New Books in Biography

In this episode, we discuss how I discovered Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy and unpack the book’s argument that modern humans are descended from primates who imitated the hunting practices and pack hierarchies of wolves during the scarcity of the ice age. We also hear from a crime novelist and a sociologist who were inspired by Man into Wolf in their own work and examine Eisler’s take on evolution. This episode contains brief descriptions of sexual violence.Voice of Robert Eisler: Logan Crum.Additional voices: Julie Ciotola and Logan Marshall.Editing and engineering: Logan Marshall.Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and his Israeli Orchestra.Guests: David Dawson, H.C. Greisman, Marcello de Martino, Kristy Montee, Myrna Sheldon, Kristen Tobey, Steven Wasserstrom.Funding provided by Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.Special thanks to the Warburg Institute.Bibliography and further reading:Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erickson, Inc. Publishers, 1978 [1951].Greisman, H. C. “Social Structure, Psychoanalysis, and Collective Aggression.” History of European Ideas Vol. 2, No. 1 (1981), pp. 35-48.I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Dir, Gene Fowler, Jr. 1957.Parrish, P. J. Island of Bones (Louis Kincaid Mysteries). Traverse City, MI: Our Noir Press, 2018 [2006].Associate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio,edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2019), Ana María Reyes examines the ways Colombian artist Beatriz González and Argentine-born art critic Marta Traba railed against international forms of modernism and promoted low brow or even provincial forms of art in the period of the Colombian National Front’s coalition government (1958-1974). In doing so, Reyes situates art in a pivotal moment in Colombian history where efforts to end political violence through compromise and power-sharing also led to the ushering of modernizing projects promoted initially under President Alberto Lleras Camargo. Reyes shows that art became under the purview of elites seeking to project Colombia as a modern, internationalist nation. González, on the other hand, increasingly questioned and challenged elite efforts to present modernism as the epitome of high art and culture in Colombia. In doing so, Reyes wholeheartedly adopted her role as a provocateur as a way to resist U.S. cultural interference and to preserve the marginal voices so often derided by urban elites in Bogotá. Through an examination of art, Reyes offers a refreshing perspective on the ways taste became politicized in mid-twentieth century Colombia.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Tanya Harmer’s new biography, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores how a young Chilean woman pursued her political commitments and navigated patriarchal strictures as a militant leftist. The daughter of Salvador Allende, Beatriz Allende was born in 1942 and came of age in a tumultuous period of Chilean history. As a young woman, she participated in youth and party politics in Chile but was also deeply connected to continental revolutionary struggles, particularly in Cuba. Though her politics diverged from her father’s, she was also a key adviser for Allende. After going into exile following the 1973 coup that brought down Allende’s government, Beatriz Allende built solidarity networks from Cuba, where she also was raising two children. Beatriz Allende took her own life in 1977.Harmer’s book traces how Beatriz’s political consciousness changed over time, paying particular attention to the ways in which gendered expectations of her shaped the nature of her militancy. In this conversation, Harmer also discusses the key, exclusive sources she used to write this biography. Beatriz Allende’s life reveals underexplored dimensions of Latin American political movements, especially those on the left, connecting that history to the themes of youth culture, gender, and everyday life in Cold War Latin America.Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about youth, higher education, transnationalism, and social class in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir (Academic Studies Press, 2020), Andrei Kushnir documents the story of his father, Wasyl Kushnir, who was born in the western part of Ukraine in 1923. The book is based on Wasyl Kushnir’s memoirs and it includes a number of photos that help reconstruct his personal story. Narrating his family story, Wasyl Kushnir goes back to the second half of the 19th century and takes the reader to the present moment: the story provides a glimpse into a family that seems to be shaped by all the atrocities of the 20th century. World War I, the collapse of the two empires, the advancement of the Soviets, dekulakization, collectivization, the Holodomor, World War II, Nazi German labor camps, exiles to Siberia, immigration to the USA: these events undoubtedly leave an imprint on the individual’s life. At times, the book reads like a movie plot: Wasyl Kushnir is a character whose life unfolds as the countries and the peoples survive though tragedies and hardships. While Andrei Kushnir pays tribute to his family by introducing the audience to the story of his father and his family, he also creates a unique way to open up historical moments through personal narratives and stories. The center of the book is the story of Wasyl Kushnir, but it gives a panoramic overview of the events that shaped not only an individual life, but the lives of nations and the destinies of the countries. This is a narrative that provides an opportunity to emphasize the fate of the individual and to present a linear presentation of historical developments. For this reason, the book is very personal and rather unbiased at the same time; the book provides insight into the life of a beloved person and it opens up the tragedies of generations on a global level. Epic Journey: Life and Times of Wasyl Kushnir is a book of memories that documents an individual life in an intimate and delicate way and it arranges numerous pieces of history not only of Ukraine, but its neighbors as well, which produces space for remembering and commemoration on private and public levels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

As historical topics, political revolutions come in and out of fashion. At the moment the American Revolution as an ideological struggle engages the public, but historians are less sure. Books that used to have the Revolution at their centre now approach it from the edges and peripheries, integrating the experiences of people and communities excluded by studies of ideological origins.In the United Kingdom, still mired in BREXIT, the civil war past inflects present politics even if the conflict itself has been nudged off the school curriculum. In the 1990s, historians of England re-fought the civil wars in battles of footnotes. It took entire books to summarise the scholarship on events that were sometimes civil wars, at others revolutions, here wars of religion, there the wars of the three kingdoms.Michael Braddick is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield, and is a leading voice in the study of England’s revolutionary past. In The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), he takes a fresh look at the turmoil that gripped England for three decades in the middle of the seventeenth century. His focus is one man’s path through these years, a path that was one of stark public suffering, personal conviction, principled argument, and an unwavering dedication to the idea that common liberties were the highest political goods.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial violence, domination, and shock. The choice is an understandable one. But in his new monograph, A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020), M’hamed Oualdi asks how a history of the modern Maghreb might look if we did not perceive it solely through the prism of European colonization, and argues that widening our gaze might force us to redefine our understanding of colonialism — and its limits.As a sequel of sorts to his first book, Oualdi explores the life and afterlife of one figure, the manumitted slave and Tunisian dignitary Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah, as an aperture through which to understand the financial, intellectual, and kinship networks that mingled with processes of colonialism and Ottoman governance in unexpected ways to produce the modern Maghreb.A master class in how historians might untangle the relationship between the personal and the political, A Slave between Empires centers Husayn — and North Africa — at the crossroads of competing ambitions, imperial and intimate. Engaging with sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and European languages, and corralling French, Tunisian, and Anglophone historiographies into one conversation, Oualdi’s newest book is not to be missed.M'hamed Oualdi is full professor at Sciences Po in Paris.Nancy Ko is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she examines the relationship between Jewish difference and (concepts of) philanthropy and property in the late- and post-Ottoman and Qajar Middle East. She can be reached at [nancy.ko@columbia.edu]. 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 Dr. Mitchell Nathanson, author of the book Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Nathanson, a professor of law at the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports at Villanova University, examines the life of Jim Bouton, a journeyman pitcher whose 1970 book, “Ball Four,” was a lightning rod for controversy and became one of the best sports books of all time. Nathanson examines the dynamics behind the crafting and publishing of “Ball Four,” Bouton’s diary of the 1969 major league baseball season. He examines the contributions of Leonard Shecter, the former New York Post sportswriter who helped shape Bouton’s narrative. More importantly, Nathanson presents a more well-rounded portrait of Bouton, a free-thinking man who marched to his own beat and was not afraid to buck the establishment. Bouton’s youth, his early successes with the New York Yankees and fall from grace are chronicled. Well-researched with interviews from key figures in his lifetime, “Bouton” provides context and reveals the man behind a work that was vilified fifty years ago as a “kiss-and-tell” book but is now lauded as a sports classic. Nathanson brings fresh perspective and delivers an unvarnished, critical view of Bouton.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

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a stern moralist yet possessed of deep, and at times dark, passions? And why did scores of thousands of Jews, many of them from traditional, observant backgrounds, embrace Herzl as their leader?In his new book Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale UP, 2020), historian Derek Penslar shows that Herzl’s path to Zionism had as much to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism. Once Herzl devoted himself to Zionism, Penslar shows, he distinguished himself as a consummate leader—possessed of indefatigable energy, organizational ability, and electrifying charisma. Herzl became a screen onto which Jews of his era could project their deepest needs and longings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina.Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Brandon K. Winford's John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director.Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.Today I talked to Brandon K. WinfordDr. Brandon K. Winford is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States and African American history with areas of specialization in civil rights and black business history.Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in colonial and revolutionary-era Black women’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography