New Books in Biography

If Lord Derby was the ‘forgotten Prime Minister’ and Andrew Bonar-Law was the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’ then Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770-1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was Britain’s longest serving prime minister since William Pitt the Younger, surely deserves is own epithet. While not providing us with that, William Anthony Hay, Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University has instead provided us with the definitive modern study of Lord Liverpool’s political career–Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (Boydell Press, 2018. In a beautifully written and produced book, one that any student of late 18th century and early 19th century British history will not wish to be without, Hay delineates for the reader Lord Liverpool’s manifold achievements and failures in office. From such seismic events as the War of 1812 with the United States, the endgame of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the Corn Laws, the Peterloo Massacre, to the escalating contention over the issue of Catholic Emancipation. Hay’s book puts Liverpool’s career and his efforts at resisting change into context, bringing this period of British history into needed focus. It shows Liverpool as a defender of the eighteenth-century British constitution, documenting his efforts at adapting institutions to the challenges of war and then the very different post-1815 world. Despite being shaped by eighteenth-century assumptions, Liverpool emerges as one of the key individuals who laid the foundations for the nineteenth-century Britain that emerged from the Reform era. Charles Coutinho holds 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. 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

We have all seen pictures of the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) at their historic meeting Yalta in February 1945. The three leaders command the viewer’s attention, naturally, but in the background of the various versions of that photo are other important figures. One can glimpse George Marshall in some. Foreign ministers Eden and Molotov appear in others. American Admirals King and Leahy are there. And so is a U.S. Army Air Force general named Larry Kuter. Not exactly a household name, Kuter was an enormously influential figure, who richly deserves this excellent biography written by airpower expert, Brian Laslie: Architect of Air Power: General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the U.S. Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2017). Dr. Laslie is the Deputy Command Historian at NORAD and US Northern Command and the author of another noteworthy book on the U.S. Air Force: The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam (2015), which I can also recommend. Laslie kept encountering Kuter’s name or photo as his work took him to Air Force bases and installations around the world and began to ask questions. Kuter was the co-author of AWPD-1, the first American plan for air war and a strong proponent of daylight, precision strategic bombing. He commanded American forces all over the world, served immediately under Harold George in the postwar Air Transport Command, which gave him responsibility, among other things, for the Berlin Airlift in 1948. He set up the United States Air Force Academy; he commanded NORAD; in retirement, he worked with Pan Am on the 747 project. And there was much more to Kuter’s story, as you can read in Laslie’s book after you enjoy our conversation here. Listeners might also be interested in the author’s blog, Balloons to Drones.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Jonathan W. White, an associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, is the author of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life (Cumberland House, 2015). In this work White reveals the moral character of Abraham Lincoln through his law practice.  Lincoln was a lawyer on the American frontier in Illinois, representing clients ranging from individuals in divorces and railroads in contract disputes.  Throughout his career he rendered advice, not only to clients but to prospective young lawyers and friends.  Lincoln’s experience as a lawyer is both revealing about the norms of law practice in the antebellum period and about the formation of Lincoln’s approach to law and governance, which would influence his behavior as President during the Civil War.  White has an eye for entertaining and revealing anecdotes.  In revealing how Lincoln practiced law White helps uncover Lincoln as a person, beyond the reverential historical figure we all know from America’s Civil War. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In about 1978, I found myself in my high school library. I don’t know why I was there except to say I was probably on detention; I didn’t do a lot of reading in those days. In any event, I was wandering around the stacks and I found a book called My Lai 4. I knew a little about the My Lai massacre because I knew a little about the Vietnam War; my father had been in the army in the 1960s and my uncle had fought in Vietnam. I started reading. It’s not often that a book stays with you your whole life, but Seymour M. Hersh‘s My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Random House, 1970) did. Hersh reported–that’s just the word–what happened: he did not embellish, he did not moralize, he did not speculate. He tirelessly interviewed the men who were there, the men who commanded them, and read everything he could get his hands on. Then he told a shocked American public: this happened. His reporting arguably changed the course of the Vietnam War. It changed the course of my life, as I went on to write a book about My Lai myself. He has told the story of how he broke My Lai countless times. The story made him famous, and his later reporting only added to that fame. So in this interview about his recently published, telling, and honest memoir Reporter: A Memoir (Knopf, 2018), I focus on Hersh’s life before My Lai. I was particularly interested to learn how he became “Sy Hersh, reporter.” Listen in.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Originally published in 1994, Marc Leeds’ The Vonnegut Encyclopedia (Delacorte Press, 2016) was initially conceived of as a comprehensive A-Z guide to the expansive oeuvre of the American author Kurt Vonnegut. The encyclopedia was created as resource for scholars, teachers and casual fans of Vonnegut’s work and was comprised of detailed entries on all of his plays, novels and stories, in addition to descriptions of individual characters, narratives and motifs. Readers of Vonnegut will, of course, be aware that rather than distinct, hermetically sealed texts, each of Vonnegut’s works forms part of a larger fictional universe wherein characters, locations, turns of phrase and even consumer products cross back and forth between different novels, short stories and plays. As such, Leeds’ encyclopedia allows researchers and readers to cross reference recurring characters, words and plot points. The book also serves as something of a glossary of Vonnegut’s various neologisms (e.g. “foma” and “karass”) as well as providing a wealth of biographical information on the author himself, his family and friends. The first edition, published in the early 1990s, provided a detailed, alphabetical guide to all of Vonnegut’s work up until 1991. The revised and updated edition which was published in 2016 includes all of Vonnegut’s work up until his death in 2007. In this insightful and engaging interview Marc Leeds discusses his unique perspective on Vonnegut’s philosophy and fiction. Leeds also explains his motivation for compiling this rigorous yet entertaining guide to Vonnegut’s work and tells me about his own friendship with Kurt Vonnegut. Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. She blogs about literature and popular culture HERE and can also be found on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The achievements of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great are often presented as primarily the work of a singular genius. As Richard A. Billows demonstrates in his book Before and After Alexander: The Legend and Legacy of Alexander the Great (The Overlook Press, 2018), such an interpretation ignores the considerable advantages that he inherited. Foremost among them was Macedonia itself, which was a kingdom rich in resources, especially when compared to the more economically marginal Greek city-states to the south. Recognizing the advantages that Macedonia possessed and utilizing them to defeat Balkan invaders, Alexander’s father Philip II began the process of turning Macedonia’s potential into reality. By reorganizing the Macedonian military and employing it effectively in a series of wars, Philip forged it into a fearsome fighting force that Alexander inherited upon his father’s assassination in 336 BCE. It was by employing the generals of Philip’s armies and the tactics they developed that Alexander won most of his battles that defined his reputation. Yet Alexander’s death meant that it was left to his successors to take his conquests and turn them into the governable kingdoms which cemented Alexander’s achievement and extended Greek civilization throughout the Near East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Brian Abrams interviewed more than 100 people – Democrats, Republicans, cabinet officials, White House aides, campaign operatives, congresspeople and activists – to piece together a comprehensive oral history of the Barack Obama presidency, in Obama: An Oral History, 2009-2017 (Little A, 2018).  Based almost solely on the words of those who helped Obama win election and govern the country, Abrams begins with Obama’s famous anti-war speech in 2002 and carries the reader through the shocking aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory. Through often candid and unvarnished remembrances, readers will relive the debates between Democrats and Republicans, and between pragmatists and idealists, that shaped Obama’s legacy and continue to reverberate. Abrams gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most dramatic presidencies in history. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (Yale University Press, 2018), Brigham Young University Associate Professor Jenny Hale Pulispher demonstrates that Indians, too, could play the land game for both personal and political benefit.  According to his kin, John Wompas was “no sachem,” although he claimed that status to achieve his economic and political ends. He drew on the legal and political practices of both Indians and the English—even visiting and securing the support of King Charles II—to legitimize the land sales that funded his extravagant spending. But he also used the knowledge acquired in his English education to defend the land and rights of his fellow Nipmucs. His biography offers a window on seventeenth-century New England and the Atlantic world from the unusual perspective of an American Indian who, even though he may not have been what he claimed, was certainly out of the ordinary. Drawing on documentary and anthropological sources as well as consultations with Native people, Pulsipher shows how Wompas turned the opportunities and hardships of economic, cultural, religious, and political forces in the emerging English empire to the benefit of himself and his kin. Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And what’s not to love? You meet really interesting people (some very attractive, if you get my drift); you get to yak about really fascinating though useless stuff into the wee hours (and sleep late!); you can play pick-up basketball at nearly any hour of the day (“I got next”); there’s a lot of beer to be drunk and, um, other things to be ingested (some of which will, so you are told, “expand your mind” or something like that); and you don’t really have to work (other than the job you get to raise the money to buy the aforementioned beer). Oh, and the dining hall (a really magical place) always had soft serve! It never occurred to me  to leave this youthful paradise of irresponsibility. So I didn’t; I went to graduate school where I continued to live that indolent life for nearly another decade. And even when I was done there and got my first “job”, I continued to live more or less like I did in college well into my 30s, a kind of over-educated man-child. Eventually, though, there was a reckoning. And it was rough. I’ll spare you the sad, painful details. Happily for Bob Brody and his lovely family, his reckoning came sooner and he handled it with much more grace that I did. But our stories of growing up are of an American-male piece.  He tells his tale in a wonderful series of vignettes in his new memoir  Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age (Heliotrope Books, 2017). They are at moments funny, touching, instructive, wise and always heartfelt. And (spoiler alert!) the entire set ends well, because Bob grows up to be a very responsible family man. And a great writer to boot! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

For the most part women in the classical world have suffered from what Duane W. Roller terms “near-invisibility,” obscuring the consequential roles that at times they played in government and politics. In his book Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), Roller recounts the lives of more than a half-dozen women in the last decades of the 1st century BC and early decades of the 1st century AD to show how they exercised power during the early years of the Roman Empire. Drawing upon a tradition of royal women in the ancient Near East, these women – Cleopatra Selene, Glaphyra of Cappadocia, Salome of Judaea, Dynamis of Bosporous, Pythodoris of Pontos, Aba of Olbe, and Mousa of Parthia – all played crucial roles as rulers in kingdoms on the periphery of the Augustan empire. As Roller explains, their success in maintaining their positions both depended in part upon the support of powerful women in the Augustan family and, in turn, served as role models for royal women in the Roman imperial courts for centuries afterward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography