New Books in Biography & Memoir

John F. Kennedy remains one of the most remembered and most enigmatic presidents in American history, perhaps precisely because, as Thurston Clarke writes in the preface of his new biography JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President, he was “more than most presidents– more than most middle aged men… a work in progress.” This is perhaps also why he’s a perennial favorite of biographers: because he proves such a challenge to pin down and because it is so very tempting to try to imagine who he might have become had he lived. Alas, he didn’t. And so we’re left to wonder, a temptation Clarke resists in JFK’s Last Hundred Days. Instead, he mines that period to see who JFK was then and leaves us to the imagining. For, undoubtedly, he was a changed man in many respects: grieving the death of his infant son, somewhat renewed in his commitment to his wife, moving towards a policy of détente with Russia, re-examining American involvement in Vietnam. Clarke borrows from the journalist Laura Bergquist the idea of JFK as our most “prismatic” president, and systematically examines the various facets that were presented in his final hundred days. The end result is a portrayal that, while doing nothing to quell the unanswerable question of who JFK might have become had he not died, does go a long way towards answering the question of who he was while he lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

For many people, the most important questions about the Kennedy assassination are “Who killed Kennedy?” and, if Lee Harvey Oswald did, “Was Oswald part of a conspiracy?” This is strange, because we know the answers to both questions: Oswald killed Kennedy and he did so alone. These facts won’t keep people from speculating–everyone loves a mystery–but they might allow us to focus on more pertinent questions about what happened on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. One such question is this: “Why did Oswald do it?” Obviously, the answer will not be straightforward. Assassinating the President of the United States is, well, not really something a rational person would attempt, so we should not expect a completely rational explanation. Oswald was not crazy, but he was doubtless mentally ill. He had “reasons” for killing the president; it’s just that his “reasons” are not going to make much sense to us. To comprehend why he did what he did, then, we must comprehend how his “reasons” made sense to him. In his insightful, well-researched book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Savodnik helps us do just this by investigating Oswald’s decision to defect to, live in, and ultimately abandon the Soviet Union. He convincingly argues that Oswald’s Soviet Period was part of a larger pattern, one that dominated his entire life: that of taking on and abandoning identities, always unsuccessfully. Even as a child (and, as Peter points out, Oswald had a horrific childhood), “Lee” never really “fit.” He could never find a group of people he could rely on, a social context in which he could thrive, a community that would respect him. As he matured, he began to search for an identity–in politics, in the Marines, and in the Soviet Union. Yet he was always, as Peter says, an “interloper”: he never lasted long in the skin of any given “Lee.” To this reader, the fact that Oswald was essentially an interloper goes a long way in explaining why he murdered Kennedy. It was his last attempt to fit in, to establish who he really was, to find an identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

What do most Americans know about Andrew Jackson, apart from that he’s on the $20 bill and that he apparently had great hair? Probably not much. Maybe that he was a two-term president who pioneered the aggressive use of the powers of that office, and that he steadfastly opposed the sectionalizing, states-rights tendencies of the South Carolina nullifiers. In short, most of the conventional image of Andrew Jackson situates him firmly as an American. Mark Cheathem‘s new biography Andrew Jackson, Southerner (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) reminds us that Jackson was born and raised in the South, became a wildly successful plantation owner there, and based his formidable political coalition in the American Southwest. Moreover, many of the signal events of Jackson’s presidency — Indian removal, the Eaton Affair (sometimes called the “Petticoat Affair”), and his war against the “Monster Bank” are only fully understandable when Jackson’s southern background is accounted for. Mark Cheathem’s book will ensure that we will never again take Jackson’s southern roots for granted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (Schocken, 2013) offers readers an encounter with the great Yiddish author himself. Dauber writes in the rhythm of the language of Sholem Aleichem – Mr. How Do You Do – brilliantly structuring the book as a drama, with an overture, five acts, and an epilogue in ten scenes. He assumes the voice of a theater impresario, talking to his audience, just as the author Sholem Aleichem did, narrating his stories and reading them to the crowds whom he loved to entertain. The author Sholem Aleichem, most famous for his Tevye stories that became Fiddler on the Roof, was no Tevye, but rather a sophisticated and educated cosmopolitan businessman and writer.  He possessed immense curiosity about every man, a unique ear for interesting stories, and the ability to connect with his audience; these talents ultimately united his life with Tevye’s. Although he could very well write in Russian and Hebrew, ultimately he chose Yiddish, the most natural language of the people whom he loved, to tell his universal stories of tradition confronting modernity and the struggles of people to deal with change. Read this engaging and very well written book to learn more about Sholem Aleichem and fall in love with this man and his writings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20th century (think: Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Onassis, Elvis Presley, F. Scott Fitzgerald), and an area in which the partial life biography can play an interesting role. Whereas biographers have more traditionally opted for what we call “cradle-to-grave” narratives, the partial life biography instead offers a slice of a life- a particular period that is explored in-depth. Such is the case with Elizabeth Winder‘s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953(Harper, 2013). Plath’s is a story most everyone knows, and yet her time working in New York as an intern in Mademoiselle has not previously been studied outside of the context of all that came after, which is surprising because it’s an interesting period but also because her experiences then formed the basis for what she would later write in The Bell Jar. The summer is of not just biographical interest, but literary significance as well. There is about Pain, Parties, Work an inevitable sense of clouds brewing- the summer will end, Plath will return home, and she will attempt suicide by taking pills and crawling under her mother’s house- but there’s also a sensation of joy: the joy of young women alone in a big city, experimenting with boys and clothes and make-up and work. Pain, Parties, Work is bolstered by the fact that Winder was able to secure interviews with many of Plath’s fellow interns, voices that have been notably absent in many of the earlier accounts and which lend an immediacy to a well-known story. The interviews with these women do much to flesh out the concrete details of the experience as well as Plath’s unique struggles within it. The Plath we have here is young and eager, fond of make-up and boys, and already displaying a rare gift for words. The clouds are on the horizon, yes- we all know that- but, in the meantime, the city and the thrill of discovery provide an intoxicating distraction. Summer is a time in which anything can happen. Reading Winder’s narrative and meeting Plath in this context, one feels that keenly: the excitement of a girl in the city, the hope and heat of New York, an electricity in the air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Mikhail Lomonosov is a well known Russian figure. As poet, geographer, and physicist, Lomonosov enjoyed access to the best resources that 18th century Russia had to offer. As a result, his contributions to Russian arts and sciences were immeasurable. The source and shape of his celebrity, however, is as interesting as the man. In his book, The Invention of Mikhail Lomonosov: A Russian National Myth (Academic Studies Press, 2013),  Steven Usitalo constructs the great polymath not from the subject’s revolutionary work, but from the words of his biographers who transformed and lifted Lomonosov as a great scientific thinker embodying the Russian spirit. To Russians of the 19th century, Lomonosov helped represent the place of Russian sciences on the international stage. To the Russians of the USSR, Lomonosov represented the bold and forward spirit of the Russian people. Over the course of history, the great scientist and artist remains crucial to Russia’s memory–his actual work often distorted in the process. As Russia marked 300 years since his birth, the memory of Lomonosov still represents the interests of his admirers. The book masterfully demonstrates the power of national narrative and tradition in constructing history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel. And so Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more a depiction of a 2012 idea of the 1920s than a realistic depiction of the ’20s themselves. But what of the ’20s? These years are, today, so coated in mythology that they’re hard to imagine as a real time in which real people lived. The myths surrounding Fitzgerald and his novel are equally entrenched, but Sarah Churchwell‘s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby (Virago, 2013) goes a long way towards peeling back the layers that have accrued around all of this- the author, the novel and the time- to, in her words, “throw into relief aspects of the novel we no longer see.” Here, the world of the ’20s- a world that so often seems impossibly ephemeral- assumes solidity through small details: hem lengths, traffic signals, the brightness of the lights. Churchwell’s aim may, at first, seem nebulous- to capture what was in the air whilst Fitzgerald was writing the book, the atmosphere, the mood- but, in the end, it yields a surprisingly concrete portrayal of the writing process (a notoriously nebulous thing) and the origins of a masterpiece. Careless People isn’t the life of an individual. Rather, it’s the early life of a work- a strand of biography that continues to provide fresh ways of considering classic works, the people who wrote them, the times from which they sprung, what they might have meant then and what they might mean now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

As you can read in any Russian history textbook, a series of seventeenth-century tsars culminating in Peter the Great attempted to “modernize” Russia. This is not false: the Romanovs did initiate a great wave of “Europeanizing” reforms. But it’s not exactly true either in the sense that they–the tsars themselves–didn’t generally do the work of Europeanizing reform because they knew next to nothing about Europe (Peter being something of an exception). In order to import and assimilate European institutions, the Russian elite needed, well, Europeans. In his fascinating book Moderniser of Russia: Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Kees Boterbloem explores the life of an on-the-ground reformer who was perfectly fit to do the tsars’ reformist bidding–Andrei Vinius. He was not only European (Dutch, in fact), but he was also Russian (having been raised in Russia). Vinius was there at nearly every moment of top-down attempt to reform Muscovy. By investigating his life, however, we get to see the reform process from below. Just how was it done? Read Kees’ terrific book and find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Christians in the United States and around the world have varying images of Jesus, from one who turns the other cheek to one who brings the sword. Reza Aslan, in his highly popular and beautifully written new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House, 2013), approaches Jesus by first taking the context in which he lived – first-century Palestine – quite seriously. Aslan argues that Jesus’ time was one awash in a fervent nationalism that is important for understanding the man as well as his message. It is not a book about the Jesus of the Gospels. Indeed it is not even a book about Christianity. Rather, Aslan’s book attempts to grapple with how Jesus understood himself and his role during a volatile period in history. Zealot has shot to the best seller lists in recent weeks, partly due to a controversial interview Reza Aslan gave to Fox News during which he was questioned about why a Muslim would be interested in writing a book about the founder of Christianity. We also talk to Reza about his earlier books, No god but God and How to Win a Cosmic War, as well as his two edited collections, Tablet & Pen and Muslims and Jews in America. We talk to him about growing up Iranian, while pretending to be Mexican, in the United States during the 1980s, about graduate school, about Fox News and Islamophobia, and about writing for a popular audience, being a public intellectual, and the challenges involved with such endeavors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

What is a celebrity? And how has the definition of celebrity changed over the course of American history? Those questions are central to Charlene M. Boyer Lewis‘s book Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Patterson, a beautiful and brilliant young woman from Baltimore, married Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, when she was only eighteen. They were quickly divorced at the emperor’s insistence, but her story does not end there. As  Boyer Lewis shows, this strong-willed and opinionated woman created a cult of celebrity around herself, centered on her self-conscious adoption of aristocratic ways. Her story illuminates the ambivalence about aristocracy, the scope of women’s action, the nature of fame and celebrity, and the complexities of father-daughter relationships in the early American republic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography