New Books in Biography

Dag Hammarskjold was such a dynamic secretary-general that for years, the motto about him was simply “Leave it to Dag.” Only the second person to hold that post when he was elected, Hammarskjold did a great deal to shape perceptions of the UN. Consequently, evaluations of his legacy have tended to run the gamut, from extremely positive to bitingly critical. Hammarskjold’s defenders see him as a paragon of virtue, one who did his utmost to defuse international conflict at a time when the Cold War and decolonization threatened to ignite wars at any given moment. Hammarskjold’s critics accused of him meddling in international politics, or worse, being a tool of western imperialists as they tried to maintain control over the decolonizing world.Henning Melber’s Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Decolonisation of Africa (Hurst, 2019( looks at Hammarskjold’s legacy. Melber offers no apology when he states that he deeply admires Hammarskjold, though he does also clarify that Hammarskjold was imperfect. Moreover, while Hammarskjold was a person of deep integrity, his life nevertheless reveals many of the shortcomings of the UN and the difficulty of forcing the great powers to accept justice for the Global South. This books offers a succinct and informative overview of the influences that shaped Hammarskjold, his work in relation to Africa, and the legacies he bequeathed to the UN. Long after his untimely death, Hammarskjold continues to illuminate much of the UN’s history, and its complicated relationship with Africa.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

"On Christmas Eve, 1911, John Wanamaker stood in the middle of his elaborately decorated department store building in Philadelphia as shoppers milled around him picking up last minute Christmas presents. On that night, as for years to come, the store was filled with the sound of Christmas carols sung by thousands of shoppers, accompanied by the store’s Great Organ. Wanamaker recalled that moment in his diary, 'I said to myself that I was in a temple,' a sentiment quite possibly shared by the thousands who thronged the store that night."This is a conversation about a Philadelphian and his store, told by guest Nicole C. Kirk in Wanamaker’s Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store (New York University Press, 2018). Which might sound rather boring. But it’s really a conversation about nineteenth century stores, shopping, consumerism, Christianity, the social gospel, the prosperity gospel, social responsibility, art, beauty, Temple University, Dwight Moody, John Ruskin, Horace Bushnell, Christmas decorations, organs, eagles, World’s Fairs, and the curiously innovative mind of Philadelphia’s John Wanamaker.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

O’Neil Ford on Architecture (University of Texas Press, 2019) brings together Ford’s major professional writings and speeches for the first time. Revealing the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of his distinctive modernism, they illuminate his fascination with architectural history, his pioneering uses of new technologies and construction systems, his deep concerns for the landscape and environment, and his passionate commitments to education and civil rights. An interlocutor with titans of the twentieth century, including Louis Kahn and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ford understood architecture as inseparable from the social, political, and scientific developments of his day. An introductory essay by Kathryn E. O’Rourke provides a critical assessment of Ford’s essays and lectures and repositions him in the history of US architectural modernism. As some of his most important buildings turn sixty, O’Neil Ford on Architecture demonstrates that this Texas modernist deserves to be ranked among the leading midcentury American architects.Kathryn E. O’Rourke is an associate professor of art history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She is the author of Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Jeremy Black’s impressive new book offers an enormously wide-ranging account of the social, political and religious cultures in which England’s greatest dramatist was formed and found success. England in the Age of Shakespeare (Indiana University Press, 2019) draws together Black’s expansive reading in Shakespeare’s contexts with extensive knowledge of the canon of his plays. Black, a professor of history at Exeter University, reads the plays as evidence of Shakespeare’s interest in his changing world. As an English writer, rooted in the very distinctive theological and liturgical arguments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare offers a moral vision of a turbulent and contradictory world.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task.In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library.Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Sara Georgini is a historian and series editor for The Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a family biography that explores the Christian republicanism of John and Abigail Adams and how it shaped their view of the origins and destiny of the American nation under the guidance of divine providence. The book charts change in religious culture through the generations with profiles of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, the religious interiority of Charles Frances Adams, the cosmopolitan outlook of the skeptic Henry Adams and the religious renewal experienced by Brooks Adams. Each generation had to reevaluate the usefulness of Christian republicanism  from the new republic, antebellum reform, the Civil War and the emptied-out faith of the Gilded Age. Household Gods not only give us insight into a famous American family through their education, travels, religious inquiry and literary endeavors but also into the changing moods of the nation over the course of more than a century.This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.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 an intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir and her reception in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Mahalia Jackson, the great mid-twentieth century gospel singer, thought of herself as an embodiment of the history of African Americans in the United States. She understood that her family’s background, as they moved from enslavement in Louisiana to farming in the same rural area to New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century and then her own move to Chicago with the Great Migration was emblematic of the experiences of generations of black people. In Mahalia Jackson & the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mark Burford describes Jackson as both an exemplary figure and an exceptional figure. Ending the book in 1955 just as Jackson reached the height of her career after she released her first recording with a major label and was hosting her own television show, Burford uses the first part of Jackson’s career to tell the story of the development of gospel music set against her experiences, the networks within which she moved, and the overlapping contexts of black culture and American political history. Adapting Pierre Bordieu’s ideas, he argues that to study gospel music we must understand the cultural field created by all the players in the industry—the performers, composers, business owners, churches, audiences, and media company executives that shaped gospel music. For a time, Mahalia Jackson was in the center of this network, and Burford uses her connections to explore this field. She grew up with the industry and eventually became one of the best-known gospel singers in the United States by navigating the gospel music industry with her potent combination of a great voice, charisma, and business acumen. Besides telling the compelling story of gospel music and Mahalia Jackson, Burford analyzes Jackson’s voice and her early Apollo recordings using innovative techniques grounded in the listener’s experience. Much more than a biography of Mahalia Jackson, this book is a reimagining of the study of gospel music.Mark Burford is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he is also chair of the American Studies program. His research and teaching focuses on twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music, and late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. His article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs” received the Society for American Music’s 2012 Irving Lowens Award for the outstanding article on American music.  He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field, released last fall by Oxford University Press, and editor of the forthcoming Mahalia Jackson Reader, an anthology of writings on Jackson that he is editing for Oxford’s Readers on American Musicians series.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Alex Kay’s The Making of an SS Killer: the Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a must read for those interested in the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and World War II.  Focusing on the actions and consequences of a “front-line Holocaust perpetrator”, Kay’s biographies diverges drastically with the traditional bios of other more well-known Nazis.  Kay argues that Filbert chose to become an exceptional Nazi Party member and his career as well as his life hinged upon what seems to be an unquestionable dedication to the cause.  This book is not only well-researched, but intellectually tantalizing and addictive.  Kay’s narrative hooks you from his introduction and by the time the reader has finished, it is hard to believe that this is based on the facts of Filbert’s life and career.  Instead, it seems almost Hollywood-like in its tensions and its twist of an ending. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

As the wife of a Macedonian king and the mother of three sons who would succeed him, Eurydice played an important role in Macedonia at an important moment in the kingdom’s history. In Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power(Oxford University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney draws upon recent archaeological findings and other sources to reconstruct her role as queen and queen mother during this time. As Carney notes, many of the surviving materials of Eurydice conflict in their portrayal of her personality and actions. With her eldest son Alexander II barely old enough to rule when his father Amyntas III died in 370 BCE, Eurydice was bound to exert considerable influence on the throne, an influence that likely continued after Alexander’s succession by his brother Perdiccas III and even into the reign of Philip II as well. By analyzing the surviving works and detailing the available contemporary materials about Eurydice’s life, Connelly reveals the key role the queen played both in the reign of her sons and in developing the image of the Macedonian monarchy on the eve of its remarkable era of world conquest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Kate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography that addresses the puzzle and contradictions of the life of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drawn from never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how choices shaped her life. Beauvoir, a writer and feminist icon, won prestigious literary prizes and scandalized many with her now classic The Second Sex. She is now celebrated, but during her life she was a controversial figure both by conventional and feminists’ standards. As one who chose to write about lived ideas, both in fiction and essays, rather than build philosophical systems she was easily dismissed as Jean-Paul Sartre’s overly loyal side kick. Kirkpatrick shows how Beauvoir’s thinking evolved as a feminist and a philosopher – labels she was reluctant to embrace.  The author reexamines the overemphasis on Beauvoir’s atheism, the extent of her political engagement, and her ethical failures in regard to third parties in the Sartre/Beauvoir relational triads. Beginning with her childhood to her adoption of Sylvie Le Bon, Kirkpatrick focuses on the significant relationships in Beauvoir’s life to expand our understand of how they shaped her thinking about the nature of subjectivity. Becoming Beauvoir demonstrates how the choices we make shape who we become.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 feminist thought 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