New Books in Biography

Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection presents thirty-nine essays from distinguished scholars in philosophy, religion, literature, intellectual history, and other fields who consider the work of the eighteenth-century British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. A political and moral thinker and a forerunner to modern feminism she has not received attention on par with the wide breath of her ideas. The collection gives the reader insight into to her life, major works of philosophy and novels, debates with Edmund Burke and Rousseau, and enduring legacy. She commented on religion, liberalism, republicanism, moral virtue, education, women’s place in society and much more. Her ideas were known to women such as Lucretia Mott, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir who found in her a source for building a modern feminist philosophy. Timely and fruitful, The Wollstone-craftian Mind provides a board survey of an erudite thinker and a source for understanding the politics of the modern era.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, 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 research project is on the intellectual history 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 Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Cornell University Press, 2019), Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted.Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism's existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World War I, when Mann was first translated into English, to 1952, the year in which he left an America increasingly disfigured by McCarthyism, Boes establishes Mann as a significant figure in the wartime global republic of letters.Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The person in the photograph of a thirteen-year-old Vincent Van GoghWhat did the influential Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh actually look like? Popular culture and media have propagated the belief that there have been only two photographs of Vincent Van Gogh himself. If his written exchanges are to be believed, Vincent despised self-portrait photography. However, a recent breakthrough study in the Brill journal Oud Holland suggests that there are not just two photographs of Vincent Van Gogh. There is just one.So, what about the second photograph?Teio Meedendorp, Researcher at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, discusses the breakthrough discovery he made with his co-author Yves Vasseur, General Commissioner of Mons 2015 European Capital of Culture. Listen to this podcast now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras main figures.In the past three years, three important new books have reassessed Hitler's life, beliefs and actions. Two of the authors, Volker Ulrich and Peter Longerich, are historians of Germany who are German. The third, our guest for today's interview, is British. In his new book Hitler: A Global Biography (Basic Books, 2019), Brendan Simms  offers us a different Hitler, one much more focused on global capitalism and on the Anglo-American world than either Ulrich of Longerich.  Simms argues that fears that Germany would lose the economic and demographic competition with Britain and especially the US sat at the heart of Hitler's world view. Anti-Semitism, fears of German particularism, scientific understandings of race, all of these appear in Simms' portrait of Hitler. But they are joined by a constant fear that the American system was simultaneously seductive and corrupting, and that Germans and Germany would not be able to resist. This, Simms argues, drove many of Hitler's decisions, especially in the 1920s and 30s.We had some technological problems getting connected for the interview and had only 30 minutes to talk. But Simms does a marvelous job using that time to lay out the broad outlines of his argument and to sketch in some of his main lines of defense. It's a fascinating interview. Not everyone will agree with his conclusions. But at the least the book will prompt a stimulating debate about the role of the west in HItler's thinking.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Yaacob Dweck's new book Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who, alone among Jewish leadership, challenged Sabbetai Zevi’s improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers.The story of a lone voice against the crowd, the story of a lonely man of faith who insisted on reason in the face of mass passion, Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty. It is a revealing examination of how Sasportas’ life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers.Although his name may not be widely known, Sasportas’ impact continues in Jewish life today.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of you aware of the distinguished philosophical career of Hermann Cohen (1859 - 1918) and the absence of an intellectual biography in English, Beiser’s scholarship is a long time coming. Though Cohen scholarship has experienced a mini-renaissance in the last thirty years in the English speaking world, knowledge of Cohen, his scholarship on Kant, his activity in the Jewish community, and his battle against anti-semitism in Germany has remained largely confined to academic Jewish studies. Fortunately Beiser’s new book Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford UP, 2018) commands a broader audience with much to offer historians, philosophers, theologians in addition to Jewish thinkers. In the course of this NBN conversation, Professor Beiser and Avi Bernstein, Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis University discuss Cohen’s• Lifelong quest for a “religion of reason”• Effort to “rescue” Kant from psychologists who had misunderstood him• Hostility to Spinoza• Interest in infinitesimally small quantities• Left-of-center Wilhelmine politics• System of philosophy• Unrequited love affair with German culture• Ontological argumentation for GodCohen’s posthumously published Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism is left largely unremarked in Beiser’s book, as the author freely admits. With humility Beiser calls on his colleagues in Jewish Studies to go more deeply than he into this “masterpiece” of Cohen’s dotage, for in his estimation the Religion of Reason contains arguments for the idea of God that remain worthy of readers even today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Christopher Fort’s new translation of Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s Night and Day: A Novel (Academic Studies Press, 2019) (Kecha va Kunduz) gives readers a chance to dive into the world of early 20th century Uzbek literature and understand the complex social problems of late Russian imperial Turkestan. This book will be interesting for a wide range of readers, including those interested in the history of Russia and Central Asia, as well as the nature of colonial and post-colonialism in those contexts. Finally, Fort’s translation brings attention to Cho’lpon, an important figure in Uzbek literary life who tragically became a victim of Stalinist terror.Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Once one of the wealthiest members of the Russian aristocracy, Sofia Panina spent her final years living on a pension while in exile from her homeland. Adele Lindenmeyr’s book Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) recounts the eventful life of this remarkable woman, who through her dedication to helping others broke many of the barriers facing the women of her era. The daughter of a count and the granddaughter of an industrialist, at an early age Panina was removed from her widowed mother’s care and enrolled in a boarding school. After a failed marriage at a young age, Panina focused on a career in philanthropy, establishing a settlement house in St. Petersburg that provided needed services for the workers living in the city. In the aftermath of the February Revolution in 1917 Panina served on the Petrograd city council and as an assistant cabinet minister—the first female cabinet member in world history – before the Bolshevik Revolution in November led to her trial and imprisonment. Though the Bolsheviks’ victory in the civil war forced Panina into exile for the rest of her life, Lindenmeyr shows how her life remains relevant to Russians today, as they gain a renewed appreciation for her many achievements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Alex Lichtenstein, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, discusses his new book with co-author Rick Halpern, Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (Indiana University Press, 2016) photojournalism, and writing transnational histories of labor and social justice movements.As a photographer for Life and Fortune magazines, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Russia in the 1930s, photographed the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and recorded the liberation of Buchenwald at the end of WWII. In 1949, Life sent her to South Africa to take photographs in a country that was becoming racially polarized by white minority rule. Life published two photo-essays highlighting Bourke-White’s photographs, but much of her South African work remained unpublished until now. Here, these stunning photographs collected by Alex Lichtenstein and Rick Halpern offer an unparalleled visual record of white domination in South Africa during the early days of apartheid. In addition to these powerful and historically significant photographs, Lichtenstein and Halpern include two essays that explore Bourke-White's artistic and political formation and provide background material about the cultural, political, and economic circumstances that produced the rise and triumph of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa. This richly illustrated book brings to light a large body of photography from a major American photographer and offers a compelling history of a reprehensible system of racial conflict and social control that Bourke-White took such pains to document.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Dr. Babette Becker’s memoir I Should Have Been Music (Page Publishing, 2018) recounts her experience as a patient in four different mental hospitals from 1957 to 1960. It was a time when little was known about mental illness, except the shame and horror of it, and nothing was known about early childhood trauma. Passed from hospital to hospital carrying several severe classic diagnostic labels, she narrowly missed being sent to a State hospital where, if not for luck, she might have been incarcerated for the rest her life. The memoir follows her progress through these hospitals as well as the progress from psychosis to functioning adult. Along with her memories and journal entries from her time in the hospitals the book includes doctors' reports from each of the hospitals. These primary source materials reveal the stark contrast between the doctors' portrayal and the reality of Dr. Becker’s experience.Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Chelsea, Manhattan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography