New Books in Biography & Memoir

American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a compelling exploration of the political life of Governor Mario Cuomo as well as the concepts of American liberalism, presidential politics, our understandings of governors in the United States, and the geographic and political shifts that transpired during the latter half of the twentieth century. While Saladin Ambar‘s book focuses specifically on Cuomo’s life, his engagement with Democratic politics, his speeches, it is much broader in scope and in importance as an analysis of the changing dynamics in American politics as the sun set on the New Deal and, in its place, we observed the rise of the Reagan Revolution and the Conservative movement. Ambar examines Cuomo not just as a politician and elected official, but also as theorist about the role of government in the lives of modern Americans. This is why he is dubbed the American version of the Cicero. Ambar’s book would be of interest to those who study American political development and American history, American Political Thought, and, in particular, the connection between political parties, electoral politics, governors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Through his work as a scholar and critic, Alain Locke redefined African American culture and its place in American life. Jeffrey Stewart‘s book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018) offers a detailed examination of Locke’s life, one that reveals his many achievements and how they changed the nation. Born into a middle-class family in Pennsylvania, his mother worked to ensure that Locke had the best education possible. After graduating from Harvard and spending three years in Europe as the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke returned to the United States and took a position at Howard University. In the 1920s he encouraged African Americans to embrace their own cultural past, becoming one of the leading promoters of the Harlem Renaissance then emerging in the country. Though his relationship with its leading figures was often fraught with tension, Locke never gave up his advocacy of Afro-American cultural identity, which he continued for the rest of his life through his writings, his lectures, and his sponsorship of African American artists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

While Stanley Kramer is considered a successful producer and director of many films as Hollywood moved out of the studio era, he also was criticized for his lesser skills as a director, as well as his liberal beliefs that permeated many of his movies. In Producer of Controversy: Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism and the Cold War (University Press of Kansas, 2017), Jennifer Frost, Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland presents a new study of Kramer’s films, emphasizing four of his popular message films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose collection and last will laid the foundation for the British Museum, the first national, free, public museum. For Delbourgo, Sloane was for far too long an overlooked figure, who knitted together the interests of a rising empire through methods of botany, natural history and medicine. Overshadowed in part by his counterpart Isaac Newton, Sloane’s life synchronizes with the changes from seventeenth-century England to eighteenth-century Britain. His life and the time are deeply interwoven with slavery and a new world of commerce. It was thanks to this interconnected world and the many intermediaries that Sloane managed to accumulate so many weird and wonderful objects from different places. He collected, catalogued, and exhibited them according to his own belief system, which centered around binaries of enlightenment versus superstition and sober empiricism versus magic. More than anything, Delbourgo’s book reveals the complex lives and stories around Hans Sloane’s collection and the many different peoples, places and stories that are attached to the silent objects, even today. It raises important historical questions about ownership and authorship of public museums, collections and curatorial practices and makes them relevant for us today. Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), Brian Jenkins describes Lyons’s eventful life and the often subtle impact he made in international relations. The son of an officer in the Royal Navy, Lyons was long drawn to diplomatic service. Sent to Greece as an aide soon after finishing his education, he rose steadily through the ranks over the course of a series of postings in Europe. Named minister to the United States in 1858, Lyons arrived to witness the emergence of secession, and he spent much of his tenure in America grappling with the challenges posed by the war that resulted. His success in such extraordinary circumstances cemented his reputation and led to his appointment as ambassador, first to the Ottoman Empire, then to France, where he served during the fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic. Throughout it all, as Jenkins shows, Lyons set a standard of conduct as a hard-working nonpartisan defender of Britain’s interests that his successors strove to emulate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The debate over Margaret Mead’s and Derek Freeman’s conflicting ethnographic reports has gone on for decades. While no longer a hot topic, Mead-Freeman stands as a testament to the power and, sometimes, imprecision of social scientific inquiry. In his new book, Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropology (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), Peter Hempenstall (emeritus professor of history at the University of Canterbury and conjoint professor of history at the University of Newcastle) gives an unprecedented look at the life and works of a controversial figure in the making of modern anthropology. In this interview, we discuss how cultural and nationalistic biases played a role in the Mead-Freeman controversy, whether or not Freeman suffered from mental illness, and why the man is often misrepresented in the history of the discipline. Jared Miracle is an anthropologist and folklorist whose research areas include violence, education, and digital culture. He is the author of Now with Kung Fu Grip! How Bodybuilders, Soldiers and Hairdresser Reinvented Martial Arts for America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

It was a year that at times left Lyndon Johnson feeling as though he was living in a continuous nightmare. Yet as Kyle Longley describes in his book LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval (Cambridge University Press, 2018), it was one in which he continued to engage with the many challenges confronting his presidency as he finished his term in office. That it would be his last year as president was not certain at the beginning of it, as he was expected by everyone to run for another term in the upcoming presidential election. Yet as Longley explains, health concerns and the divisions caused by the Vietnam War led Johnson to contemplate announcing during the State of the Union address that he would not seek another term. Even after he made his decision official in March, he continued to pursue an ambitious agenda that included new Great Society legislation, arms negotiations with the Soviets, and the nomination of his friend Abe Fortas as the next chief justice of the Supreme Court. Longley shows how a combination of Johnson’s lame duck status and events beyond his control often combined to frustrate his intentions, while his desire to avoid a scandal by not publicizing information about the Nixon campaign’s interference in the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Vietnam only paved the way for the even greater political crises in his successor’s administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

That Theodore Roosevelt remains one of America’s most recognizable presidents nearly a century after his death is due in no small measure to the flamboyant image he presented. Yet as Michael Patrick Cullinane reveals in Theodore Roosevelt’s Ghost: The History and Memory of An American Icon (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), credit is also due to the efforts of his both family and friends to memorialize his accomplishments after his death. These efforts began with the news of Roosevelt’s untimely death in 1919, which prompted a wave of assessment as to his legacy. Over the course of the next decade, proposals for memorials moved on a number of fronts, with his widow and children playing a prominent role. Cullinane explains how in the 1930s the resurgent political career of Theodore’s cousin Franklin prompted a split within the family, as the two sides warred over the meaning of Theodore’s career and who was best suited to determine it. In the 1950s the approach of the centennial of Roosevelt’s birth prompted a new round of celebrations and monuments, now increasingly shaped by a generation of Americans for whom Roosevelt was only a memory. The decades that followed demonstrated the endurance of Theodore Roosevelt as a national figure, one whose wide-ranging achievements offered something for nearly every American to admire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Noam Zadoff begins his biography of Gershon Scholem, one of the 20th century’s greatest scholars and an equally perplexing intellectual, at the point where Scholem ends his own autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth—with his arrival in Jerusalem in 1923. Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Brandeis University Press, 2018) situates Scholem’s thought in the context of his biography, by skillfully reading Scholem’s self-fashioning against the grain and together with materials held in his archive. With particular focus on his conflicted and shifting relationship to Germany and German thought and language, Zadoff contributes to the ever-growing scholarship about Scholem. Zadoff moves beyond Scholem’s early ambivalence towards German culture as he sought a Jewish future in Israel during the inter-war years. Despite his early rejection of Jewish-German assimilation and his idiosyncratic Zionist dreams, we find that not only was his world-view framed in reference to Germany—of his youth, the Holocaust, and the after-war years—but this relationship becomes a barometer to understand his evolving thought. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on Scholem’s early period in Jerusalem, his political activities there, relationship to the Hebrew Language, and to the Hebrew University. The next section is about Scholem’s response to the Holocaust and his pivotal role in collecting and reclaiming manuscripts and books that were looted from the Jewish communities of Europe. The last, and perhaps most revealing section, focuses on Scholem’s “return to Germany,” during the last part of his life, particularly his involvement in the Eranos seminars. Zadoff begins the book by asking how the images of Scholem in Israel and Germany could be of the same person, at home he was known as a fiery intellectual, demanding German teacher, and scholar of the kabbalah, while in Germany he was a literary personality and a nostalgic link to German culture of the pre-War years. At its conclusion, we are left with a well argued narrative that does not strip its subject of its complexity. Noam Zadoff is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and of History, and the Director of Olamot Center at Indiana University, Bloomington. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an avid lepidopterist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Vandenberg eventually became one of the foremost advocates for America’s engagement with the world. As a young man Vandenberg embarked upon a career as a journalist, and soon rose to become the editor of the local newspaper in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Vandenberg’s platform made him a force in state politics, and his editorials enjoyed a national readership among Republican leaders. Appointed to the Senate in 1928, Vandenberg soon made a name for himself for his ability to compromise on legislation, and with the electoral decimation of the party in Congress in the 1930s he emerged as one of its most prominent figures. Meijer details the ways in which Vandenberg used his stature to shape American policy, from his role in the drafting of the United Nations Charter to his involvement in the passage of the Marshall Plan and the treaty that established NATO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography