Spring 2018 Preview

February 26th, 2018

We’re highlighting here  some of the books due out this spring and summer that are likely to garner critical and popular acclaim, because of their subject, their author, or both. The titles already getting buzz are drawn from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, and Amazon, among others. BIO members with upcoming releases are noted in bold type.

Please note: We do our best to learn about new books, and the ongoing monthly “In Stores” feature in The Biographer’s Craft will include even more fall and winter releases. But, if we’ve missed any members’ upcoming releases, please let us know so we can add them to this list.

March

A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith (Basic Books)

Neruda: The Poet’s Calling by Mark Eisner (Ecco)

Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours by Joseph Rosenbloom (Beacon Press)

Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World by Miles J. Unger (Simon & Schuster)

The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s by William I. Hitchcock (Simon & Schuster)

The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835–1871 by Gary Scharnhorst (University of Missouri Press)

Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within by Joel F. Harrington (Penguin)

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport (PublicAffairs)

Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson (Pegasus Books)

The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor by Lone Frank (Dutton)

In Byron’s Wake by Miranda Seymour (Simon & Schuster)

April

Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution by Todd S. Purdum (Henry Holt)

Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography by Julia Van Haaften (W. W. Norton)

Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean (Grove)

The Pope Who Would Be King by David I. Kertzer (Random House)

Born Trump: Inside America’s First Family by Emily Jane Fox (Harper)

The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made by Patricia O’Toole (Simon & Schuster)

The Promise and the Dream: The Interrupted Lives of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. by David Margolick (Rosetta Books)

Sugar: Micheal Ray Richardson, Eighties Excess, and the NBA by Charley Rosen (University of Nebraska Press)

To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey (W. W. Norton)

Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin de Siècle Paris by Caroline Weber (Knopf)

The Final Race: The Incredible World War II Story of the Olympian Who Inspired Chariots of Fire by Eric T. Eichinger and Eva Marie Everson (Tyndale Momentum)

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson (Simon & Schuster)

Speaker Jim Wright by J. Brooks Flippen (University of Texas Press)

President Carter: The White House Years by Stuart E. Eizenstat (Thomas Dunne Books)

Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World by Eileen McNamara (Simon & Schuster)

Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World by Andrea Barnet (Ecco)

Daughters of the Winter Queen: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots by Nancy Goldstone (Little, Brown)

Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House by Joseph Esposito (ForeEdge)

Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang (Liveright)

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson (Random House)

The China Mission: George C. Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945–1947 by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan (W. W. Norton)

Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties by James F. Simon (Liveright)

Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution by Todd S. Purdum (Henry Holt)

Napoleon: The Spirit of the Age: 1805–1810 by Michael Broer (Pegasus Books)

Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense by Jenny Uglow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Loulou & Yves: The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent by Christopher Petkanas (St. Martin’s Press)

The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America’s Supreme Law by Joseph Tartakovsky (Encounter Books)

Gehrig and the Babe: The Friendship and the Feud by Tony Castro (Triumph Books)

Hirschfeld: The Biography by Ellen Stern (Sarah Crichton Books)

Richard III: England’s Most Controversial King by Chris Skidmore (St. Martin’s Press)

Above and Beyond: John F. Kennedy and America’s Most Dangerous Cold War Spy Mission by Casey Sherman (PublicAffairs)

May

Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn (Simon & Schuster)

The Lives of the Surrealists by Desmond Morris (Thames & Hudson)

Madame Claude and Her Secret World of Pleasure, Privilege, and Power by William Stadiem (St. Martin’s Press)

Enemies in Love: A German POW, a Black Nurse, and an Unlikely Romance by Alexis Clark (The New Press)

Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution by Christopher S. Wren ((Simon & Schuster)

A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps (W. W. Norton)

Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

Robin by Dave Itzkoff (Henry Holt)

The Lost Pilots: The Spectacular Rise and Scandalous Fall of Aviation’s Golden Couple by Corey Mead (Flatiron)

Lincoln’s Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency by Dan Abrams and David Fisher (Hanover Square)

The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order by David Levering Lewis (Liveright)

Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father by Peter Stark (Ecco)

Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman (Yale University Press)

Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing by Lara Feigel (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer (Basic Books)

June

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy: The Life of General James Mattis by Jim Proser (Broadside Books)

Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse by Andrea Di Robilant (Knopf)

Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters by Martin Gayford (Thames & Hudson)

The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Fortune in the American West by Gregory Crouch (Scribner)

Conan Doyle for the Defense: A Sensational British Murder, the Quest for Justice, and the World’s Greatest Detective Writer by Margalit Fox (Random House)

Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton (Knopf)

God, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians Against the Puritans of New England by James A. Warren (Scribner)

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson (Pegasus Books)

Unbeaten: Rocky Marciano’s Fight for Perfection in a Crooked World by Mike Stanton (Henry Holt)

Bruce Lee: A Life by Matthew Polly (Simon & Schuster)

Crusader for Democracy: The Political Life of William Allen White by Charles Delgadillo (University Press of Kansas)

July

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 by Marc Ambinder (Simon & Schuster)

Chasing the Demon: Chuck Yeager and the Band of American Aces Who Conquered the Sound Barrier by Dan Hampton (William Morrow)

City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai by Paul French (Picador)

The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel (Blue Rider)

The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West by John F. Ross (Viking)

The King’s Assassin: The Secret Plot to Murder King James I by Benjamin Woolley (St. Martin’s Press)

Verdi: The Man Revealed by John Suchet (Pegasus Books)

Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont by Saul Austerlitz (Thomas Dunne Books)

August

The Astronaut Maker: How One Mysterious Engineer Ran Human Spaceflight for a Generation by Michael Cassutt (Chicago Review Press)

Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero by Christian Di Spigna (Crown)

Architects of Death: The Family Who Engineered the Death Camps by Karen Bartlett (St. Martin’s Press)

The Washington War: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II by James Lacey (Bantam)

Arthur Ashe: A Life by Raymond Arsenault (Simon & Schuster)

Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President by James C. Klotter (Oxford University Press)

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee (Dey Street Books)

Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters by Anne Boyd Rioux (W. W. Norton)

The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire by Deborah Baker (Graywolf Press)

Playing to the Gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the Rivalry that Changed Acting Forever by Peter Rader (Simon & Schuster)

The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an American Classic by Kendall Taylor (Rowman & Littlefield)

The Impostor: A True Story by Javier Cercas (Knopf)

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling (Knopf)

Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago by Max Allan Collins and Brad Schwartz (William Morrow)

Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History by Eamon Dolan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

A Life of My Own: A Biographer’s Life by Claire Tomalin (Penguin)

Richard Holmes Wins 2018 BIO Award

February 14th, 2018

Photo: Stuart Clarke

British author Richard Holmes, beloved for his biographies and memoirs about writing biography, is the winner of the ninth annual BIO Award. BIO bestows this honor on a colleague who has made a major contribution to the advancement of the art and craft of biography. Previous award winners are Jean Strouse, Robert Caro, Arnold Rampersad, Ron Chernow, Stacy Schiff, Taylor Branch, Claire Tomalin, and Candice Millard. Holmes will receive the honor on May 19, at the 2018 BIO Conference at the Leon Levy Center, City University of New York, where he will deliver the keynote address.

Holmes’s The Age of Wonder was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He has written many other books, including Falling Upwards, an uplifting account of the pioneering generation of balloon aeronauts, and the classicFootsteps. Its companion volumes, Sidetracks and This Long Pursuit, complete a trilogy that explores the Romantic movement biographer at work. Holmes’s first biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, won the Somerset Maugham Prize; Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award; Coleridge: Darker Reflections won the Duff Cooper and Heinemann Awards; and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage won the James Tait Black Prize.

Holmes holds honorary doctorates from the universities of East Anglia, East London, and Kingston, and was professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007. He is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1992. He lives in London and Norfolk, with the novelist Rose Tremain. TBC will have an interview with Holmes in an upcoming issue.

BIO Returns to Europe for International Conference

February 14th, 2018

The conference will be held at the Doopsgezinde Kerk in Groningen.

On September 20 and 21, 2018, BIO will join the Biography Institute and the Biography Society in hosting the conference Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies. This conference will take place in Groningen, the Netherlands, home of the Biography Institute, which is directed by BIO board member Hans Renders. The event will allow biographers to look beyond their own borders, explore how biography is practiced in other parts of the world, and discuss the cultural perspectives that guide biographers in their approach to the infinite complexity of the other.

With a mix of panel, roundtable, and public discussions, featuring speakers from many nations, this conference is designed to present the state of the art of biography from a wealth of different perspectives. Richard Holmes will deliver the keynote address, and BIO members participating include Carl Rollyson, John A. Farrell, and Nigel Hamilton. The latter will host a master class on Wednesday, September 19, for young biographers working on their first books.

Also on Wednesday, attendees can choose to explore two cultural sites in and around Groningen: Museum of Graphic Arts and Camp Westerbork, an exhibition depicting the Netherlands during World War II, focusing on the persecution of Jews.

Early-bird tickets for the conference are available until June 1, for 40 euros; after that, the price will rise to 60 euros. Attendees can also reserve a place at the conference dinner for 60 euros. If you require assistance in booking hotel or travel arrangements, email the conference board. Look for more information on the conference in future issues of TBC, and you can follow news of the event on Facebook at Different Lives Conference.

BIO Announces Finalists for the 2018 Plutarch Award

February 1st, 2018

BIO’s Plutarch Award Committee has chosen the four books highlighted below as the finalists for this year’s Plutarch Award, the only international literary award for a biography that is chosen by fellow biographers. BIO members will have three months to read the finalists and vote for the winner.  The Plutarch Award will be presented on Saturday, May 19, at the Ninth Annual BIO Conference in New York.

To see a list of the nominees for 2018 and learn more about the Plutarch Award, go here.

The Plutarch Award Nominees for 2018

January 16th, 2018

Here are the nominees for the 2018 Plutarch Award, honoring the best biography published in 2017, listed in alphabetical order by author:

BIO PLUTARCH AWARD COMMITTEE MEMBERS, 2018:
Anne C. Heller, chair
Kate Buford
Nassir Ghaemi
Brian Jay Jones
Andrew Lownie
Julia Markus
J.W. (Hans) Renders
Ray Shepard
Will Swift, ex-officio

Annual BIO Conference to Be Held in New York in May

January 9th, 2018

Biographers International Organization will convene on the weekend of May 18–20, in Manhattan, for three days of discussion, camaraderie, and exploration. “BIO is especially pleased that this year’s conference will be hosted by CUNY and the Leon Levy Center for Biography,” said program co-chairs Heath Lee and John Farrell. “The scope of expertise that these two organizations, devoted to biography, bring to the table is stunning.”

Registration for the conference will begin in late January. Current BIO members will receive an email with a link to the registration site to take advantage of an early-bird discount.

The conference starts on Friday, May 18, with guided tours of New York City research libraries, readings by authors, and a welcoming cocktail party at the Fabbri Mansion on East 95th Street.

The Saturday, May 19, sessions at the Leon Levy Center will begin with a plenary breakfast at which Edmund Morris (biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) and his wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris (biographer of Clare Boothe Luce and Edith Kermit Roosevelt), will share their views about the craft of biography as it pertains to writing about the living and the dead. They have titled their plenary talk: “Dead Is Easier.”

Other featured speakers include Griffin Dunne, the actor and filmmaker, in conversation with Stacy Schiff regarding Dunne’s film biography of his aunt, Joan Didion. James Atlas will be talking about “The Soul of a Biographer” with our 2018 BIO Award winner, who will give the luncheon address. We are particularly excited about this year’s winner, whom we will announce in February.

Joe Hagen, the biographer of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, will discuss the perils of difficult subjects with biographer Kitty Kelley, who has pierced the walls around Frank Sinatra, Jackie O, and other celebrities.

In the Saturday sessions, conference attendees will be able to select from 16 panels devoted to topics such as “Issues in Biography,” “The Craft,” “Basics,” and “The Biz,” and a number of roundtable discussions. The conference will also feature a panel about the interdisciplinary use of biography, a product of a new collaboration with the Community College Humanities Association.

Saturday ends with a reception at which BIO will convey the Plutarch Award for the Best Biography of 2017, as chosen by BIO members, with remarks from the winner.

For those interested in more intensive study of the craft, on Sunday morning, May 20, a series of workshops will be held on writing and the art and business of biography.

Look for more information on the conference in upcoming issues of TBC.

BIO Members Explore the Role of Biography in Teaching the Humanities

January 9th, 2018

Thanks to the efforts of Billy Tooma (rear), deputy executive director of the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA), four BIO board members took part in a panel at the CCHA’s annual conference. Next year, members of CCHA will participate in BIO’s annual conference. Shown here with Tooma are Kate Buford, Dean King, Heath Lee, and Brian Jay Jones.

Four BIO board members helped kick off an affiliation between BIO and the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) on November 10, when they took part in a panel discussion at the CCHA’s national conference in Baltimore, Maryland. In front of an assembled group of two-year-college faculty and students, moderator Kate Buford introduced panelists Brian Jay Jones, Dean King, and Heath Lee. What followed was a lively discussion on the merits of biography as a focus of academic study and why such a field of study should be incorporated into higher-education course syllabi.

After the session, Jones said, “I thought it was an incredibly worthwhile ‘tech transfer,’ and so useful for us to learn and appreciate how biography is actively used (not just in concept) in teaching.” King’s assessment of the panel session reaffirmed this when he said that it “was a great opportunity to have a fruitful interaction with educators who have a deep interest in biography and are on the frontline of making biography relevant and motivational to a new generation of readers. I felt we had as much to learn from them as they did from us.” Buford noted that being able to present “the importance of biography to such a receptive group of academic professionals was a rare pleasure.”

Feedback on the panel from conference attendees was overwhelmingly positive. Jack J. Cooney, Associate Professor of History at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, made sure to spread the word to both fellow CCHA members and his own colleagues: “I was greatly heartened to hear how each biographer spoke so thoughtfully, and with candid humility, about their craft. The grace and good humor of their eloquent comments gave those of us in the audience a chance to reimagine biography. The panelists offered us ample evidence so we might better see how biography can break boundaries for humanities teaching.”

CCHA members will continue the dialogue between biographers and educators in May 2018 at BIO’s annual conference. This “cross paneling” affiliation is the brainchild of BIO president Will Swift and CCHA deputy director Billy Tooma (a biographer and a BIO member). By bringing the two organizations together, the two hope to see biography rise in prominence within the college classroom. “I think biography can go beyond the liberal arts,” Tooma said. “Educators are constantly trying to figure out ways in which we can turn STEM into STEAM, with the ‘A’ representing the arts, and I think biography is the answer. How do you humanize the study of physics? One way is to have your students read Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe.” Lee agreed with Tooma’s view when she said the “idea that biography is being woven intentionally into the humanities curricula as well as into STEM courses is revolutionary and exciting for biographers. The idea that our stories could help draw students into a larger narrative across the disciplines is thrilling!”

Thanks to Billy Tooma for his contributions to this report.

Deirdre Bair on Writing a Memoir of Beckett, Beauvoir, and Bair

November 10th, 2017

By Dona Munker, TBC New York Correspondent 

Deirdre Bair, who has written six biographies, is currently writing about her experiences while researching and writing Beckett (1978) and Simone de Beauvoir (1990). At the fall 2017 Dorothy O. Helly Work-in-Progress Lecture, presented by New York’s Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar, she talked about her reasons for doing so and the challenges for a seasoned biographer who decides to become part of the story.

Bair originally planned “a short book” about all her biographies but was unable to find a framework that would encompass them all and Beckett and Beauvoir generated more interest than any others. In addition, in the decades when they appeared, Bair had felt obligated to withhold some information her research uncovered, not only because people still living would have been hurt by it but because certain kinds of revelations were then considered “unseemly” for respectable biographies, especially of women. However, at this point, she explained, the passage of time and the shattering of cultural taboos have removed these constraints, and she now feels free to add to the public’s understanding of two major writers.

Much of the as-yet-untitled memoir will be about working with Beckett and Beauvoir in Paris, where they inhabited the same neighborhood and where Bair met and interviewed them regularly, either at home (Beauvoir) or in cafes, restaurants, and hotel lobbies (Beckett). The interview process with each, however, differed radically. Beckett, secretive and interview-averse, told Bair that he would “neither help nor hinder her,” but also forbade her to take notes. By contrast, at their first meeting Beauvoir “cheerfully” told her how they would work: Bair would take down everything she said and the result would be Beauvoir’s version of her life. “I remember how my head sank into my hands as I said, ‘Oh, dear, I think we’re finished before we even get started.’” 

Bair eventually succeeded in securing the book’s independence. Knowing that Beauvoir and Beckett detested one another, she told Beauvoir of Beckett’s promise to “neither help nor hinder.” After a long pause, Beauvoir reluctantly replied that “she supposed she would have to work that way as well.” Nevertheless, over the years Beauvoir persisted in trying to control what went into the book, at one point becoming so angry at Bair’s questions that she pushed her bodily out the door.

An important reason for casting the story of her first two biographies as a memoir, Bair said, is that when Beckett: A Biography was published in 1978, it drew ferocious attacks from male Beckett scholars infuriated that a young woman had beaten them to the draw. (“So you are the little girl,” one of them told her, “who stuck her hand in the cookie jar and ran off with all the goodies.”) Second-wave feminism was only starting to have an impact, and at first Bair was dismayed and confused by the attacks. Before long, however, she decided that having written “the best, most honest book I could” entitled her to hold her head high, ignore the unfair criticism, and get on with her life. She credits the warm encouragement of feminist friends with helping her move past the experience. Four decades after the fact, her intention is not to settle scores but to tell the story of her evolution as a feminist in those years, so that younger women, she explains, can understand “what some of us went through as our generation fought for the opportunities in life and work that we made possible for them to enjoy today.”

On the other hand, recounting that story in memoir form sets up a dilemma for a scholarly biographer and a former print journalist. As a biographer-storyteller, Bair has always maintained a balanced detachment, and inserting herself into the narrative raises the thorny question of how to write about herself without violating professional standards that she has hewed to all her life. How and when should she become part of the story? How should she write about her younger self? And how can she insure that the text “will be as factual and objective” as she can make it, even as it is based on her own memories? Above all, can she—or, indeed, should she—“bring the scrupulous objectivity and authorial distance” that she aimed for in her biographies “into a memoir of the fourteen most emotional years” of her life? 

To try and reconcile these competing claims, she told her listeners, she is consulting innovative literary memoirs like Margo Jefferson’s Negroland and reading countless biographies, autobiographies, and cultural essays in the hope of finding “points of light” to guide her in the creation of a satisfactory hybrid. She hasn’t found all the answers yet. Nevertheless, she said, in her new role as biographer-memoirist, she has taken comfort from the opening words of Rousseau’s Confessions: “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no imitator. My purpose is to display a portrait in every way true to nature, and the person I portray will be myself. Simply myself.”

Dona Munker is the writer and co-author (with Sattareh Farman Farmaian) of Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution. She is currently working on a book about the affair of Sara Bard Field and C. E. S. Wood. Her blog,“Stalking the Elephant,” is about how biographers imagine and tell other people’s lives.