding of the post- World War One world. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He has this great line: “If Germany is to be milked, she must not first of all be ruined.” Once again, he’s prophetic. Prophecy and history… This reminds me that two of the biographies we’re discussing were written by journalists who toggle between history and journalism. I have read Zachary Carter’s excellent journalism in the Huffington Post and for years read Les Payne’s Pulitzer Prize winning work in Newsday . Both have written biographies that are the richer for their fluid storytelling and research tenacity."

"Landmark indeed, and brave. It follows Malcolm Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2012 and The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm which was published in 1965 to great acclaim. The Payne biography is a rebuke to those who insist that if a subject has won the attention of one biographer, it is off the market to others. New evidence can be unearthed, existing evidence can be challenged or lead to other inquiries. Perspective, structure, and expression matter. Payne has elevated oral history and narrative to an art form and excavates Malcolm X’s origin story, from his birth as Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska to his assassination in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City’s Washington Heights. Payne captures the winding arc of Malcom’s life through the death of his father—which Malcolm believed to be nefarious, and Payne disproves—and the confinement of his mother in a psychiatric hospital. As a troubled adolescent, he landed in prison while his brothers, who Payne interviewed, found their way to the Nation of Islam. Malcolm joined them, and transformed into an evangelist for Black self-respect and a fierce critic of white America. “The Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive” It is remarkable that the Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive through thousands of eyewitness reports and personal documents. They went way beyond the declassified FBI files and secondhand stories of the legend of Malcolm’s transformation. Payne may have drawn on his journalistic skills to build this biography on firsthand accounts and oral history, but he also worked as a historian to contextualize these contradicting accounts and synthesize them into an extraordinary narrative. Payne writes the 20th-century American history of the Nation of Islam and situates Malcom in these ideological battles— through his parents, who adhered to Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of self-reliance, Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism; through activist intellectuals like W E B Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. Payne explains Malcolm X’s route to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, including his break from them which led to his assassination. Payne shows his experience as an investigative reporter, especially regarding the recovery of details involving the plot to kill Malcolm. Indeed. Payne confirms that the assassination order came directly from Muhammad’s headquarters in Chicago to the gunmen. We also learn that Malcolm, on the direction of Elijah Muhammad, met with Ku Klux Klan leaders in 1961 about a land deal. It turned out that the Klansmen were really set on the assassination of Martin Luther King, which led to Malcolm’s break with the Nation of Islam. These revelations establish the historic record, but—without diminishing their importance—explosive disclosures make a news story not a biography. What distinguishes Payne’s biography of Malcolm X is the multiplicity of voices and evidence, and his creation of a richly rewarding narrative."

"Personally, I share your enthusiasm about all matters Plath. As a critic, let me say that Clark not only unearths new evidence about Plath’s life but also brings a fresh, subtle and nuanced critical perspective to her work. Plath is mythologised and pathologised; she has come to be seen as an icon or a victim, a “high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death,” as Clark writes. What Clark does here is recover Sylvia Plath as an aesthetically accomplished, important poet. Clark discovered letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist, delved into the Plath family history (including her father’s FBI file and grandmother’s institutionalization), found a portion of Plath’s last novel, and used her unpublished diaries and creative work as well as police, hospital and court records. She also drew from an archive that opened in 2020 which contained scores of interviews with Plath’s contemporaries in the 1970s for an uncompleted biography. From the start, Clark is clear in her intention to reposition Plath as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. I was skeptical initially, because the biography weighs in at 1118 pages. Well, 937 pages without notes. But after the prologue, I was hooked. Clark nestles details so deftly in flowing narrative prose and successfully positions Plath in the era. It’s literally a heavy book, but Clark writes with a light touch, evoking Plath’s psychological and poetic landscape as well as her social milieu. Well known now as the wife of Ted Hughes, Plath emerges so clearly in her other relationships. Clark vivifies Plath not only as a mother, but also a daughter who was just eight years old when her father died, leaving her to be raised by her single mother. Plath grew up at a harrowing and difficult time for German immigrants in America, during and before the Second World War . Plath’s father Otto was repeatedly investigated and eventually detained by the FBI but, as Clark shows, he renounced his German citizenship in 1926 and watched Hitler’s rise with trepidation. ‘Daddy’ runs through the biography and Clark tracks interpretations and it’s almost as if those reveal more about the perceiver than the poem. For some, ‘Daddy’ is a rallying cry for feminists, others believe it reflects Plath’s youth and others damn it for appropriating the Holocaust . Clark makes clear that Plath’s father was a committed pacifist. In addition to his German heritage, Clark suggests that as a professor and scientist, he embodied patriarchal authority and a kind of imperial aggression just as resentment of her husband was boiling. There’s also an argument that the poem is based on an entirely different person, her friend’s father who abandoned his family to join the fascist Blackshirts. Clark reveals Plath wrestling with ‘Daddy’ in successive drafts, with one reading like an elegy, and others more resilient and forgiving. The poem’s placement in Ariel , published posthumously and out of her control, possibly shifted its meaning. I could talk about ‘Daddy’ all day but would much rather read about it in Clark’s biography! Clark argues that Plath’s aesthetic impulse was more surrealist than confessional and that ‘Daddy’ illustrated that Plath had her finger on the pulse of contemporary poetry. As a reader, I could hear Plath’s mother preaching: “excel, but conform.” While Sylvia Plath is known for her death, Clark shows how hard she worked, how many poems she sent out before she found success. Clark reads Plath’s juvenile short stories and poetry really seriously, and asks questions: how did she get to be who she was? Clark recognizes Plath’s incredible ambition and dedication to her work. Yes. Clark makes a powerful argument for it through her analysis of Plath’s poetry. The Sylvia Plath that emerges as a poet from these pages is stronger and more sophisticated than she has been credited. Yes, Plath took her own life, and is synonymous with madness and tragedy, but Clark has shattered the mythology and placed Sylvia Plath in the canon as one of the most important writers of the century."

"First, that sly, smart title. Radcliffe College President Mary Bunting had the brilliant idea to support “intellectually displaced women.” By that, she meant women whose ambitions as artists and intellectuals had been thwarted by gender expectations and the demands of domesticity, marriage and motherhood. The College’s Institute for Independent Study would provide hefty stipends, private offices and its resources to a group of women who had “either a doctorate or its equivalent” in creative achievement. Bunting described it as her “messy experiment.” In The Equivalents , Maggie Doherty captures that glorious mess. She focuses on five women artists: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, sculptor Marianna Pineda, painter Barbara Swann from the East Coast and fiction writer Tillie Olsen, mother of four from San Francisco who had been a community organizer and aspired to write the great proletarian novel. None of them had PhDs; they nicknamed themselves ‘the Equivalents’. The Equivalents is magnificent social history, a collective snapshot of an overlooked moment in American feminism; we meet these women crossing the bridge between first and second wave feminism. The institute provided them with the rooms of their own to which Virginia Woolf had aspired, but it turned out they needed more of E M Forster’s edict to “only connect.” With insight and subtlety, Doherty explains the alchemy of solitude and community as “ideal conditions for artistic growth.” They read one another’s work and collaborated on projects. The deep creative bond between the charismatic poets—Sexton and Kumin—provides a narrative backbone. Their friendships revealed the importance of the collective, and how they really did give and draw strength from one another. The idea of five women artists being freed—receiving money and office space and affiliation from Radcliffe was really radical and groundbreaking. Olsen was, in many ways, the outlier of the group. In a crowd of upper-class Boston and New England women, Olsen was from the West Coast, not at all part of the eastern intelligentsia. While others used stipends to pay for nannies and domestic help, Olsen often had to borrow money. She was sort of a Marxist and emphasized that women—and all people—could be creative and fulfil their promise. A very important corrective. I suspect that the women of The Equivalents found Radcliffe a turning point where they could do that. But, knowing that Betty Friedan was an early visitor, they also talked about equity – and the “problem that had no name.” This was a space where a woman could discover that the wandering, absent husband, or the imperious male colleague was not her problem alone. As Doherty writes, these shared confidences could lead a woman to realize that “there was nothing wrong with her, but there might be something wrong with the world.” I would just raise the ante on the Bechdel test and suggest that a book must contain a scene in which mothers talk to one another about anything other than their children! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Doherty captures so well the intensity and vicissitudes of these relationships. One can feel moments when Sexton’s needs are too much for Kumin, for instance. Then there’s the electricity of collaboration between mediums, for instance Swann’s artwork appears on the poets’ book covers. The Equivalents arrived as “well-behaved women” and may not have thought of themselves as feminists, but their determined efforts at self-expression radiated out into the world and laid the groundwork for revolution. In closing her sublime book, Doherty relates that when Bunting was asked why her “messy experiment” was so successful, she modestly responded: “We spoke to their condition.” Doherty closes her marvellous book with a call to arms: “Women today live under new conditions. It is time for another messy experiment and for a new group of women to speak.”"

"We recognised Weegee’s photographs—they are unique and unmistakable—but knew little of the man behind the camera. We had only Weegee’s—or Fellig’s—account of his own life: Weegee by Weegee . Bonanos entwined Weegee’s evolution as a person and as a photographer and placed this story in the context of the emergence of street photography and crime photography. He vivified that that moment when technology—the camera in Weegee’s hands and imagination, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing New York—captured a rich, stark world in a revolutionary way. Weegee declared himself as “the world’s greatest living photographer” and Bonanos captures the self-mythologizing Weegee with his Speed Graphic, beating out his competition to depict accidents and disasters—as well as high-society—with his distinctive noir touch. Bonanos tracks Weegee into his sad declining years and makes a case for Weegee’s influence and his enduring images that functioned as little one-act plays of great human drama. Like many of us, Weegee was probably not the most faithful witness of his own life. Biographers can use autobiographies as a lens that reveals how someone wishes to be seen. They can be helpful in that way, but they are a slant on a life and are a literary art form that shouldn’t substitute for a rigorous, illuminating biography that takes the full measure of a life. Who doesn’t want to be hero of their own story? Bonanos brings extraordinary insight to Weegee and his times, and I’m not sure that Weegee himself would have had the perspective to make his life and work meaningful for readers. Autobiographies at midlife are meaningful and revealing in their own way, but they are not biographies that can endure the test of time. They are more a report from the front, a sanitised dispatch from the trenches of life. The recent past poses both advantages and disadvantages for a biographer. On the positive side, one can interview those who lived in that era, and sources—undigitised newspapers, for instance—can be easier to locate. That said, the distant past can be a bit more elusive, and this requires being more ingenious about locating resources and clues. Fortunately, for me, that treasure hunt is endlessly fascinating. What characters read, what they ate and how they dressed can be revealing, but my personal rule is to avoid conjecture on what characters think as that is a sticky wicket of unreliability, and no substitute for evidence."

"Oh, my gosh, yes—there seems to be endless fascination with royals even on this side of the pond, from the tabloids and gossip magazine to The Crown and the naughty sister Margaret. Even apart from this endless preoccupation with the royals, Brown tapped into the universal appeal of a woman’s public downfall. In theatre, literature and art, there’s an endless fascination with a woman teetering on the precipice of public disaster, or even embarrassment. “What characters read, what they ate and how they dressed can be revealing, but my personal rule is to avoid conjecture on what characters think ” Brown makes Margaret an interesting, complex figure, and pushes the traditional form of biography by contending with both a life and the spectacle of a life. In many ways, Brown’s book is about perceptions and how human life resists narrative boundaries and suggests that the subject and record are in an ongoing conversation with one another. It raises fascinating questions about the formation of public impressions and somehow, in creating this multi-faceted form, is also profoundly empathic. Beyond the delicious details, Brown’s biography is a fascinating perspective on celebrity and media. I should note that I personally like biographies that push the form beyond the dutiful cradle-to-crave and are more kaleidoscopic. That’s a very interesting thought. I do think imagination is an underrated skill in biography. That isn’t to say that there should be anything less than a fidelity to fact, but rather that facts are the foundation from which biographers can imagine a life."

"What a dramatic story, and way to look at America. They arrived as freaks, winning freedom from the oppressive men who brought them from Thailand for a traveling show, until they married two sisters who bore them 21 children, two of whom served in the Confederate army. After the Civil War, the Bunkers lost their money and went back on the road as entertainment, often accompanied by several of their children along for display. By mimicking Southern gentry, they challenged what we think of as ‘normal.’ Huang has a full command of the Bunkers’ dramatic story of how these oppressed men became oppressors. “By mimicking Southern gentry, they challenged what we think of as ‘normal’” As incredible as Chang and Eng’s story was to read, I gravitated toward Huang’s footnotes which revealed both his far-reaching research, his fidelity to fact and creative location of sources. As I read biographies, I often begin with footnotes. I’m eager to discern the reliability and originality of sources, and Huang’s research stretched from the rivers of Siam—now Thailand—to the hamlets of North Carolina, specifically the Bunker’s houses located in the town on which Andy Griffith’s Mayberry was modelled. The research into that Tar Heel culture is completely fascinating, and Huang really dug into the Bunker’s meticulously maintained financial records. As our reviewer Ann Fabian wrote in The National Book Review , Huang provided a master class in decoding financial ledgers. Although the twins were inseparable, he made us see them as separate people, and their story is rich with irony, right down to marrying Southern belle sisters. Right? An image that it hard to shake, and prompts readers to ask themselves about the power of blanking out, and psychological removal more generally. Inseparable is so rich in its exploration of inclusion and exclusion, the hierarchy of ethnicity, and the shifting dynamics of power."

"Bald Philip Johnson with his black, classic, round eye-glasses may be a familiar image to some. He is known as the architect for famous creations like Glass House and Four Seasons. Lamster placed Johnson within the context of the evolution of architecture and the emergence of the architect as star and chronicles the story of a great American reinvention. Lamster draws upon his own deep knowledge of architectural history and trends, digs into Johnson’s past and traces his origins in Cleveland, Ohio to Harvard, from curator to modern and post-modern architect and winner of the inaugural Pritzker Architecture Prize. Lamster captures the forces animating Johnson in his quest for celebrity and recognition and how he made the American public pay attention to architecture. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Entwined with this story of Johnson’s self-designed evolution as an architect is his dark side. Lamster exposes Johnson’s contradictions, but he also discerns a straight line from the architect’s affection for fascism in the 1930s with his architecture. While this connection may not have been unknown, Lamster really illuminates it and deals with the incredible contradictions of Johnson. I’m personally drawn to contradictory characters, and biography is a wonderful way to get into that dynamic—as we’ve seen in the other NBCC Biography finalists—inclusion and exclusion, liberation and oppression, entitled and dispossessed. Architecture is a fascinating lens through which to see the world. Last year, I loved the biography by Wendy Lesser about Louis Kahn and I’m eagerly awaiting Paul Hendrickson’s forthcoming book about Frank Lloyd Wright . I thought that Lamster wrote about post-modernism and Johnson’s architecture so deftly, and, like our other NBCC biography finalists is resonant today. You’re exactly right, that’s the perfect insight. Lamster has written a biography , not an antiseptic analysis of the buildings. He captures the theatricality of Philip Johnson and connects it with the morass of right-wing politics within the trajectory that moved from neoclassical architecture to his brand of postmodernism. We’re going to have to vote for one winner in the end. It’s going to be impossible! These are wonderful new biographies."

"Yes, back to your last thought. There’s also a great interest with The Big Fella in this day and age where athletes are such celebrities. Babe Ruth was an extraordinary baseball player and Leavy makes that case in the context of the emergence of athletic stardom and celebrity. This is not a mere recounting of statistics; Leavy gives Babe Ruth a place in cultural history. Leavy zeroes in on the agent who set the great baseball player on a nationwide tour, a sort of barnstorming. Essentially, in that radio age, Babe Ruth campaigned to be a modern celebrity. With this fifth 2019 finalist, one can discern a theme in these biographies. These are figures who were attuned to celebrity and to its unique power. Financial reward was part of this calibration, certainly, but with that came the imprimatur of success and a place in history. Speaking as one who personally prefers reading to watching athletic competitions and has always actively avoided any games with round objects, Leavy is an invaluable guide through the world of America’s greatest pastime. I think there is enough baseball for the hard-core aficionados, but this is biography as cultural history. Again, the themes of celebrity develop through Ruth’s slightly creepy agent, but it’s also about a boy with a talent, basically an orphan who went on to great success. In many ways, this is a classic rags to riches story, albeit one with an able assist from a canny agent who came from advertising and was comfortable pitching products. “Isn’t God supposed to be dead? Or is it poetry?” Leavy focuses his biography on the ‘barnstorming tour’ after the 1927 World Series, when huge numbers of people came out to see Ruth and he developed a hold on the American imagination. Avoiding the minutiae about player statistics, rivalries, trades and the nuances of strategy, Leavy focuses on what was happening behind the scenes. She also deals really well with the scandals in his life, including his philandering. She recognises his eagerness to appear with African Americans when it was a fairly brave thing to do. You see him as a kind of limited guy, but also one who came from a horrific childhood so that it was amazing that he made it to where he did, I think. You’re right! Isn’t God supposed to be dead? Or is it poetry? As I reflect over the last years judging biographies, I really do believe that biography as a genre is flourishing and far from wilting away. Please keep in mind that there’s a bit of self-interest at work here—I’m working on a collective biography right now. My sense is that the old-fashioned, cradle-to-grave biographies of Great Men that weigh in at 1,000 pages may be vanishing, but there seems to be a genuine curiosity about how others have tried to make sense of the world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Biographers have benefited by the proliferation of resources made accessible by technology. There is no substitute for walking in the footsteps of those about whom we are writing, but now we can spend time going to these places rather than devoting days to ill-functioning microfiche machines in freezing cold archives. Until recently, the NBCC placed autobiography/memoir and biography in a single committee. My initial fret about separating them into two weaker categories was unfounded because there’s been a real resurgence in high-quality biographies, and prizes that reward them. There’s also a wonderful group called Bio, the Biographers International Organisation, that goes beyond prizes and supports the genre with resources and a conference devoted to the craft of biography. So, onward biography! And to deciding which of these five wonderful biography finalists will be chosen collectively by the National Book Critics Circle to win the 2019 award in Biography. There were so many other truly excellent biographies this year and so many of them deserve more attention. To answer your question: Biography is far from dead. Biography, like so much literature, evolves and flourishes. As long as we have discerning readers, they will push and elevate the writing and newly energised methods of research and reporting that yield excellent new biographies. The National Book Critics Circle winners will be announced in a public ceremony on March 14, 2019, following a reading by finalists on March 13, 2019. Read more in the best books of 2019 interview series."

"Yes. At the centre of King’s fascinating book is Columbia University’s Franz Boas (1858–1942), the father of cultural anthropology, who challenged his era’s prevailing wisdom that race, gender and sexuality were destiny. He argued against eugenics and contemporary theories of racial distinction between humans. His work culminated with his theory of relativism, which discredited the prevailing conviction that Western civilization was superior to simpler societies. While Boas championed cultural diversity and scientific discovery, he also created an environment that inspired a circle of visionary women researchers who were pathbreaking. The book is kaleidoscopic, and its title comes from Zora Neale Hurston, one of Boas’s students whose fieldwork work led to her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God . Margaret Mead’s fieldwork with adolescent girls led to her seminal work of anthropology, Coming of Age in Samoa . From her work on post-World War II Japan and Pueblo culture, Ruth Benedict shaped approaches to history and death. Ella Cara Deloria focused on Sioux folklore and legends. “Boas championed cultural diversity and scientific discovery, and created an environment that inspired a circle of visionary women researchers” At a time when women were beginning to chafe at the patriarchal social order, Boas encouraged them to find their work and share it with an audience. Together, they broke new ground and acknowledged differences of colour, gender, custom and ability, yet set forth an expansive vision of normalcy and humanity in a multicultural world. The pioneering work of Boas and his students is particularly interesting to consider in an increasingly tribal America. By showing how these female anthropologists came to their new ideas, King enriches the experience so that readers can grasp how radical and forward-thinking they really were. Boas’s researchers came to terms with their own cultural biases and grasped the common humanity linking the people of Polynesia, the American South and Native America. King evokes the qualities that make each one of them brilliant in her own distinctive way, and gets at the alchemy that connects them. King could have done five separate biographies in one volume, but as a narrative, he makes clear how they shaped, challenged and refined one another’s ideas."

"We need to look back to the ‘welfare queen’ meme that took root in Ronald Reagan ’s failed 1976 presidential campaign. As the author of The Queen explains, the phrase was taken from the headlines of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s Chicago Tribune investigation of Linda Taylor, a Cadillac-driving, fur-clad woman who scammed the system and was code for a lazy con artist. The myth took hold and fuelled public hysteria about cadging money that honest folks had worked hard to earn. She became the poster person for welfare abuse. Yes, thank you. In The Queen , Levin sets out to find the real Linda Taylor, but it turns out that in this case, the reality really is more interesting than the story of a self-interested politician campaigning on fake news. There really was a Cadillac-driving scam artist called Linda Taylor, and in a feat of investigative reporting Josh Levin subverts the myth and reconstructs her life. It turns out that welfare fraud was the least of her problems. Through her many aliases, Levin found that she served time in prison, and may have murdered someone. She was both victim and victimizer; Linda Taylor was abused as a child growing up in the Jim Crow South. She abandoned her own children and is accused of selling others on the black market. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Perhaps this is also a cautionary tale about daily journalism, because Linda Taylor became known to reporters after she called the Chicago police to report a burglary. Her complicated story eluded journalists of the day who wrote her off as a welfare cheat, but Levin relentlessly digs into court transcripts, old property deeds and police records story to find a troubled, complicated woman, making clear in his footnotes how he documented her elusive story. Levin’s stamina and creative search for evidence in this book is extraordinary, especially considering how elusive she was and how many identities she assumed. Perhaps I should note how important a sympathetic imagination is for the writing of biography. In The Queen , Levin shows how the newspaper headline became a campaign issue, but that her story is far more interesting than the myth. This is a book that operates on so many different levels. It’s about American myth-making, and it’s also a hugely revealing social and psychological story about race, segregation, identity and a damaged person who went on to damage others. The Queen is not a policy book, but the implications of the single narrative are clear. Linda Taylor came to prominence during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign; his slogan at this moment when history coalesced was “Let’s make America great again.” And of course, Trump’s MAGA theme was on the horizon. So many interesting parallels. We haven’t even gotten to the anti-immigrant populist nationalism!"

"Yes, provocateur is fair! Of this year’s National Book Critics Circle biography finalists, one could argue that L.E.L is probably the most traditional, in the sense that it’s a chronological narrative about an overlooked artist from the past. As a group of literary critics, I think we at the NBCC have a soft spot for literary biographies, or perhaps we give them their due because we fully appreciate the intellectual dexterity required to segue between the life of a writer and what she writes. Over the years, we’ve honored quite a few of these. Recent winners have included Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser and Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, both of which set a very high standard. In L.E.L. , which was the semi-anonymous nom de plume of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Lucasta Miller sets out to reclaim Landon’s literary accomplishments and establish her as a bridge between Romanticism and Victorianism . Miller contends that Landon’s work has been overlooked and perhaps made invisible because she was regarded as popular writer whose feminine poetry was dismissed, and that she should be considered from a contemporary perspective as ‘proto-postmodern,’ sort of postmodernist in training. Structurally, Miller does something very smart with her biography of Landon. She begins with Landon’s mysterious death—was it murder? Suicide? Accident? She turns the adage ‘chronology is your friend’ upside down and begins with the end. In suspenseful way, Miller recounts how this innocent ingenue and sex siren controlled her public image. She had three children, kept a secret from her public, who thought she was a virgin. She has sexual relations with her mentor who also promoted her career, and, as you said, she wrote scandalous poetry. Defying the norms of the day, L.E.L.’s poetry was risky, bold, flirtatious and sly. Very well put by The Atlantic . Some might say that men and the public used her, but I think she used them right back. Landon was a woman making a living by her pen at a time when that was frowned upon. She was this upwardly-mobile woman whose provocations distracted others from noticing her self-sufficiency. Perfect. While perhaps lyric sophistication is not her strength, L.E.L. really does pack a punch."

"Within the first few chapters of Our Man , I was reminded of one of my favorite biographies ever: Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Lippmann (1889–1974) was a reporter and commentator who was also involved in government. For six decades Lippmann was at the center of American political life—where the striving, almost great diplomat Richard Holbrooke yearned to be. As different as Walter Lippmann and Richard Holbrooke may have been, biographers Steel and Packer place them within the rich context of the quarrels, triumphs, friendships and alliances of the American century. The American century is a shorthand for roughly the 20th century, when the American empire was born, flourished, matured, and finally began to diminish by about 2000, although it could be argued that the war in Vietnam marked the decline of American influence in the world. Steel’s Lippmann and Packer’s Holbrooke were outsized men on the world stage who separately mirrored the waxing and waning of the American empire. In Our Man , Packer does the impossible. He takes Holbrooke’s story—a mid-level ‘almost great’ diplomat who was an idealist, but also an egotist, whose insatiable need for influence mirrored America’s anxious place in the world. From Vietnam to Afghanistan and the Balkans, Holbrooke yearned for recognition, and ultimately failed in his quest to become Secretary of State. “You just can’t help rooting for this deeply flawed man” Packer builds a trust by breaking down the fourth wall and speaking directly to readers. “Do you mind if we hurry through the early years?” he asks. Scrupulously documented, at times Packer seems like he is channeling Holbrooke. This is from the beginning: Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head. I still hear it saying, “You haven’t read that book? You really need to read it.” Saying, “I feel, and I hope this doesn’t sound too self-satisfied, that in a very difficult situation where nobody has the answer, I at least know what the overall questions and moving parts are.” Saying, “Gotta go, Hillary’s on the line.” After Holbrooke’s death, his widow Kati Marton gave Packer her husband’s papers, journals and files. Holbrooke kept great track of his friends and foes and Packer had a truckload of his archives. I should note that although Holbrooke’s widow provided Packer access to her husband’s archives, he does not refrain from disclosing her extra-marital affairs or Holbrooke and Marton’s excessive spending. Packer presents Holbrooke as a contradictory figure. While he craved approval by the elite, he also wanted to be a man of the people. He was very covetous of others and desperately wanted to be Secretary of State, yet alienated even his ardent supporters. He was enthralled with celebrity and money. Holbrooke’s social climbing and gross behavior are unseemly, yet Packer approaches him with such an empathic imagination, you just can’t help rooting for this deeply flawed man. He really becomes ‘Our Man’ in its best sense. You’re not wrong! Those who read by index are really missing out, and in a whole different category are those just who look for themselves in the index, or the footnotes to see if they have been quoted. Footnotes, though—they’re dynamite. I’m seeing more biographies with footnotes as mini-essays. It enhances my reading experience when grasp the range of sources for a biography. In the case of Packer’s biography of Holbrooke, I can understand why there are no footnotes. Packer very effectively introduces his sources into the narrative and inspires trust in his readers."

"What a great title! I’ll have to read it. I did read Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill which was excellent. As I recall, it was prodigiously researched and written in a lively style. During these challenging times, tales of resistance in World War II have found a receptive audience. In the case of Sonia Purnell’s biography, Americans are keen to read about our own countryman’s heroism. At the center of Purnell’s biography is socialite Virginia Hall of Baltimore, Maryland who had been shut out of the American diplomatic corps in the 1930s and stuck as a clerk in the State Department. Raised in affluence, she had learned to ride a horse, shoot, sail and cycle. An adventurous sort, she lost her leg below the knee in a hunting accident in Turkey. (True story: she shot herself in the foot.) Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . After the Nazis invaded France, Hall got herself there to drive ambulances which she did with her prosthetic leg, known then as a ‘peg leg’ which she named Cuthbert. Fluent in French and knowledgeable about the terrain, Hall talked her way into the Office of Strategic Services, and eventually ran spy networks and supervised air drops of weapons. She was known as ‘Madonna of the Mountains.’ Purnell recounts Hall’s spy operations so vividly that it feels like one is reading a spy novel . As Purnell’s title suggests, Hall was often underestimated and overlooked. In rescuing Virginia Hall from obscurity, the book also tells a great story about the Resistance. It’s so interesting to me that right now there is a spate of books about women in the Resistance: for example, there’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War by Lynne Olson and then there’s The Resistance Quartet series by Caroline Moorehead. Great question. I grew up reading biographies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city which takes its history and historical figures very seriously, so that was my initial lens, I suppose. I toggled between history and journalism , but was always drawn to biography and went to graduate school in history where it turned out that biography was not in vogue. The great C. Vann Woodward had retired but I had loved his books Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel and The Strange Career of Jim Crow and Mary Chesnut’s Civil War , so I visited him for tea and peppered him with questions about biography. Once I asked how I would know if I had found the perfect subject for a biography. And he said, in his amazing Southern accent: “Pick a real bitch, or real bastard, and make sure they’re dead.” Just so brilliant. I mean, what he was saying to me is: No hagiography or rescue mission, and you need to have the full measure of a life. I don’t really consider books about living people to be real biographies, because it’s not the full, measurable life. Also, I’d like to be able to trust my sources and all sources have agendas. So that’s how I think of biography. It probably works multiple ways. I personally prefer the subject to be dead and not someone I know. Packer did a New Yorker profile of Holbrooke and he was the one chosen to receive his papers. Maybe it’s just an individual case, but I feel that Packer is so honest in the book. He puts himself in it, and talks to the readers, so I don’t see it as a problem. I see it as: he has empathy, an understanding of Holbrooke, but it’s not like they were best friends. They just knew each other, I think. It gets us to another interesting question, which is about access. Many people say access is really important in a biography. Access to interviewees, or access to the source. My friend Adam Cohen and I wrote a biography , and our character, Mayor Richard J. Daley, was dead. Then we tried to talk to his family, and we had a few sit downs—little brief ones—but they really cut us off. I was worried about that, but then I realized that I kind of knew what they were going to say anyway. “Time reveals. I guess that’s why you can’t really rush a biography” Right now I’m working on the 19th century, where nobody can talk back. I’m trying to read between the lines; it’s not just what a character’s writing in a letter, but also to whom they’re writing it. That says something intangible about a person. I mean, you wouldn’t put it in a biography, but it informs your sensibility. A friend of mine said that the process of not getting an interview with the Daley family was its own education. And, yes, in being repeatedly rebuffed, and how that was done, so much was revealed in the process. Time reveals. I guess that’s why you can’t really rush a biography, because time has to reveal itself about a person. Oh yes. Yes, I really do. I think that we’ve gotten past the cradle-to-grave biography. I mean, they’ll always been popping up, the dutiful ones, but increasingly these biographies are at a slant, or more episodic, or and I think that has brought a new energy to the genre. So I feel optimistic about that, but I am worried about the problem of email and archives. I can’t even convey the joy of going into an archive, and finding these handwritten, impossible-to-read letters. They’re so good. I have to hand-type them, fantastic. Without letters , diaries and documents, I am so worried that so much great history is going to be lost. I mean, journalism was fantastically helpful when I wrote my book about Mayor Richard J. Daley and the making of modern Chicago, but so much of what appears now is on Twitter. It doesn’t even make it into the papers. The other thing I’ll say is that if you pick a day in history, say . . . August 23rd, 1968. It was during the Democratic Convention and I have a folder several feet wide of different newspaper articles covering the day’s events from wildly different perspectives. That doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve talked about the local news crisis, and I think we will see in a generation that books are really suffering, definitely. So I am so optimistic, but I’m worried at the same time. Part of our best books of 2020 series."

"G-Man is traditional in as much as Beverly Gage captures the full sweep of Hoover’s life, cradle to grave: 1895 to 1972. In that way, structurally G-Man sits aside the epics of David McCullough ( Truman , John Adams ) and Ron Chernow ( Grant , Alexander Hamilton ). Unlike those valorized national leaders, Hoover answered to no voters. The quintessential ‘Government Man,’ a counselor and advisor to eight U.S. presidents , of both political parties, he was one of the most powerful, unelected government officials in history. He reigned over the Federal Bureau of Investigations from 1924 to 1972. Hoover began as a young reformer and—as he accrued power—was simultaneously loathed and admired. Through Hoover, Gage skilfully guides readers through the full arc of 20th-century America, and contends: “We cannot know our own story without understanding his.” In G-Man , Yale University professor Gage untangles the contradictions in Hoover’s aspirations and cruelty, and locates the paradoxical American story of tensions and anxieties over security, masculinity, and race. “This year, many biographies were deeply rooted in American soil that required years of research to till” Hoover lived his entire life in Washington D.C., and Gage entwines his story in the city’s evolution into a global power center and delves deeply into the dark childhood that led him to remain there for college. Critical to understanding Hoover, Gage demonstrates, was his embrace of the Kappa Alpha fraternity; its worldview was informed by Robert E. Lee and the ‘Lost Cause’ of the South , in which racial equality was unacceptable. He shaped the F.B.I. in his image and recruited Kappa Alpha men to the Bureau. For Hoover, Gage writes, Kappa Alpha was a way to measure character, political sympathies, and, of course, loyalty. One of those men was Clyde Tolson, and Gage documents their trips to nightclubs, the racetrack, vacations, and White House receptions. Hoover did not acknowledge that he and Tolson were a couple, but in the end their separate burial plots were a few yards from one another. While Hoover feels very much alive on the page, Gage captures the full sweep of American history, chronicling events from the hyper-nationalism of the early part of the century, moving into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., making use of newly unclassified documents. When Hoover’s F.B.I. targeted Nazis and gangsters, there was clarity about good guys and bad guys. But by the mid-century, as the nation began to fracture, he regarded calls for peace and justice as threats to national security. Among the abuses of power committed by Hoover’s F.B.I., for instance, was the wiretapping and harassment of King. Beyond Hoover’s malfeasance, Gage emphasizes that Hoover was no maverick. He tapped into a dark part of the national psyche and had public opinion on his side. Through Hoover, Americans could see themselves, and, as Gage argues, “what we valued and refused to see.” You’ve hit on a fascinating question at the heart of biography: the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces. A late history professor of mine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, once told me that biography was ‘peopled history.’"

"I was eager to read The Grimkés as I had admired Greenidge’s earlier biography, Black Radical , about Boston civil rights leader and abolitionist newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter. Greenidge, a professor at Tufts University, brings her unique, perceptive eye to African American civil rights in the North. Now Greenidge’s The Grimkés sits on my bookshelf next to The Hemingses of Monticello , the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Annette Gordon-Reed who exposed the contradictions of one of the most venerated figures in American history, Thomas Jefferson. In the Grimke family, Greenidge has found a gnarled family tree, deeply rooted in generations of trauma. Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been exalted as brave heroines who defied antebellum Southern piety and headed northward to embrace abolition. Greenridge makes the powerful case that, in clinging to this mythology, a more troubling story is obscured. In the North, as the Grimké sisters lived comfortably and agitated for change, they enjoyed the financial benefits of their slaveholding family in South Carolina. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter After the Civil War, they learned that their brute of a brother had fathered at least two sons with a woman whom he had enslaved. The sisters provided some financial assistance in the education of these two young men, one attended Harvard Law School and the other Princeton Divinity School—and did not let their nephews forget it. Not only does Greenidge provide a revisionist history of the Grimke sisters, but she also takes account of the full Grimké family and extends their story beyond the 19th century. She delves into the dynamics of racial subordination and how free white men who conceive children — whether from rape or a relationship spanning decades with enslaved women—destroy families. Generations of children are haunted by this history. Poignantly, Greenidge evokes the life and work of the sisters’ grandniece Angelina (‘Nana’) Weld Grimké , a talented—and troubled—queer playwright and poet, who carried the heavy weight of the generational trauma she inherited. Yes. While Sarah and Angelina Grimké have been the subject of fiction, their nephews Archibald and Francis and their families deserve a novel of their own!"

"The perfect match of biographer and subject! A dancer who trained with Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York and is now dance critic for The New Yorker, Homans has written a biography of the man known as ‘the Shakespeare of Dance.’ In felicitous prose, Homans channels the dancer’s experience onto the page, from the body movements that can produce such beauty to the aching tendons and ligaments. Training is transformation, Homan writes, and working with Balanchine was a kind of metamorphosis tangled with pain. She evokes the dances so vividly that one can almost hear the music. “At the heart of biography is the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces” Homans captures Balanchine in a constant state of reinvention, tracing his life from Czarist Russia to Weimar Berlin , finally making his way to post-war New York where he revitalized the world of ballet by embracing modernish, founding New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine was genius whose personal history shape-shifted over the years. Homans grounds Mr. B in more than a hundred interviews, and draws from archives around the world. Homans captures Balanchine’s charisma and cultural importance, but Mr. B. is no hagiography. Homans grasps the knot of sex and power over women used in his work. He married four times, always to dancers. They were all the same kind of swan-necked, long-waisted, long-limbed women, and although Homans does not write this, his company often sounds more like a cult than art. And, of course, there is the matter of weight, which Homans dealt with directly, as did Balanchine. He posted a sign: ‘BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY—YOU MUST WEIGH.’ Indeed!"

"At the outset of World War II , a quartet of young women, Oxford students—Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley—were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men,” as Mac Cumhaill, a Durham University professor, and Wiseman, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, write. In their marvelous group biography, MacCumhaill and Wiseman vivify how the friendships of these women congealed to bring “philosophy back to life.” As their male counterparts departed for the front lines, this brilliant group of women came together in their dining halls and shared lodging quarters to challenge the thinking of their male colleagues. In the shadows of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, these friends rejected the logical positivists who favoured empirical scientific questions. They didn’t really create a distinct philosophical approach as much as they shared an interest in the metaphysics of morals. While today we may recognize the prolific Iris Murdoch more for her fiction—like her Booker-winning novel The Sea, the Sea — others made an enduring mark. For example, I learned that after their Oxford years, Murdoch’s good friend Phillipa Foot was responsible for the classic conundrum of the ‘trolley problem,’ which posed the question of whether one would—or should—willingly kill one person to save five. And beyond philosophy, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s deft sketches of these women sparkle with details of their world, from hot tea and cold shared flats to the lovers and ex-lovers who sometimes shared those flats."

"A biography about writing biography ! Very meta, and very much in the interdisciplinary tradition of American Studies. In his gorgeous braid of cultural history, Cornell University professor Sachs entwines the lives and work of poet and fiction writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) and the philosopher and literary critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), illuminating their coextending concerns about their worlds in crisis. While Melville is now firmly ensconced in the American canon, most appreciation and respect for him was posthumous. The 20th-century Melville revival was largely sparked by a now overlooked Mumford, once so prominent that he appeared on a 1936 Time magazine cover. Sachs brilliantly provides the connective tissue between Melville and his biographer Mumford so that these writers seem to be in conversation with one another, both deeply affected by their dark times. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As Mumford grappled with tragedies wrought by World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic and urban decay, Melville had dealt with the bloody Civil War , slavery , and industrialization. In a certain way, this book is about the art of biography itself, two writers wrestling with modernity in a bleak world. In delving into Melville’s angst, Mumford was thrust into great turmoil. Sachs evokes so clearly and painfully this bond that almost did Mumford in, and writes that “Melville, it turns out, was Mumford’s white whale.” In many ways, this is a golden era for biography. There are fewer dull but worthy books, more capacious and improvisational ones. More series of short biographies that pack a big punch. We see more group biographies and illustrated biographies. But just as figures and groups once considered marginal are being centered, records that document those lives are vanishing. The crisis in local news and the homogenization of national and international news will soon be a crisis for biographers and historians. Where would historians be without the ‘slave narratives’ from the Federal Writers Project , or the Federal Theatre Project ? Reconstruction of public events—federal elections, national tragedies, and so on—may be possible, but we lose that wide spectrum of human experience. We need to preserve these artifacts and responses to events as they happen. Biographies are time-consuming labors of love and passion, and are often expensive to produce. We need to ensure that we are generating and saving the emails, the records, the to-do lists of ordinary life. The affluent among us will always be able to commission histories of their companies or families, but are those the only ones that will endure?"