New Books in Biography & Memoir

In his new book The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing (Crown, 2017), Damion Searls presents the first biography of Hermann Rorschach and the history of the Rorschach Test. A story that is largely untold, Searls starts with the childhood of Rorschach and brings readers through his growth as a psychiatrist as he created an experiment to probe the mind using a set of ten inkblots. As a visual artist, Rorschach incorporated his ability to think about visuals and his belief that what is seen is more important than what we say. After his early death, Rorschach’s Test found its way to America being used by the military, to test job applicants, to evaluate defendants and parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness. In addition, it has been used throughout advertising and incorporated in Hollywood and popular culture. A tragic figure, and one of the most influential psychiatrists in the twentieth century, The Inkblots allows readers to better understand how Rorschach and his test impacted psychiatry and psychological testing. Searls’ work is eloquently written and detailed, pulling in unpublished letters, diaries and interviews with family, friends and colleagues. Searls’ well researched text presents insight into the ways that art and science have impacted modern psychology and popular culture. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

During a life that stretched from the Progressive era to the 1960s, A. J. Muste dedicated himself to fighting against war and the exploitation of working Americans. In American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Leilah Danielson describes the course of Muste’s career as a pacifist, labor organizer, and civil rights campaigner, explaining the development of his ideology within the context of his activism. An immigrant to America, Muste pursued a career as a Protestant minister until the pressures created by America’s entry into World War I forced him to resign from his pastorate. His work supporting striking textile workers in in Lawrence, Massachusetts heralded the start of a period of involvement in the labor movement, during which time he became a leading figure at Brookwood Labor College and attempted to establish a labor-based political party during the Great Depression. As another war approached in the late 1930s Muste returned to his roots as a Christian pacifist and spent the next three decades working on behalf of the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements before ending his years as a staunch opponent of America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. As Danielson demonstrates, Muste’s ideas and example inspired generations of activists throughout the world, both in his time and in ours today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Though best remembered today for his brief tenure as the ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison’s most significant contribution to American history was his service as a general in the War of 1812. In William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country: Frontier Fighting in the War of 1812 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), David Curtis Skaggs recounts Harrison’s military career and the lessons he learned that brought him national acclaim. The son of a Virginia aristocrat, Harrison rejected a medical career in favor of service in the United States Army. While serving as an aide to General Anthony Wayne in the 1790s, he learned the challenges of campaigning in what was then the northwestern frontier of the United States. These lessons stood him in good stead later when, as governor of Indiana Territory, he faced the growing challenge of Tecumseh’s confederacy, the defeat of which became his claim to fame. Yet as Skaggs demonstrates it was his subsequent victory over British forces at the Battle of the Thames which was his greatest achievement, as it ensured that the territories that became Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan would return to American control at the end of the War of 1812. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Calamity Jane was a celebrity of the 19th century American West, yet the woman portrayed in the newspapers and dime novels was one very different from the actual person. In The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), Richard Etulain sorts through over a century of fiction and half-truths to uncover who Calamity Jane was in real life. Born Martha Canary, she was orphaned at a young age and left to provide for her siblings. Working a variety of jobs, she came to Deadwood in 1876, where she soon received national press attention both for her unusual persona and her brief association with “Wild Bill” Hickok. Yet these accounts were usually more fabrication than fact, and often did not reflect the difficult circumstances of her life. Suffering from alcoholism, she lived an itinerant and unstable existence, one in which her drinking impeded her efforts to provide for herself and her daughter and led to her early death. Etulain’s biography gets to the truth of Calamity Jane’s life, as well as the development of her posthumous reputation in print, in movies, and on television. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Richard Crockatt is an Emeritus Professor in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. His book, Einstein & Twentieth-Century Politics: ‘A Salutary Moral Influence‘ (Oxford University Press, 2016), is an intellectual biography of Einstein’s political thought. As one the most compelling figures of the twentieth century, Einstein first gained public attention for his scientific theories placing him on the world stage. Developing a broad network of liberal internationalists he had the opportunity to speak for and support some of the most critical political issues of his day. Crockatt follows him through his early days and his connections with men like Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells and Albert Schweitzer that shaped his thought as a global public intellectual. From his position of professional influence and personal charm, he worked on behalf of pacifism, Zionism, world government, freedom, and against the arms race. Einstein’s positions emerged from deep moral conviction yet his thought remained complex, non-dogmatic and at times seemingly contradictory. Crockatt has captured the deep moral sensibility and agile political mind of a scientist who exercised “a salutary moral influence.” Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project, tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Many scholars of baseball and American sports have focused on Ty Cobb as an integral and controversial character in the history of baseball. However, scholars have ignored the ways in which the story of Ty Cobb intersects with ideas of turn-of-the-century masculinity and honor. Steve Tripp in his new book Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) explores the ways in which Cobb proved to be an interesting case study in the role that manhood played in the lives of men that found themselves in a changing American landscape. Tripp argues that the men in Cobb’s life and the values they embodied–honor, personal autonomy, nerve, and will–played an integral role in Cobb’s formation of his own masculinity. Not only does Tripp focus on Cobb, but the people that granted him fame and disdain: the fans of turn-of-the-century baseball. Steve Tripp is currently Professor of History at Grand Valley State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was a celebrity in 19th century America thanks in no small measure to her brief marriage to Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother Jerome. In A Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (Maryland Historical Society, 2016), Alexandra Deutsch draws upon the documents and artifacts Elizabeth’s family donated to describe her life. The daughter of a wealthy American merchant, her charm and beauty captivated Jerome, who married her in 1803 only to leave her and her unborn two years later at the emperors insistence. Though the Bonapartes sought to distance themselves from Elizabeth, she spent the next several decades doggedly fighting to win acceptance of her son and his children as members of the Bonaparte line, all while building a fortune of her own. Deutsch details these efforts by using Elizabeth’s possessions to describe the various ways in which she associated herself with the Bonaparte family, an effort that was every bit as important to her as the ongoing legal struggle to confirm her son’s legitimacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Tim Brady’s book His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr. (NAL, 2017) is not just the biography of the eldest son and namesake of America’s 26th president, but an account of a life that was adventurous and consequential in its own right. Coming of age in the years in which his Theodore Roosevelt served as president, Ted at times struggled to measure up to the daunting example set by his dynamic father. While often emulating his father’s path, Ted nonetheless sought to be judged on his own achievements, and distinguished himself in both business and in command during the First World War. To many Ted was on his way to becoming the second Roosevelt to occupy the White House, yet his electoral career came to a premature end in 1924 with his loss to Al Smith in the race for the governorship of New York a loss which paved the way for his subsequent political eclipse by his distant cousin, Franklin. Yet as Brady demonstrates, the growing animosity between the two branches of the family did nothing to dim Ted’s commitment to serve his country in its hour of greatest need, and it was while in uniform as a United States Army general in France that his life came to its tragically early end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The term historical fiction covers a wide range from what the mystery writer Josephine Tey once dubbed “history with conversation” to outright invention shading into fantasy. But behind every story set in the past lies the past itself, as re-created by scholars from the available evidence. This interview features Helen Rappaport, whose latest work reveals the historical background behind the Masterpiece Theater miniseries Victoria, due to air in the United States this month. Rappaport served as historical consultant to the show. The Queen Victoria who gave her name to an age famous for a prudishness so extreme that even tables had limbs, not legs, is nowhere evident in Rappaport’s book, the television series, or the novel by Daisy Goodwin, also titled Victoria, that gave rise to the series. Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen (Harper Design, 2017) explores in vivid, compelling prose the letters, diaries, and other documents associated with the reign of a strong-minded, passionate, eager, inexperienced girl who took the throne just after her eighteenth birthday. This Victoria loved to ride, resisted marriage, fought to separate herself from her mother, detested her mother’s close adviser, and became infatuated with her prime minister before transferring her affections to Prince Albert, who initially did not impress her. Wildly devoted to her husband, she bore nine children but hated being pregnant and regarded newborn infants as ugly. Even her name caused controversy: christened Alexandrina, she switched to Victoria on taking the throne, overriding critics who insisted that Elizabeth or Charlotte were more suitable appellations for a British monarch. By the time she died sixty-three years later, entire generations understood the word “queen”as synonymous with “Victoria.” Although the most powerful woman in the world, Victoria here makes some serious mistakes, as any eighteen-year-old thrust into the center of politics would. If she had no social media to record every misstep, she also had no publicity managers or image brokers to spin her rash remarks or misjudgments. As Daisy Goodwin notes in the foreword to this book, Victoria had to grow up in public, and she left a precious record of that journey in her own exquisite handwriting. But since this is the official companion volume to a television show, it also includes details about casting and costuming, as well as numerous photographs of the actors and background information about the times. It makes a perfect starting point for a discussion of history and historical fiction, their differences and similarities, and how to observe the requirements of one without violating the precepts of the other. C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Clyde Warrior was a Ponca Indian who in the 1960s was one of the founders of the “Red Power” movement for the rights of Native Americans. While his name may not be as well-known as that of other civil rights leaders of that decade, as Paul McKenzie-Jones reveals in this biography Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), he was as just as pivotal a figure as many such figures who are household names today. Growing up on his grandparents farm in Oklahoma, Warrior was immersed in Ponca culture and became renowned for his prowess in the Fancy Dance competitions in the postwar Southwest. In college he embraced student activism, and went from participation in Indian student groups to the establishment of the National Indian Youth Council in 1961. As an advocate of self-determination, he was soon at the forefront of the movement for greater Native American rights, even coining the phrase Red Power in 1966 to encapsulate his goals. As McKenzie-Jones demonstrates, Warriors premature death cut short his promising career but left a legacy that would be carried on by others in the decades that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography