New Books in Biography

Young Edith and her siblings had access to the best educators in the world, but the girls were not taught how to handle the family money; that responsibility was reserved for their younger brother. A parsimonious upbringing did little to prepare Edith for life after marriage to Harold McCormick, son of the Reaper King Cyrus McCormick. The rich young couple spent lavishly. They purchased treasures like the jewels of Catherine the Great, entertained in grand style in a Chicago mansion, and contributed to the city’s cultural uplift, founding the Chicago Grand Opera. They supported free health care for the poor, founding and supporting the John R. McCormick Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases. Later, Edith donated land for what would become Brookfield Zoo.Though she lived a seemingly enviable life, Edith’s disposition was ill-suited for the mores of the time. Societal and personal issues—not least of which were the deaths of two of her five children—caused Edith to experience phobias and panic attacks. Dissatisfied with rest cures, she ignored her father’s expectations, moved her family to Zurich, and embarked on a journey of education and self-examination. Edith pursued analysis with then-unknown Carl Jung. Her generosity of spirit led Edith to become Jung’s leading patron. She also supported up-and-coming musicians, artists, and writers, including James Joyce as he wrote Ulysses.While Edith became a Jungian analyst, her husband, Harold, pursued an affair with an opera star. After returning to Chicago and divorcing Harold, Edith continued to deplete her fortune. She hoped to create something of lasting value, such as a utopian community and affordable homes for the middle class. Edith’s goals caused further difficulties in her relationship with her father and are why he and her brother cut her off from the family funds even after the 1929 stock market crash ruined her. Edith’s death from breast cancer three years later was mourned by thousands of Chicagoans.In Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick (Southern Illinois UP, 2020), Andrea Friederici Ross presents the full arc of this amazing woman’s life and expertly helps readers understand Edith’s generosity, intelligence, and fierce determination to change the world.Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta Books, 2022) travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII.Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim's gripping account of Roth's chaotic life speaks powerfully to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism. Published as Roth's works rapidly gain new readers and recognition, Endless Flight delivers a visceral yet sensitive portrait of his quest for belonging, and a riveting understanding of the brilliance and beauty of his work.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

This is the fantastical, yet real, story of the merchants of Bethlehem, the young men who traveled to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth century. These men set off on the backs of donkeys with suitcases full of crosses and rosaries, to return via steamship with suitcases stuffed with French francs, Philippine pesos, or Salvadoran colones. They returned with news of mysterious lands and strange inventions—clocks, trains, and other devices that both befuddled and bewitched the Bethlehemites. With newfound wealth, these merchants built shimmering pink mansions that transformed Bethlehem from a rural village into Palestine's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan town. At the center of these extraordinary occurrences lived Jubrail Dabdoub.The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub: Or, How the Bethlehemites Discovered Amerka" (Stanford UP, 2023) tells the story of Jubrail's encounters, offering a version of Palestinian history rarely acknowledged. From his childhood in rural Bethlehem to later voyages across Europe, East Asia, and the Americas, Jubrail's story culminates in a recorded miracle: in 1909, he was brought back from the dead. To tell such a tale is to delve into the realms of the fantastic and improbable. Through the story of Jubrail's life, Jacob Norris explores the porous lines between history and fiction, the normal and the paranormal, the everyday and the extraordinary.Drawing on aspects of magical realism combined with elements of Palestinian folklore, Norris recovers the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Bethlehem: a mood of excitement, disorientation, and wonder as the town was thrust into a new era. As the book offers an original approach to historical writing, it captures a fantastic story of global encounter and exchange.Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Poster Children bassist Rose Marshack details her life in the 80s and 90s as part of a heavily touring Indie Rock band. Using her Tour Reports from the 1990s, Marshack relates what life was like during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)--Marshack chronicles the band's day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk's DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman's life in the trenches and online.Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, Beijing-born Weijian Shan, instead of a secondary school education spent six hard years in the Gobi Desert with the Army Construction Corps.Remarkably, the young Shan made it to a PhD program at UC Berkeley where he met his academic advisor, then Professor Janet Yellen, later U.S. Treasury Secretary. (Somewhat ironically now attending to the insolvencies of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank). Shan goes on to become a Wharton School business professor before moving into investment banking and private equity investing making financial business history with the successful takeover and turnaround of failed banks in South Korea and China.Both generous with his time and patient with my questions, Dr. Shan is currently the CEO at PAG, a private equity firm managing assets of some $50 billion. We discussed the books in chronological order with a few tangents that Shan used to both clarify and instruct such as: his 2006 public debate with World Bank economists about Chinese profitability; why his generation truly is a ‘Lost Generation’; his career and transitions including, among other things, the connection between recent financial crises and the basics of sound financial banking systems; lessons from and advice for business negotiation; the importance of leadership, and his two keys to an ‘ownership’ mentality. All within the context of his well-written and interesting narratives providing personal accounts of life during the Cultural Revolution period in China, as well as historic overseas private equity bank deals as described by the publisher, Wiley and Sons, adapted below: Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America draws a vivid picture of the raw human energy and the will to succeed against all odds. Shan, a former hard laborer who is now one of Asia's best-known financiers, is thoughtful, observant, eloquent, and brutally honest, making him well-positioned to tell the story of a life that is a microcosm of modern China, and of how, improbably, that life became intertwined with America. This powerful and personal perspective on China and America will inform Americans' view of China, humanizing the country, while providing a rare view of America from the prism of a keen foreign observer who lived the American dream. (2019) Money Games: The Inside Story of How American Dealmakers Saved Korea’s Most Iconic Bank is a riveting tale of one of the most successful buyout deals ever: the acquisition and turnaround of what used to be Korea's largest bank by the Asian arm of an American firm, Newbridge Capital. Full of intrigue and suspense, this insider's account is told by the chief architect of the deal itself, the celebrated author and private equity investor Weijian Shan. With billions of dollars at stake, and the nation's economic future on the line, Newbridge Capital sought to become the first foreign firm in history to take control of one of Korea's most beloved financial institutions. (2020) In Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China, Weijian Shan delivers a compelling account of one of the most significant deals in private equity history: the first and only foreign acquisition of control of a Chinese national bank. Money Machine is the fascinating inside story of the transaction as told by the man who led it, from the intrigues of dealmaking to the complex and uncharted process of securing control by a foreign investor of a Chinese nationwide financial institution, a feat that had never before been attempted, nor has it been repeated. (2023) Keith Krueger teaches at the Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the United States. Zaborowska demonstrates how Baldwin’s Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity and U.S. race relations as the 1960s drew to a close.Following Baldwin’s footsteps through Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum, Zaborowska presents many never published photographs, new information from Turkish archives, and original interviews with Turkish artists and intellectuals who knew Baldwin and collaborated with him on a play that he directed in 1969. She analyzes the effect of his experiences on his novel Another Country (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), and she explains how Baldwin’s time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France. James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP, 2009) expands the knowledge of Baldwin’s role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration.Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of MichiganMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

What Is to Be Done?In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends, no conversation. This was the revolutionary tradition from - and against - which legendary anarchist feminist Emma Goldman sprung. Goldman refused the austere image of the revolutionary. For her, sex, passion, and love were inextricable from the human experience, and thus also inextricable from political life. She maintained, as Gornick says, a “timeless hunger for living life on a grand scale.” In her own—now famous—words: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”Goldman had immigrated from Lithuania to Rochester, New York in 1885 and became America's "most dangerous woman" by the powers that be of her time. Gornick, the radical feminist critic celebrated for Fierce Attachments (1987) and The Romance of American Communism (1977), recounts Goldman’s progression as an anarchist and feminist. Goldman’s feminism was often ambiguous. But Gornick suggests that precisely these conflicts explain her continued influence over generations of feminists after her. On the podcast, we spoke about Goldman’s radical political program and their resonance in our time.Gornick also wrote an original preface for a new Goldman reader from Warbler Press, The Essential Emma Goldman—Anarchism, Feminism, Liberation (2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Taking Sides: A Memoir about Love, War, and Changing the World (Scribe, 2023) is a personal memoir by Sherine Tadros, the United Nations Representative and Deputy Director of Advocacy for Amnesty International. An award-winning broadcast journalist and war correspondent for Sky News and Al Jazeera English, where she reported on the Gaza War, the Arab Spring, and rise of the Islamic State, Tadros decided in 2016 to leave journalism for human rights activism after concluding that her reporting work “ended up at the wrong point”. In this wide-ranging interview she talks about overcoming discrimination as an Egyptian-British “halfie”, a woman, and an immigrant, the importance and limits of being an acclaimed war correspondent, the duty she feels to fight for the rights of others and why individual action makes a difference.Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights professional with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He was extolled by his contemporary Frederick Douglass for his “depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness.” Until now, his story has been largely untold.Ward, a newspaper editor, Congregational minister, and advocate for the temperance movement, was considered one of the leading orators of his time. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 he fled to Canada, where he lectured widely to improve conditions for formerly enslaved people who had settled there. Ward then went to Britain as an agent of the Canadian Antislavery Society and published his influential book Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro. He never returned to the United States, and he died in obscurity in Jamaica.Despite Ward’s prominent role in the abolitionist movement, his story has been lost because of the decades he spent in exile. In Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle (Yale UP, 2023), R. J. M. Blackett brings light to Ward’s life and his important role in the struggle against slavery and discrimination, and to the personal price he paid for confronting oppression.Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions.One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (HarperOne, 2023) explores Exman’s personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country’s top religion publisher.Exman’s role in the shaping of American religion is undeniable. Here was a man who was ahead of his time and leading the rest of the nation through books on a spiritual exploration. Exman published bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Exman did not just sit at a desk and read. In addition to his lifelong relationships with the most influential leaders of the day, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962.In the end, this is the story of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Exman helped to reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography