New Books in Biography

Meryl Altman's new book Beauvoir in Time, published by Brill Rodopi Press (2020), situates Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) in its historical context and responds to criticism that muddles what she actually said about sex, race and class. She takes up three aspects of Beauvoir's work today’s feminists find problematic: the characterizations of the frigid woman and lesbians, the analogy of race and class that obscures Black and working-class women and her examples drawn from white middle-class experience. Charged with ethnocentrism, her contribution is distorted by not considering her place and time. Through close reading of Beauvoir's writing in many genres, alongside expansive criticism, Altman shows that what appears as a problem for feminist theory is best understood by a full consideration of Beauvoir’s engagement with Freudian, Marxist and anticolonial thinkers. Extremely helpful in understanding the place of The Second Sex within international feminist theory, Altman offers insights into how Beauvoir is still relevant in the age of intersectionality and identity politics.Meryl Altman is Professor of English and Women's Studies at DePauw University.Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (Pegasus Books, 2021), Ken Ellingwood takes readers back to the first true test of the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and a free press through the story of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The story unfolds during the 1830s, a period known for legal efforts to silence the abolitionist movement by states across the South and violent mobs who picked up that charge when the government could not. Lovejoy pushed back against both of those forces and ultimately succumbed to them, becoming a martyr for the abolitionist movement and a wakeup call about how essential a free press was to a free country and a thriving democracy in America.Lovejoy's story is worth revisiting now at time when attacks against journalists are again on the rise and the press is considered by some to be the "enemy of the people." Ellingwood does a wonderful job of capturing it in this book and bringing this important time in American history to light.Ken Ellingwood is an award-winning journalist, Ken Ellingwood has been posted in the San Diego, Mexico City, Jerusalem, and Atlanta bureaus of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of the critically acclaimed (and prescient) work of investigative journalism Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border. He currently lives in Abu Dhabi.Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The First World War poet and composer Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) spent the last fifteen years of his life confined in a Kent mental hospital before dying prematurely of tuberculosis. How good was Gurney's war poetry, and has his music stood the test of time? Why did try to re-write Shakespeare's plays? How far do recently uncovered archives transform our understandings both of Ivor Gurney's troubled life and his remarkable work? Kate Kennedy of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing discusses her ground-breaking biography of Ivor Gurney Dweller in Shadows (Princeton 2021) with Duncan McCargo, in an unusual podcast that includes readings of his poetry, and two specially recorded examples of his music. The podcast opens and closes with Kate Kennedy (cello) and Simon Over (piano) performing Gurney's song Sleep. We also hear Simon accompany Dominic Bevan as he sings Severn Meadows, a rare example of Gurney setting his own words to music. Rare treats lie in store for the listener.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His fiction and criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Conjunctions, n+1, The Baffler, and elsewhere. The piece we are discussing here is Child’s Play. What can Wittgenstein teach us about raising kids published in June 2021 in The Believer.His debut novel The Zero and the One was published in March 2017 by Twelve Books. It has subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse, which was a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books.A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers' Workshop and an Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Lyle D. Bierma's Font of Pardon and New Life: John Calvin and the Efficacy of Baptism (Oxford UP, 2021) is a study of the historical development and impact of John Calvin's doctrine of baptismal efficacy. The primary questions it addresses are (1) whether Calvin taught an "instrumental" doctrine of baptism, according to which the external sign of the sacrament serves as a means or instrument to convey the spiritual realities it signifies, and (2) whether Calvin's teaching on baptismal efficacy remained constant throughout his lifetime or underwent significant change. Secondarily, the work also examines whether such spiritual blessings, in Calvin's view, are conferred only in adult (believer) baptism or also in the baptism of infants, and what impact Calvin's doctrine of baptismal efficacy had on the Reformed confessional tradition that followed him. The book examines all of Calvin's writings on baptism-his Institutes, commentaries on Scripture, catechisms, polemical writings, and consensus documents-chronologically through five stages of his life and then analyzes the doctrine of baptismal efficacy in eight of the major Reformed confessions and catechisms from the age of confessional codification. It concludes that Calvin did indeed hold to an instrumental view of baptism; that this doctrine underwent change and development over the course of his life but not to the extent that some in the past have suggested; that his view of the efficacy of infant baptism was consistent with his doctrine of baptism in general; and that versions of Calvin's teaching can be found in many, though not all, of the major Reformed confessional documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

This year, transgender liberation is at the forefront of Pride Month discourse, with a staggering number of conservative, religious, and gender critical-backed bills challenging trans people’s rights to use public restrooms, participate in organized sports, and even expect inclusive language at the doctor’s office. These would-be laws seek to legislate and restrict trans identity—especially that of trans children—despite the fact that trans people have always existed and will continue to exist, living lives that sometimes include having children of their own.For trans masculine writer Krys Malcolm Belc, pregnancy taught him more about gender identity and transition than he expected—an embodied experience that ultimately encouraged him to begin Hormone Replacement Therapy. In his stunning experimental debut, The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, Belc uses original photographs and documents to outline the expansion of his family and the surprising revelations of this journey. The result is a can’t-miss book about trans identity and parenthood full of poignancy, humor, and love.Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Krys Malcolm Belc to learn more about The Natural Mother of the Child, available now from Counterpoint (2021).Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Federico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. The book explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity and then to ‘postmodern reproduction’. Burke moves from analysis of stories told from a relatively ‘objective’ standpoint, to increased concentration on Fellini-as-author and on the cinematic apparatus, to Fellini’s dismantling of authorship and cinematic apparatus, to his postmodern signifying strategies. Grounded in poststructuralist approaches to texts and signification, Burke shows that Fellini is profoundly readable, if extremely complex. Revisiting Burke’s 1996 Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, this new edition includes revised material from the original, plus a new preface and new chapter on the filmmaker’s work on commercials. Elegantly written and thoroughly researched, this book is essential reading for Fellini fans and scholars.The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini presents new methodologies and fresh insights for encountering, appreciating, and contextualizing the director’s films in the 21st century. A milestone in Fellini scholarship, this volume provides contributions by leading scholars, intellectuals, and filmmakers, as well as insights from collaborators and associates of the Italian director. Scholarly yet readable essays explore the fundamental aspects of Fellini’s works while addressing their contemporary relevance in contexts ranging from politics and the environment to gender, race, and sexual orientation.Giancarlo Lombardi is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published widely on European and North American serial drama, on Italian Film and Cultural Studies, and on cultural representations of Italian terrorism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean War to Cold War crises, from the Red Scare to the Missile Gap controversies, Ike was able to give our country eight years of peace and prosperity by relying on a core set of principles. These were informed by his heritage and upbringing, as well as his strong character and his personal discipline, but he also avoided making himself the center of things. He was a man of judgment, and steadying force. He sought national unity, by pursuing a course he called the Middle Way that tried to make winners on both sides of any issue.Ike was a strategic, not an operational leader, who relied on a rigorous pursuit of the facts for decision-making. His talent for envisioning a whole, especially in the context of the long game, and his ability to see causes and various consequences, explains his success as Allied Commander and as President. After making a decision, he made himself accountable for it, recognizing that personal responsibility is the bedrock of sound principles.Susan Eisenhower's How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions (Thomas Dunne, 2020) shows us not just what a great American did, but why--and what we can learn from him today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Ahmad Ibn Tulun: Governor of Abbasid Egypt, 868-884 (Oneworld Academic, 2021), by Matthew S. Gordon (Miami University (Ohio)) is an innovative look at the Abbasid governor of Egypt from 868-884, and the short-lived dynasty that succeeded him for just two decades. Ibn Tulun is perhaps best known for the mosque that still bears his name in Cairo--arguably the city's oldest Islamic monument that survives in its original form--which was the centerpiece of the capital city that he built. While ibn Tulun is often depicted in Egyptian historiography as an autonomous leader, aspiring toward independence away from the greater Abbasid state, Gordon makes a convincing argument that ibn Tulun--the son of a Turkic slave-soldier gifted to the Abbasid caliph--was instead a product of the political turmoil in Iraq, but that he was very much an Abbasid in spirit and politics. This intriguing and convincing reframing of ibn Tulun's life and career offers a new interpretation of this understudied period in Egyptian history, as well as a glimpse into Abbasid-era household politics. Christopher S Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Today I talked to Edward G. Longacre about his new book Unsung Hero of Gettysburg: The Story of Union General David McMurtrie Gregg (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).On the 3rd day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Union cavalry officer David Gregg ensured that Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry troops didn’t succeed. Stuart’s orders were to attack the right flank of the Army of the Potomac and create a pincer movement by attacking from behind while Pickett’s forces made their disastrous frontal attack known as Pickett’s charge. Outnumbered by probably 2 to 1, Gregg’s men and the commandeered cavalry led by George Custer held off the Confederate horsemen, helping to seal the military victory. Gregg and Custer got along well but could hardly have been more different. One was reserved, the other flamboyant. And it would of course be Custer who went down in the history books for being impulsive, while the levelheaded Gregg provided solid leadership whether at Gettysburg or elsewhere during the war. This episode goes into all of that and more, including what type of person tended to be most attracted to the cavalry (independent, hell-for-leather types).Ed Longacre is a retired historian for the U.S. Department of Defense and the award-winning author of numerous books on the Civil War in addition to writing top-secret documents for the U.S. Airforce. One of his ancestors took part in the torching of part of William and Mary College during the Civil War as an act of revenge following the Confederate seizure of some of his comrades in arms.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography