New Books in Biography & Memoir

This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast.] Author Megan Marshall has recently written a well-received biography of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). The Peabodys were key players in the founding of the Transcendentalist movement in the early to mid 19th century. Elizabeth, the oldest, was intellectually precocious, learning Hebrew as a child so she could read the Old Testament. Mary was the middle sister, somewhat subdued by the dominant – and bossy – qualities of Elizabeth, and by the attention paid to the youngest, Sophia, who was practically an invalid. Nonetheless, Mary managed to become a teacher, writer and reformer. Sophia, beset by devastating migraines, spent most of her early years in bed. But when she had the strength, she painted. In an interview with ThoughtCast, Megan Marshall continues the tale… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

[This interview is re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] At a time when the country’s attention is focused on the ever-expanding list of American war dead, Carol Bundy‘s biography of a Union officer who sacrifices his life in the Civil War is eerily apt. The Nature of Sacrifice. A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005) tells the story of the short, heroic life of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., an elite young cavalryman who embodied the promise of his generation. An ardent abolitionist and reformer, Lowell was also a brilliant battlefield strategist, and he turned the tide at the Battle of Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, a crucial victory for the North just two weeks shy of Lincoln’s re-election. Shot twice during the fighting, Lowell died at dawn the following day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It does what all good history books should do–tell you something you thought you knew but in fact don’t–but it does it ON EVERY PAGE. I thought Vermeer was X; now I know he was Y. I thought Vermeer was influenced by X; now I understand he was influenced by Y; I thought Vermeer painted X; now I realize he painted Y. I could go on and on, revelation after revelation. The biggest news–or rather the bit that will get the most press–is that a handful of “Vermeers” were in fact painted by his daughter, Maria. Vermeer’s Family Secrets is remarkably well researched and convincingly argued. It’s also lavishly illustrated. So are a lot of art history books. But this one is also intelligently illustrated: the way the pictures are arrayed serves the book’s many arguments. They are not simply eye-candy; they are also brain-candy. And the book is written in a clever, engaging, dry style. The short “Acknowledgments and Preface” are worth the price of admission. A word about that price. I confess I get all the books I do on this show free, thanks to the publishers. So I don’t know how much they cost. I thought this one, judging by the production value, was going to run somewhere around $100. That’s steep. But my friends, I’m delighted to tell you that you can buy this book for the low, low price of $32.85 from Amazon. It would make a great holiday gift. Since I have a copy on hand, I think I’ll give it to my brother-in-law (don’t tell him…). Please become a fan of “New Books in Art” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

When you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror? We’ve learned a lot about Ezhov’s involvement in the Terror since the opening of Soviet archives in 1991. We know about his fanaticism, how he manufactured confessions, was present at his victims’ torture, and even kept the bullets that killed his victims, wrapped and labeled them, and tucked them in his desk. Less is known about Ezhov before he became the personification of Stalinist political violence. To understand Ezhov’s life before the Terror, we have to turn to J. Arch Getty’s book Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s Iron Fist (Yale UP, 2008). Getty’s focus isn’t on Ezhov, Stalin’s “iron fist,” but on Ezhov the “good party worker.” In particular, Getty is interested in Ezhov’s meteoric rise through the Party ranks to become the head of the NKVD and, by 1936, the second most powerful person in the Soviet Union. Ezhov’s story is a mixture of hard work and ambition, patrons and clients, devotion, and Manichean political culture in post-revolutionary Russia. How did Ezhov successfully navigate all this? The answer to this question says less about Ezhov as an individual than it does about the Soviet system in the 1920s and 1930s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010). Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there were one. He believed in the Nazi cause with his heart and soul. He wanted to create a new Germany, and indeed a new Europe dominated by Germans. As the Gauleiter of Wartheland (an area of Western Poland annexed to the Reich), he was given the opportunity to help realize the Nazi nightmare in the conquered Eastern territories. But, as Epstein shows, he was often hindered both by his own personality and the chaos that characterized Nazi occupation of the East. Grieser emerges from Epstein’s book as someone who wanted to be a “model Nazi,” but couldn’t really manage it because he was a crooked timber working in a crooked system. His personal life was an embarrassing tangle of marriages, affairs, and break-ups that at points threatened his career. His professional life was marked by ambition, ego-mania, and fawning, none of which endeared him to most of his colleagues and superiors. And his murderous attempts to “work toward the Fuhrer” in the Wartheland–by displacing Poles, murdering Jews and other “undesirables,” and populating the East with Germans–were stymied by the cross-cutting jurisdictions, conflicting agendas, and professional jealousies that were one of the hallmarks of Nazi rule. Grieser did his best (or his worst, depending on how you look at it) to Germanize the Wartheland. He improvised, maneuvered, and “worked the system” such as it was in pursuit of the Nazi totalitarian project. Thankfully, he failed, demonstrating again that totalitarian dreams, though they can be horribly distructive, are a far reach from totalitarian realities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler than any other figure in modern history. Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin and a few others might give him a run for his money, but I’d bet on Hitler. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him. Surely Thomas Weber knew this when he began to work on Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford UP, 2010). After all, a new book on Hitler’s wartime experience had come out in 2005. What more is there to say? It turns out that there is quite a lot if you know where to look. And Weber does. He uses an interesting approach to uncover novel information about Hitler. Weber acknowledges that the documentary record relating directly to Hitler’s personal wartime experience is thin (a few letters, some military reports) and, when it is thicker, biased (more than a few axe-grinding memoirs from a much later time). These documents, all of which have been pored over by historians, will not shed any new light on Hitler. So Weber turns to a much larger and more trustworthy body of sources: that produced by the officers and soldiers in Hitler’s unit, the List Regiment. Though these papers usually do not mention Hitler by name, they enable Weber to reconstruct what he must have experienced, to see what was typical and what was not in Hitler’s service record, and, on the basis of this information, judge the veracity of claims made by Hitler, Nazi propagandists, and historians about the impact of World War I on the the Nazi dictator. The result is a serious revision. Hitler (et al.) said that World War one “made” him the person he became. Weber shows in detail that this claim is false. Fundamental elements of Hitler’s worldview either pre-date the war (his German nationalism) or seem to post-date it (his radical anti-semitism). In fact, the war did two things for Hitler: it gave him credibility he could use as he entered politics and it convinced him that he was an expert in military affairs. He ran for office as a humble Gefreiter (private), a holder of the Iron Cross First Class; and he ran the war as a dilettantish know-it-all, often with disastrous consequences. The only revelation Hitler had in the trenches was a common one, namely, that war is a very nasty business. That he went on to start another, even bloodier one has less to do with his experience of World War One than the ideas he brought to the conflict and absorbed after it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

I fear that most people think that “history” is “the past” and that the one and the other live in books. But it just ain’t so. History is a story we tell about the past, or rather some small portion of it. The past itself is gone and cannot, outside science fiction, be revisited. And the histories in books are neither dead nor alive. They are zombies, endlessly repeating themselves, never having a new thought, never responding to anything you say. (Plato, by the way, is good on this subject.) In point of fact the only place that histories really live is in the minds of historians in the act of creation. In this context, the story is far from dead. Indeed, it hasn’t even been born. As historians read, research, and think, they make histories like a carpenter makes a table. Readers rarely get to see the historical craftsmen at their benches. All they see is the result. [pullquote]As historians read, research, and think, they make histories like a carpenter makes a table. Readers rarely get to see the historical craftsmen at their benches. All they see is the result.[/pullquote] Today we’ll have the opportunity to look into the history workshop with Abbott (“Tom”) Gleason. Tom has worked in academic history for nearly half a century. He has been everywhere, done everything, and faced every challenge a working historian can. And now he’s written a terrific memoir about his path, and that of historians of his generation in general: A Liberal Education (TidePool Press, 2010). I came away from the book with a renewed appreciation of the hold Zeitgeist has on historians and their work. Tom was raised in a cultural milieu (the liberal WASP establishment) that has now largely vanished. That peculiar, specific context had a powerful impact (by his own admission, both positive and negative) on his historical opinions and writing. It was interesting for me to see how Tom, as a conflicted, thoughtful son of privilege, negotiated Harvard of the 1950s, academia in the 1960s, and the rise (and relative decline) of the Russian studies industry in the post war decades. With eyes wide open, he recognizes the limitations of his Cold-War scholarly cohort, the ways in which he and his colleagues saw some things while being oblivious to others. Sometimes they got Russia right; sometimes they didn’t. But they were always on a quest to find the historical truth. Tom’s memoir shows just how difficult that truth is to find. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But no dunks! Russell’s opponents in college and the NBA rarely fared any better. Sports talk is full of hyperbole, but in Russell’s case most of it is true. In his time, he was far and away the best player to ever step on the court and, for most of his career, he completely owned every court he stepped on. He was so dominant that they changed the rules so less gifted players would have a chance. Bill Russell, however, was not only a surpassingly great basketball player, he was also an African American star in an era in which being an African American star (or just being an African American) was very complicated. Today we are used to seeing outstandingly successful blacks in all (or almost all) spheres of life. In the mid-1950s that just wasn’t true. The American ruling elite was lily white, and that’s the way most white Americans thought it should be. Bill Russell (and Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Willie Mays, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, among others) were anomalies: they were black, but they were both extraordinarily accomplished and remarkably famous. They couldn’t just be athletes; they had to be symbols of some promising (or frightening) new world as well. That’s quite a burden to bear. In King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (University of California Press, 2010), Aram Goudsouzian has done a great service by detailing the ways Russell bore this weight, and the ways in which he fought to throw it off. Aram makes clear that Russell was a conflicted soul. He lacked self-confidence, but he was brusk and even arrogant. He was friendly and gregarious to some, but often simply rude to others. He was hot tempered, but he affected a cool, distant demeanor. He believed he was a man of principle (and convinced others he was), but he periodically abandoned his family for a playboy lifestyle. If Russell couldn’t be honest about himself, he insisted on being honest about everything and everyone around him. He meant what he said and said what he meant–about race, about sports, about anything that bothered him. He was a sort of athletic Socrates, always questioning and never fully accepting the way things were. And, like Socrates, Russell was willing to suffer for his beliefs. As Aram points out, he did in many ways. But in the process he gained the respect of almost everyone he encountered. He was a hard man to like, but he was an easy man to admire. I should add that if you like white-hot game narratives, this book is full of them. Remember this?: “Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones… Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over… It’s all-l-l-l over!” Johnny Most, RIP. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Try to imagine having never seen an airplane. It’s hard. Aircraft are an ordinary part of our daily experience. Just look up and you’ll probably see one, or at least its vapor trails. Go to your local airport and you can fly in one pretty inexpensively. Heck, if you like, you can learn to pilot one yourself at any one of hundreds of flying schools. There is just nothing unusual or even very exciting about airships. It wasn’t always so. In the first quarter of the 20th century, airplanes were new. People had long dreamed of flight (see “Icarus and Daedalus”) and by the 19th century they’d done a little of it in balloons. But most folks could hardly conceive of a man (or woman) taking to the air like a bird. But men (and soon women) did just that. To many contemporary observers, flying in winged airships was nothing short of a miracle. Surely, pundits claimed, conquest of the air would usher in a new modern age. It did, but not in all the ways expected. As Thomas Kessner shows in his wonderfully told The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh & the Rise of American Aviation (Oxford University Press, 2010), the experience of Charles Lindbergh is a case in point. To be sure, Lindbergh was an extraordinary pilot–skilled, meticulous, and remarkably brave. That, however, did not set him apart from the hundreds of other fly boys of the age. What did set him apart was: 1) luck (many of his contemporaries died in crashes, and he nearly did on many occasions); 2) a single insight, doggedly pursued (that a plane with one engine, one pilot, and an 2,385 pounds of fuel could make it from New York to Paris); and 3) the fact that after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic he became the most famous person in the world. Tom pays due attention to all three of these characteristics, but I found the last of them–Lindbergh’s incredible celebrity and its impact on him and the world–the most interesting. It’s arguable that Lindbergh was the first “superstar.” Though he had indeed done something extraordinary, he was the creation of a finely tuned, corporate-backed publicity campaign and a frenzied, tireless, and completely meritorious press corps. The people around Lindbergh understood that if they handled his “image” correctly they all could make a fortune. And so they took this gangly, taciturn, strangely aloof son of the prairie and made him the symbol of all that was good (and marketable) in the newly christened air age. The problem was that, eventually, Lindbergh refused to play along. He was who he was, and who he was was a loner. Celebrity wore on him. Now when most people get tired of attention, they go home. But after the Paris flight Lindbergh had no home. His entire life was public. So he did what so many frustrated celebrities with considerable resources (think Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, J. D. Salinger) after him have done: he became a crank. He tried to find a way to live for ever, dabbled in ‘scientific racism,’ and eventually got mixed up with the Nazis. Lindbergh, the arch-individualist, got tired of having people tell him who he was; he wanted to be his own man. And, in the end, he was, for good and ill. The lesson? If you are in the business of making and selling role models, it’s probably not a good idea to pick a 27-year old who has focused his life on some narrow pursuit to the exclusion of all others, even if he’s really good at it. You just don’t know what they’re going to “be” when they grow up. (For more, see “Michael Jackson,” “Lindsey Lohan,” “LeBron James,” etc., etc.) Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out. France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic settlement. So which was it to be: France a nation of free-thinking citizens or France a nation of Catholic Frenchmen? The question was not definitively answered during the Dreyfus Affair, but new (and somewhat disturbing) possibilities were sketched out. The analysis of these new paths is one (among many) of the great strengths of Ruth Harris‘s new book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt, 2010) . She shows that both sides–the Dreyfusards (aka “Intellectuals”) and the Anti-Intellectuals–used the Affair to elaborate their visions for France and, in the process, worked themselves into a tizzy. They began to believe things that, well, only a lunatic could believe. French political culture entered a kind of surreal moment (a bit like American political culture during the O.J. trial if you ask me). Alas, the French didn’t quickly come back to reality after the Affair ended. They organized parties and continued to fight. And they are still fighting. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography