New Books in Biography

The rich and complex prose of the celebrated Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a detailed look at the fabric of European literary and social discourse and continues to attract scholarly attention, even 200 years after his birth.2021 marks the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth. To commemorate this occasion, join us in conversation with Prof. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, as she takes us through the brief-yet-colourful life, most notable works, and myths surrounding the celebrated Russian author.The discussion is an extension of “The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review”, published by Brill and edited by Prof. Vladiv-Glover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In what ways was the course of twentieth-century Middle Eastern history shaped by the immediate post-World War I years at the dawn of the Mandatory Period? Winston S. Churchill and the Shaping of the Middle East, 1919-1922 (Academic Studies Press, 2020) examines the key developments in Iraq, Palestine and the Aegean as they were coped with by Winston S. Churchill, who served as Secretary for War and Air and as Colonial Secretary during 1919-1922. Author Sara Reguer depicts the diplomatic relationship between Churchill and the Zionist movement, the formation of a Middle East Department in the Colonial Office, the dangers posed by the Bolsheviks in the post-Russian Revolution moment, and the threat to British interests posed by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) of Turkey in a new light to stress the unique role in diplomatic history played by Winston Churchill as a creative, nuanced and sophisticated individual situated in the right place at the right time.Ari Barbalat holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of California in Los Angeles. He lives in Toronto with his family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The US military camptowns were established shortly after the Second World War in 1945, appropriating the Japanese comfort stations. The Korean government actively supported the creation of camptowns for its own economic and national security interests. Utilizing the Japanese colonial policy, the US military and the South Korean government sought to control camptown women’s bodies through vaginal examinations, isolation wards, and jails, monitoring women for potential venereal diseases. Denigrated as a “traitor” for “mixing flesh with foreigners,” camptown women and their labors were disavowed in Korean society.[1] However, the Korean government also depended on camptown women for its economic development: camptown women’s earnings accounted for 10% of Korea’s foreign currency.[2] Speaking against this silence, Grace Cho’s new memoir, Tastes Like War (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2021), brings to light not only the pain and trauma of militarized violence as experienced by her mother who worked as a camptown woman in the 1960s and 1970s, but also the beauty and poignant resilience of her life.In Tastes Like War: A Memoir (Feminist Press, 2021), Cho explores the connection between food, war, trauma, family, and love. After marrying a merchant marine, Cho’s mother moved to a white town of Chehalis in Washington in the 1970s. Abundance, social mobility, and progress – America promised Cho’s mother what seemed beyond her grasp in Korea. However, the daily traumas of racialized violence and institutionalized abuses at her workplace furthered her fragmentation as a Third World subject whose body and subjectivity were created by complex ties between the histories of empire, militarized and sexual violence, and racialization. To understand the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia, Cho delves into this history, focusing not only on the traumas but also on hope, strength, beauty, and resilience as embodied by her mother. The everyday acts of cooking Korean meals and foraging for mushrooms and blackberries signaled her mother’s will to survive no matter the condition set by the global empire. Through the act of writing, Cho reconstructs the fragments of her mother’s life – illustrating her mother’s persistent and creative drive for life despite the historical violence that continued to condition her present and the future. [1] First quote is from Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 94 and second quote is from Cho, Tastes Like War, 93.[2] Park, Emmanuel Moonchil, dir. Podŭrapge (Comfort). 2020; Seoul, Korea: Independent, 2020. Vimeo.Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In his new book, Watergate's Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night-Watchman (McFarland & Co., 2021), Adam Henig sheds new light on a widely forgotten but vital actor in the Watergate saga: the twenty-four-year-old security guard was on duty at the Watergate Office Building when he detected a break-in. A high school dropout with only a few hours of formal guard training, Frank Wills alerted the police who caught five burglars, ultimately igniting a national political scandal that ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The only African American identified with the Watergate affair, Wills enjoyed a brief moment in the limelight, but was unable to cope with his newfound fame, living the remainder of his life in obscurity and poverty. Through exhaustive research and numerous interviews, the story of America's most famous night watchman finally has been told.Adam Henig is an experienced writer and public speaker. His previous books include Alex Haley's Roots: An Author's Odyssey (2014) and Baseball Under Seige: The Yankees, The Cardinals, and a Doctor's Battle to Integrate Spring Training (2016).E. James West is a research fellow at Northumbria University Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (2020) and the forthcoming A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Over the course of a long and successful legal career, Morris Ernst established himself as one of Americas foremost civil libertarians. Yet his advocacy of free speech – an advocacy that established the case law on which much of the subsequent jurisprudence is based – stands in stark contrast with his opposition to communism and his longstanding support for J. Edgar Hoover and his anticommunist campaigns. In The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade (U Chicago Press, 2021), Samantha Barbas explores these contradictions to better understand Ernest and his legacy for our times. The son of Jewish immigrants, as a young man in college Ernst developed a gift for argumentation and an interest in progressive politics. Entering private practice after earning his law degree, he developed a reputation as a free speech crusader during the 1920s thanks to a series of high-profile legal victories and his leadership within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet even while developing a national reputation as a liberal attorney Ernst adopted a strident opposition to communism that sometimes put him at odds with his peers. Such was his antipathy to it that he emerged as one of Hoover’s most visible defenders on the left in the 1940s and 1950s, even supplying the FBI director with insider information on ACLU activities. As Barbas explains, such activities reflected his desire to remain relevant at a time when his greatest achievements increasingly lay behind him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

What was Harlem before its Renaissance, and how did it come to be? In Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), historian Kevin McGruder, Associate Professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, explores the life of the remarkable Philip Anthony Payton Jr., a real estate entrepreneur who bought building after building at the turn of the 20th century in the core of Harlem, defined as 125th St. to 135th St. between 5th and 8th Avenues. In doing so, McGruder uncovers much about Black life in New York during the period between the Civil War and the Great Migration and makes an important contribution to the history of housing segregation in the United States.David Hamilton Golland is professor of history, coordinator of humanities, and president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Ta’isi O.F. Nelson (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), O’Brien chronicles the life of a man described as the “archenemy” of New Zealand and the British Empire. He was Sāmoa’s richest man who used his wealth and unique international access to further the Sāmoan cause and was financially ruined in the process. In the aftermath of the First World War, Ta’isi embraced nonviolent resistance as a means to combat a colonial surge in the Pacific that gripped his country for nearly two decades. Ta’isi ran a global campaign of letter writing, petitions, and a newspaper to get his people’s plight heard. For his efforts he was imprisoned and exiled not once but twice from his homeland of Sāmoa. Today, Taʻisi is remembered as one of the founding fathers of independent Sāmoa.Patricia O’Brien is an Associate Professor of History at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. wpi.edu/people/faculty/hdroessler @HolgerDroessler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Who is the most interesting man in the world? The guy from the Dos Equis beer ads? Nope, it’s Buzzy Kerbox. This haole kid from O’ahu, Hawai’i burst into the professional surfing scene as a teenager in the mid-1970s and won the World Cup of Surfing in 1978, one of the first surf contests to be broadcast on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”. Buzzy was part of the generation that invented the idea of being a “professional surfer”. In 1979 he was in Australia on the professional surfing world tour when he got a message to call a certain Bruce Weber in New York City. The famous fashion photographer has seen a photo of Buzzy in a surfing magazine and wanted to fly him to New York as soon as possible to shoot him for Vogue. This surfer, who still hates to wear shoes, soon became a top model working with the likes of Cindy Crawford and Elle McPherson. As Buzzy continued to compete as a pro surfer, Ralph Lauren personally selected him to be the face of Polo. By the 1990s, Buzzy had retired from professional surfing but continued to seek out adventure in the ocean. He and famed water-man Laird Hamilton had some hair-raising antics in Europe, including death defying paddleboard crossings of the English Channel and an ill-fated paddle from Corsica to Elba. The two then went on to pioneer tow-in surfing, revolutionizing big wave surfing. At age 60, Buzzy competed in the infamously grueling Moloka’i to O’ahu paddle board race.Buzzy has written an autobiography, Making Waves. The book is a gorgeous collection of photographs, memoir, journal entries, history, and interviews. His surf stories will thrill people who don’t even know which side of the board to wax. For other conversations about the history of surfing, check out my interviews Scott Laderman, Chas Smith, and Peter Maguire in the New Books Network archives.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

I sat down with Dr. Tiffany Sippial to talk about her latest book, Celia Sanchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Celia Sanchez Manduley (1920-1980) is famous for her role in the Cuban revolution and being the "first female guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra." Sanchez joined the movement in her early thirties and went on to serve as a high-ranking government official and international ambassador. Since her death, Sanchez has been revered as a national icon, cultivated and guarded by the Cuban government. With almost unprecedented access to Sanchez's papers, including a personal diary, and firsthand interviews with family members, Tiffany A. Sippial presents the first critical study of a notoriously private and self-abnegating woman who yet exists as an enduring symbol of revolutionary ideals. Using the tools of feminist biography, cultural history, and the politics of memory, Sippial reveals the scope and depth of Sanchez's power and influence within the Cuban revolution, as well as her struggles with violence, her political development, and the sacrifices required by her status as a leader and "New Woman." Sippial reveals how Sanchez strategically crafted her own legacy within a history still dominated by bearded men in fatigues.Dr. Sippial walked me through her journey as a researcher and biographer of one of Cuba’s most revered figures. We discussed Sanchez’s early life and her emergence as a political figure in her own right, her relationship with Fidel Castro and other notable figures, her significance in Cuban national memory, and what we can learn about her story during a politically tense time. Very timely, and important conversation. Enjoy!Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba. Twitter: @RozzmeryPV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Today we are joined by Greg Larson, author of Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir (University of Nebraska, 2021). In Clubbie, Larson shares his unique perspective from his two-year stint as clubhouse attendant for the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Class A short-season affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. Larson’s starry-eyed perceptions about the game were quickly erased by the reality of a job that was time-consuming and thankless. Larson brings the reader into the minor-league clubhouse, showing how young baseball professionals are literally playing for their jobs on a day-to-day basis. As the clubhouse attendant, Larson was charged with doing laundry, making sure the players had food after the game, and keeping players supplied with equipment. He writes about the scams run by food concession officials, and also describes some of the ingenious ways he added to his own bank account. Players had to pay clubhouse dues on a limited salary, and while Larson made more than the players, broken bats, deals with beer distributors and other team staff members helped him survive. Larson spent a year living out of a converted equipment closet at Ripken Stadium to save on living expenses, and his observations are memorable. Larson’s vivid portraits of Alan Mills, Gary Allenson, Matt Merullo and Brian Graham — and himself — create a fascinating look at baseball from the bottom, looking up.Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography