New Books in Biography

A gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war. In 1932, Japan was in crisis. Naval officers had assassinated the prime minister and conspiracies flourished. The military had a stranglehold on the government. War with Russia loomed, and propaganda campaigns swept the country, urging schoolchildren to give money to procure planes and tanks. Into this maelstrom stepped Joseph C. Grew, America’s most experienced and talented diplomat. When Grew was appointed ambassador to Japan, not only was the country in turmoil, its relationship with America was rapidly deteriorating. For the next decade, Grew attempted to warn American leaders about the risks of Japan’s raging nationalism and rising militarism, while also trying to stabilize Tokyo’s increasingly erratic and volatile foreign policy. From domestic terrorism by Japanese extremists to the global rise of Hitler and the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, the events that unfolded during Grew’s tenure proved to be pivotal for Japan, and for the world. His dispatches from the darkening heart of the Japanese empire would prove prescient—for his time, and for our own. Drawing on Grew’s diary of his time in Tokyo as well as U.S. embassy correspondence, diplomatic dispatches, and firsthand Japanese accounts, Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor (Mariner Books, 2022) brings to life a man who risked everything to avert another world war, the country where he staked it all—and the abyss that swallowed it.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

How could an artist and former social worker from small-town Minnesota become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Camilla Hall was a pastor's daughter who eventually joined the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. In Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman's Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Rachael Hanel traces Hall’s path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family—through welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, and a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla's bewildering transformation from a "gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy" young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. As Hanel writes, contemporary reporters “struggled to find an easy narrative for her life and when they couldn’t find one, they made one up.” Moving past these thin, often salacious narratives that paint Camilla as a duped ex-girlfriend or a militant radical, this book recovers both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall's life. At a time of mounting unrest and violence, Hall’s story is a reminder of how the forces of radicalization can operate in an individual lifeRebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Two celebrated Egyptologists bring to vivid life the intriguing and controversial reign of King Tut's parents. Akhenaten has been the subject of radically different, even contradictory, biographies. The king has achieved fame as the world's first individual and the first monotheist, but others have seen him as an incestuous tyrant who nearly ruined the kingdom he ruled. The gold funerary mask of his son Tutankhamun and the painted bust of his wife Nefertiti are the most recognizable artifacts from all of ancient Egypt. But who are Akhenaten and Nefertiti? And what can we actually say about rulers who lived more than three thousand years ago? November 2022 marks the centennial of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and although "King Tut" is a household name, his nine-year rule pales in comparison to the revolutionary reign of his parents. Akhenaten and Nefertiti became gods on earth by transforming Egyptian solar worship, innovating in art and urban design, and merging religion and politics in ways never attempted before. Combining fascinating scholarship, detective suspense, and adventurous thrills, Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is a journey through excavations, museums, hieroglyphic texts, and stunning artifacts. From clue to clue, renowned Egyptologists John and Colleen Darnell reconstruct an otherwise untold story of the magnificent reign of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.John and Colleen Darnell are a husband-and-wife Egyptologist team. They have presented on the Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic, the Science Channel, and Smithsonian, as well as appeared in National Geographic's "Lost Treasures of Egypt."John is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. His archaeological expeditions in Egypt have been covered by the New York Times. In 2017, his Eastern Desert expedition discovered the earliest monumental hieroglyphic inscription and was named one of the top ten discoveries of the year by Archaeology.Colleen teaches art history at the University of Hartford and Naugatuck Valley Community College; she has curated a major museum exhibit on Egyptian revival art and design at the Yale Peabody Museum.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Growing up, Muggsy Bogues was always told he should do something else, anything besides basketball. He never acknowledged his many doubters except to prove them spectacularly wrong. Twenty years after receiving his first basketball as a toddler, he stood proud—at five-foot-three—as the starting point guard for the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA. From the East Baltimore playground courts where he earned his nickname by muggin' opponents for possession of the ball to Dunbar High School where he excelled alongside future NBA players, Bogues set the tone in his early years for the great heights he'd reach professionally.In Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball (Triumph, 2022), Bogues delves deep into his life and career, reflecting on legendary battles with Michael Jordan, John Stockton, and other generational stars of ’80s and ’90s hoops. He shares far-ranging anecdotes from playoff runs in Charlotte, filming Space Jam, and even watching a young Steph Curry grow up. Conversational and clear-sighted, this is a story of uncompromising vision and fleet-footed determination during a golden era for the NBA.Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Virginia C. Gildersleeve was the most influential dean of Barnard College, which she led from 1911 to 1947. An organizer of the Seven College Conference, or “Seven Sisters,” she defended women's intellectual abilities and the value of the liberal arts. She also amassed a strong set of foreign policy credentials and, at the peak of her prominence in 1945, served as the sole woman member of the U.S. delegation to the drafting of the United Nations Charter. But her accomplishments are undercut by other factors: she had a reputation for bias against Jewish applicants for admission to Barnard and early in the 1930s voiced an indulgent view of the Nazi regime.In this biography, historian Nancy Woloch explores Gildersleeve’s complicated career in academia and public life. At once a privileged insider, prone to elitism and insularity, and a perpetual outsider to the sexist establishment in whose ranks she sought to ascend, Gildersleeve stands out as richly contradictory. The book examines her initiatives in higher education, her savvy administration, her strategies for gaining influence in academic life, the ways that she acquired and deployed expertise, and her drive to take part in the world of foreign affairs. Woloch draws out her ambivalent stance in the women’s movement, concerned with women’s status but opposed to demands for equal rights. Tracing resonant themes of ambition, competition, and rivalry, The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve (Columbia UP, 2022) masterfully weaves Gildersleeve’s life into the histories of education, international relations, and feminism.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss’s life was defined by two events that threatened to undermine the order that he had so stoutly defended: a notorious social scandal and the creation of the Congo Free State. In King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Andrew Fitzmaurice tells the incredible story of a man who, driven by personal events that transformed him from a reactionary to a reformer, rewrote and liberalised international law—yet did so in service of the most brutal regime of the colonial era.In an elaborate deception, Twiss and Pharaïlde van Lynseele, a Belgian prostitute, sought to reinvent her as a woman of suitably noble birth to be his wife. Their subterfuge collapsed when another former client publicly denounced van Lynseele. Disgraced, Twiss resigned his offices and the couple fled to Switzerland. But this failure set the stage for a second, successful act of re-creation. Twiss found new employment as the intellectual driving force of King Leopold of Belgium’s efforts to have the Congo recognised as a new state under his personal authority. Drawing on extensive new archival research, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter recounts Twiss’s story as never before, including how his creation of a new legal personhood for the Congo was intimately related to the earlier invention of a new legal personhood for his wife.Combining gripping biography and penetrating intellectual history, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter uncovers a dramatic, ambiguous life that has had lasting influence on international law.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In Chingona: Owning Your Inner Badass for Healing and Justice (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Mexican American activist, scholar, and podcast host Alma Zaragoza-Petty helps us claim our inner chingona, a Spanish term for badass woman. For all the brown women the world has tried to conquer, badassery can be an asset, especially when we face personal and collective trauma. Working for change while preserving her spirit, a chingona repurposes her pain for the good of the world. She may even learn that she belongs to a long line of chingonas who came before her--unruly women who used their persevering energy to survive and thrive.As a first-generation Mexican American, Zaragoza-Petty narrates in riveting terms her own childhood, split between the rain-soaked beauty of her grandparents' home in Acapulco and a harsh new life as an immigrant family in Los Angeles. She describes the chingona spirit she began to claim within herself and leads us toward the courage required to speak up and speak out against oppressive systems. As we begin to own who we are as chingonas, we go back to where our memories lead, insist on telling our own stories, and see our scars as proof of healing.Liberating ourselves from the bondage of the patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonization that exists in our own bodies, we begin to see our way toward a more joyful future. This work won't be easy, Zaragoza-Petty reminds us. Imagining a just and healed world from the inside out will take dialing in to our chingona spirit. But by unleashing our inner badass, we join the righteous fight for dignity and justice for all.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson’s roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science. "Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson’s Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman’s remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson’s life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson’s colleagues—trace Dyson’s formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson’s innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson’s daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You’re In” assesses Dyson’s successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist’s outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas.Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus (MIT Press, 2022). This book offers the first English translation of Ruysch's guide to his collection, along with all the illustrations from the original volume, photographs of some his most imaginative extant specimens, and more.Ruysch was at once a brilliant scientist, a preternaturally gifted technician, an esteemed physician, a religious moralizer, and an artist whose prime form of expression was the medium of human remains. His works were sometimes described as Rembrandts of anatomical preparation; today they seem so strange that we can hardly believe that they even existed, much less that they were so popular in their time. His combination of the religious and the scientific, the painstakingly accurate and the extravagantly fantastical, offers vivid testimony of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art. Essays accompanying Ruysch's text and images consider such topics as the historical context of Ruysch's work, the paradox of an artist of death whose work engenders the illusion of life, the conservation of Ruysch's specimens, and the shifting ascendancies of romanticism and rationality in the natural sciences.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has long been excluded from the literary canon. In her time, Burroughs was a celebrated African American (or, in her era, a race woman) female activist, educator, and intellectual. Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900-1959 (U Notre Dame Press, 2019) represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. This anthology of her works written between 1900 and 1959 encapsulates Burroughs's work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad of ways that her career resisted definition. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs's life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs's life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography