New Books in Biography

George Frederick Bristow, born in 1825, was a significant musical figure in the United States from the 1850s until his death in 1898. Now, almost one hundred years after his birth, Katherine Preston has just written his first biography--George Frederick Bristow (University of Illinois Press, 2020)-- as part of the American Composers Series. Bristow led a professional life that today’s classical musicians would surely recognize. He patched together a living from performing, composing, conducting, teaching, church jobs, and even some business ventures and celebrity endorsements. He composed in every major genre of the period and wrote "Rip Van Winkle," the first grand opera by an American composer. Preston situates his life within the booming musical economy in New York and his music within the critical and artistic currents of the nineteenth century, while illuminating the little-known creative and performance culture that Bristow helped define and create.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

John Calvin in Context (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers a comprehensive overview of Calvin's world. Including essays from social, cultural, feminist, and intellectual historians, each specially commissioned for this volume, the book considers the various early modern contexts in which Calvin worked and wrote. It captures his concerns for Northern humanism, his deep involvement in the politics of Geneva, his relationships with contemporaries, and the polemic necessities of responding to developments in Rome and other Protestant sects, notably Lutheran and Anabaptist. The volume also explores Calvin's tasks as a pastor and doctor of the church, who was constantly explicating the text of scripture and applying it to the context of sixteenth-century Geneva, as well as the reception of his role in the Reformation and beyond. Demonstrating the complexity of the world in which Calvin lived, John Calvin in Context serves as an essential research tool for scholars and students of early modern Europe.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

In 1800 a Belfast linen merchant named Alexander Brown emigrated with his wife and eldest son to Baltimore. Today his family’s name lives on in the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, a company that has long played an outsized role in American history. As Zachary Karabell details in his book Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power (Penguin, 2021), a key factor in its endurance over the country’s long and often tumultuous financial history has been the importance it has accorded to the values of trust and reputation which Alexander Brown championed. These he taught to his sons, who branched out beyond Baltimore and Liverpool and spearheaded the transition from trade into finance. By the second generation the Browns were fixtures in both London and New York, from where their respective firms endured the Civil War and grew as the country expanded.By the end of the 19th century Brown Brothers was among the nation’s elite financial firms. Karabell shows how their founder’s values were shared by the others of a new emergent ruling, who were educated at a handful of top schools and who moved easily between finance and politics. Though Brown Brothers steered clear of the volatile transactions that were associated with the Gilded Age, they formed ties with some of its participants, most notably railroad tycoon and financier E. H. Harriman. It was the financial firm created by Harriman’s sons Averell and Roland that merged with Brown Brothers in 1930 to create Brown Brothers Harriman, which nurtured a generation of cabinet members, governors, and United States senators. As Karabell demonstrates, these leaders carried forward the ideals Alexander Brown advocated, which have not only shaped America’s role in the world but have ensured the firm’s survival while its counterparts around them have risen and fallen in the unrestrained pursuit of wealth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Richard Thompson's Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975 (Algonquin Books, 2021) gives fans of his music a tale as rollicking and entertaining as the reels and ballads he recorded with the band Fairport Convention. Fairport Convention was one of the central bands in the British Folk Rock scene, blending traditional English songs and melodies with the energy and irreverence of rock and roll. Thompson's memoir of his time with the band discusses the process of recording their classic albums, as well as run-ins with figures like Buck Owens, Nick Drake, and Jimi Hendrix. He also discusses his childhood in post-war London, his relationship with his then-wife and collaborator Linda Thompson, and his search for spiritual purpose, which he eventually found in Sufi Islam.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Isabel Rosario Cooper, if mentioned at all by mainstream history books, is often a salacious footnote: the young Filipino mistress of General Douglas MacArthur, hidden away at the Charleston Hotel in DC.Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke University Press: 2021) by Professor Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez refuses to reduce Cooper’s life to that simple statement. The book investigates Cooper’s life both in the Philippines, where she was a famed vaudeville and film actress, and in the United States, where her life shows the struggles that Asian actors and actresses faced in a prejudiced Hollywood.In this interview I ask Vernadette to introduce us to Isabel Cooper, and go beyond the simplistic historical narrative of her as MacArthur’s mistress. Wel talk about how her life exemplifies how imperialism, gender and entertainment intersected in both the Philippines and the United States. And we briefly explore how this connects with the idea of being “Asian-American”.Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke University Press: 2013), and coeditor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (Duke University Press: 2019).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Empire’s Mistress. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave (HarperCollins, 2020) is the first volume of a long-awaited, near-mythical biography of Nick Cave by award-winning writer, Mark Mordue.A beautiful, profound and poetic biography of the formative years of the dark prince of Australian rock 'n' roll, Boy on Fire is Nick Cave's creation story. This is a portrait of the artist as, first, a boy, and then as a young man. A deeply insightful work which charts his family, friends, influences, milieu and, most of all, his music, it reveals how Nick Cave shaped himself into the extraordinary artist he would become.As well as a powerfully compelling biography of a singular, uncompromising artist, Boy on Fire is a fascinating social and cultural biography, a vivid and evocative rendering of a time and place, from the fast-running dark river and ghost gums of Wangaratta, to the nascent punk scene which hit staid 1970s Melbourne like an atom bomb, right through to the torn wallpaper, sticky carpet and the manic, wild energy of nights at the Crystal Ballroom.Mark Mordue is an award-winning Australian writer, journalist, editor, and teacher. In addition to Boy On Fire, his new biography of the young Nick Cave, Mark is the author of Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip, a roadtrip memoir, and Darlinghurst Funeral Rites, a poetry collection. Mark is co-winner of the 2014 Peter Blazey Fellowship, which recognises an outstanding manuscript in the fields of biography, autobiography or life, and is winner of the 2010 Pascall Prize: Australian Critic of the Year. His work has consistently appeared across mainstream, alternative and literary publications. Mark has also been the editor of three national magazines in Australia: Stiletto in the 1980s; Australian Style in the 1990s; and Neighbourhood Paper from 2017 to 2019. His poetry, fiction, essays and memoir work have appeared in Australian literary journals including HEAT, Meanjin, Griffith Review, and Overland. Mark teaches at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.Dr Matthew Thompson is a literary nonfiction specialist who recently moved from rural Australia to the Pacific Northwest of America. He is the author of MAYHEM, Running With The Blood God, and My Colombian Death. For more information visit https://matthewthompsonwriting.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew—and left her mark on—the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions.Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments—from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg—comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world. Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin Press, 2021) is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Every good story needs a villain, and some of the early chroniclers of the pilgrim and puritan settlements found all they needed for this type of character in Thomas Morton. Peter C. Mancall tells the story in The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale UP, 2019), in what reads perhaps like a historical legal thriller novel. Most of our knowledge of Morton comes from the records left by his enemies, but Mancall's new research into this enigmatic figure unveils how this unlikely anti-hero can shed tremendous light on alternate possibilities in the contentious early years of the European-Native encounter. Morton's own writings portray a vision of an altogether different kind of indigenous–settler future. Yet Morton's continued antagonism of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonial governments led to his repeated exile. While he was repudiated by the earliest generations of readers for debauchery and political menace, subsequent generations continue to find in Thomas Morton a countercultural icon in a world dominated by religious dissidents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Shake and Bake is the story of Archie Clark, one of the top playmaking guards in the 1970s pre-merger NBA. While not one of the game’s most recognized superstars, Clark was a seminal player in NBA history who staggered defenders with the game’s greatest crossover dribble (“shake and bake”) and is credited by his peers as the originator of today’s popular step-back move.Signed as the Lakers third-round draft pick in 1966, Clark worked his way into the starting lineup in his rookie year. But Clark was more than a guaranteed double-double whenever he stepped on the floor. He was a deep-thinking trailblazer for players’ rights. Clark often challenged coaches and owners on principle, much to the detriment of his career and NBA legacy, signing on as a named litigant in the seminal Robertson v. NBA antitrust case that smashed the player reserve system and jump-started the modern NBA.Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. 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

Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s inheritance was passed down not through blood or soil but through a framed map of Trentino, Alto Adige—the region where family's ancestral alpine village is found. Far more than a map hanging above the family television, the image featured colors and lines that held in place the memories and values fueling the Povinelli family's fraught relationships with the village and with each other. In her graphic memoir The Inheritance (Duke UP, 2020), Povinelli explores the events, traumas, and powers that divide and define our individual and collective pasts and futures. Weaving together stories of her grandparents' flight from their village in the early twentieth century to the fortunes of their knife-grinding business in Buffalo, New York, and her own Catholic childhood in a shrinking Louisiana woodlands of the 1960s and 1970s, Povinelli describes the serial patterns of violence, dislocation, racism and structural inequality that have shaped not only her life but the American story. Plumbing the messy relationships among nationality, ethnicity, kinship, religion, and belonging, The Inheritance takes us into the gulf between the facts of history and the stories we tell ourselves to survive and justify them.Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography