New Books in Biography

Seán Creagh was born in County Monaghan in 1977. He attended Our Lady’s Secondary School in Castleblayney and later on Dundalk Institute of Technology. After moving to the U.S and developing an intense interest in Irish-American history he attended Northeastern Illinois University where he achieved an Honors Degree in History as well as Honors in Education. Today he is a middle school Social Studies teacher in Illinois.His first book was The Wolfhounds of Irish-American Nationalism. Listen to an interview on that here.In this interview he discusses his second book entitled Republican Solipsist, recently published with Peter LangRepublican Solipsist: The Life and Times of Joseph Mcgarrity, 1874-1940 (Peter Lang, 2025) discusses the life of Joseph McGarrity and his role within Irish and Irish American Republicanism including the complicated transatlantic relationship between two opposing visions of an independent Ireland. McGarrity’s militant Republicanism came into regular conflict with the reality of the political situation in Ireland. While the role of John Devoy has been well documented in the development of Irish American nationalism in the form of Clan na Gael that of Joseph McGarrity has been less well analyzed. For many historians the central focus of Irish American nationalism during the revolutionary period of 1916–1923 has centered on the Devoy-controlled branch of Clan na Gael. However, this period saw significant influence from McGarrity and the Philadelphia branch of the movement in shaping political events in Ireland which has been largely ignored. The book places McGarrity at the center of Irish Republicanism during one of the most critical periods of its history. It is hard to imagine how militant Irish Republicanism would have evolved had it not been for the role and influence of this long-neglected figure in Irish history.Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. I was newly arrived to New York City when I began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man barely out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. I had decided I was going to be a fiction writer and while ignorant of what that might entail, I understood writers lived in New York. From the start, Kusy’s seemed the perfect place for a budding writer looking for life experience, a singular, endlessly entertaining circus. When I interviewed Red, my old boss at Kusy’s in October of 2013, the first thing he said was, “I wish now I had a tape recorder and had just recorded every day down there. Just the fucking stories alone, the shit people came up with every day, the insanity of that place.”​It’s also the story of a young couple fresh from the Midwest making a life together. We were college sweethearts, seduced by the glamour and excitement of the East Village, its fashion model roommates, conceptual art openings, and junkies lined up outside bombed out buildings. We tried to live with an intensity that could only lead us to ruin. The Heart is Meat (Oil on Water Press, 2025) is a re-creation of a mythic time and place in New York City that can never exist again, an evocation of a vanished attitude, a pre-networked American Romanticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?”Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth.Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025) is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinning author and editor of four books, most recently Vanguard, she is past copresident of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and has contributed to the New York Times, Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Louise Lowe is a theatre and performance director, writer, choreographer, dramaturge, and, more recently, a television director and short film writer/director, working in Ireland and internationally. She is the Co-Artistic Director of ANU Productions, established with Owen Boss in Dublin in 2009. Lowe is known for facilitating and creating moments of interior reckoning for audiences through immersive performance techniques. These techniques engage spectators in affectively realised moments of understanding that the stories unfolding through performance reflect living histories in need of greater socio-political engagement and intervention. The Theatre of Louise Lowe (Cambridge UP, 2025) assesses Lowe's creative practice and production history since her days as a drama facilitator in women's prisons and resource centres in Dublin, paying particular attention to the economic struggle of Dublin's north inner-city, the markings of which are potently visible in the work she makes, and how she makes it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Professional baseball has featured a bevy of superstars over the past century and a half, but only a few of them have impacted their sport and cities as deeply as Willie McCovey and Billy Williams. Born just a handful of miles apart in 1938, they grew up in and around one of the sport’s true cradles, Mobile, Alabama, on their way to producing two iconic careers in Major League Baseball.In A Time for Reflection: The Parallel Legacies of Baseball Icons Willie McCovey and Billy Williams (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), Jason Cannon examines these two legends of the game. Overcoming the heinous racism of the Jim Crow South as part of the second generation of African American major leaguers who followed in the footsteps of Jackie Robinson, they became two of baseball’s all-time greatest players. Off the field, they took impactful stands for racial progress that continue to resonate today. Their personal resolve, leadership in the clubhouse, and dedication to their baseball communities endeared them to teammates and fans alike.Featuring original interviews with family members, friends, teammates, and Williams himself, A Time for Reflection brings to life their monumental accomplishments on the diamond, while also detailing how McCovey and Williams grew into pillars of San Francisco and Chicago and inspired future generations of ballplayers.Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Abu Bakr al-Suli was an Abbasid polymath and table companion, as well as a legendary chess player. He was perhaps best known for his work on poetry and chancery, which would have a long-lasting influence on Arabic literature. His decades of service at the court of at least three caliphs give him a unique perspective as an historian of his own time, although he is often valued as an observer rather than an interpreter of events for posterity.In History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature (I. B. Tauris, 2024), Letizia Osti provides the first full-length English-language study devoted to al-Suli, illustrating how investigating the life, times and works of such a complex individual can serve as a fil rouge for tackling broader, contested concepts, such as biography, autobiography, court culture, and written culture. The result is an exploration of the ways in which the Abbasid court made sense of the past and, in general, of what 'historiography' means in a medieval Arabic context.Letizia Osti is Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the University of Milan, where she has taught since 2007. She earned her PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of St. Andrews, and is a member of the School of Abbasid Studies and other scholarly societies. Her research has been published widely in journals such as the Journal of Abbasid Studies, the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Literatures, and she is the co-author of the 2013 study Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court.Samuel Thrope is Curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library of Israel. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. He is the translator of Iranian author Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s 1963 Israel travelogue The Israeli Republic (Restless Books, 2017) and, with Dr. Domenico Agostini, of the ancient Iranian Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation (Oxford University Press, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

What was it like to work as a Jewish district attorney in provincial Soviet Ukraine in the post-Stalinist eras? What role did antisemitism and Holocaust memories play in solving and investigating the criminal cases? How does a detective’s mind work? The answers to these and many other fascinating questions are found in Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024). Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in Ukraine and wrote his memoirs after immigrating to the US in 1993. Translated by Marat Grinberg, a prolific scholar of Russian and Jewish literature and cinema, the memoirs tell the rich and poignant story of Goldis’s life and what it took for a Jew to navigate and survive in the halls of Soviet power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In this NBN episode host Hollay Ghadery talks to bestselling author Donna Besel about her staggering memoir, The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family (University of Regina Press, 2021) which has been hailed as “a shattering story and an essential one, told with consummate honesty and courage.” —Joan Thomas, author of Five WivesThe Unravelling is a brave, riveting telling of the destruction caused by sexual assault within a family, and the physical, psychological, emotional, financial, and legal tolls survivors often shoulder.Donna Besel offers an honest portrayal of the years-long police process from disclosure to prosecution that offers readers greater insight into the challenges victims face and the remarkable strength and resilience required to obtain some measure of justice.More about The Unravelling:It’s the antithesis of why a wedding should be memorable. In 1992, at a sister’s nuptials, Donna Besel’s family members discovered that their father, Jock Tod, had molested their youngest sister. After this disclosure, the other five sisters admitted their father had assaulted them when they were younger and had been doing so for years. Despite there being enough evidence to charge their father, the lengthy prosecution rocked Besel's family and deeply divided their small rural community.More about Donna Besel:Donna Besel loves writing of all kinds, and does presentations for schools, libraries, universities, conferences, and retreats. Her work has gained recognition from CBC Literary Awards (three times), won national contests, and appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Both of her books, a short story collection and a memoir, have been bestsellers.About Hollay Ghadery:Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Those who recognize Mayor George Moscone's name may think of him as the career politician who was assassinated along with Harvey Milk, but there was much more to this influential and fascinating man's story. He was a trailblazing progressive and powerful state legislator who was instrumental in passing legislation on issues ranging from LGBT rights to funding for school lunches. Moscone's 1975 campaign for mayor was historically significant because it was the first time a major race was won by a candidate who campaigned aggressively for expanding civil rights for both African Americans and LGBT people. He won his campaign for mayor chiefly because of huge support from those two constituencies. Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone's life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined. Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today's San Francisco came into being. Moscone--through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor's race, and brief tenure as mayor--was a key figure in the city's evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone's election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage.In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky's complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan, decentred.Morrison reexamines the relationship between Tchaikovsky's music, personal life, and politics; his support of Tsars Alexander II and III; and his engagement with the cultures of the imperial margins, in Ukraine, Poland, and the Caucasus. Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer (Yale UP, 2024) unsettles everything we thought we knew--and gives us a vivid new appreciation of Russia's most popular composer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography