New Books in Biography

Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery.This new edition of Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2022) expands Friedman’s original analysis to include films of the 2010s like Lincoln and Ready Player One. Breaking down the works by genre, Friedman looks at essential aspects of Spielberg’s art, from his storytelling concerns and worldview to the uncanny connection with audiences that has powered his longtime influence as a cultural force. Friedman's examination reveals a sustained artistic vision--a vision that shows no sign of exhausting itself or audiences after Spielberg's nearly fifty years as a high-profile filmmaker.Incisive and discerning, Citizen Spielberg, Second Edition, offers a career-spanning appraisal of a moviemaking icon.Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms, and institutions, but because Caesar's extraordinary success mobilized a determined opposition that ultimately preferred to precipitate civil war rather than accept its political defeat. Based on painstaking re-analysis of the ancient sources in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the participatory role of the People in the republican political system, a strong emphasis on agents' choices rather than structural causation, and profound skepticism toward the facile determinism that often substitutes for historical explanation, Julius Caesar and the Roman People (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a radical reinterpretation of a figure of profound historical importance who stands at the turning point of Roman history from Republic to Empire.Robert Morstein-Marx is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In his new book, Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys Across the Indian Ocean (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and is available as an open-access enhanced edition, Scott Kugle follows the life and legacy of the influential Sufi scholar of Arabic, hadith, and scriptural hermeneutics shaykh ‘Ali Muttaqi. ‘Ali Muttaqi left South Asia for hajj (Mecca) where he eventually settled as an exile. Kugle provides a microscopic history of this figure by engaging a wealth of diverse Arabic and Persian manuscripts, such as his devotional writings or political orientations. This story also maps the legacy of ‘Ali Muttaqi via his disciples or the Muttaqi lineage across the Indian Ocean world into three generations that lead us into political contestations and courtly intrigue, such as with the Mughals in Gujarat, debates of the authoritative roles and legitimacy of saints and the mahdi (messiah) in Sufism, relationship between Sufism and jurisprudence, and scholarship of hadith. The story told here of the journeys by 16th century reformist Muslim scholars and Sufi mystics from India to Arabia will be of interest to anyone who writes and thinks about Sufism and Islam in South Asia and Indian Ocean world, Islamic hermeneutics and reformist thought.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashing across four lanes of traffic, then scurrying through a narrow underpass as cars whizzed by within inches. The man was William “Holly” Whyte, a pioneer of people-centered urban design. Decades before this perilous trek to a meeting in the suburbs, he had urged planners to look beyond their desks and drawings: “You have to get out and walk.”American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life (Island Press, 2022) shares the life and wisdom of a man whose advocacy reshaped many of the places we know and love today—from New York’s bustling Bryant Park to preserved forests and farmlands around the country. Holly’s experiences as a WWII intelligence officer and leader of the genre-defining reporters at Fortune Magazine in the 1950s shaped his razor-sharp assessments of how the world actually worked—not how it was assumed to work. His 1956 bestseller, The Organization Man, catapulted the dangers of “groupthink” and conformity into the national consciousness.Over his five decades of research and writing, Holly’s wide-ranging work changed how people thought about careers and companies, cities and suburbs, urban planning, open space preservation, and more. He was part of the rising environmental movement, helped spur change at the planning office of New York City, and narrated two films about urban life, in addition to writing six books. No matter the topic, Holly advocated for the decision-makers to be people, not just experts.“We need the kind of curiosity that blows the lid off everything,” Holly once said. His life offers encouragement to be thoughtful and bold in asking questions and in making space for differing viewpoints. This revealing biography offers a rare glimpse into the mind of an iconoclast whose healthy skepticism of the status quo can help guide our efforts to create the kinds of places we want to live in today.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Vivekananda, Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford UP, 2022) argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and Western thinkers. Inspired by his guru Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda reconceived Advaita Vedanta as a nonsectarian, life-affirming philosophy that provides an ontological basis for religious cosmopolitanism and a spiritual ethics of social service. He defended the scientific credentials of religion while criticizing the climate of scientism beginning to develop in the late nineteenth century. He was also one of the first philosophers to defend the evidential value of supersensuous perception on the basis of general epistemic principles. Finally, he adopted innovative cosmopolitan approaches to long-standing philosophical problems. Bringing him into dialogue with numerous philosophers past and present, Medhananda demonstrates the sophistication and enduring value of Vivekananda's views on the limits of reason, the dynamics of religious faith, and the hard problem of consciousness.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In this raw and thought-provoking memoir, Dowd brings us on her journey though the Ferguson uprising into abolition.For years Elle Dowd considered herself an advocate for justice, but her well-meaning support always took a back burner to what Martin Luther King Jr. called the tension-free, ordered "negative peace" of white moderates. Then Michael Brown, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent Uprising changed everything.In Baptized in Tear Gas: From White Moderate to Abolitionist (Broadleaf Books, 2021), minister and activist Elle Dowd tells the gripping story of her transformation into an Assata Shakur-reading, courthouse-occupying abolitionist with an arrest record, hungry for the revolution. Thanks to deep relationships with people in Ferguson and St. Louis, and to experiencing a fraction of the system for herself--including the fear of rubber bullets, the shock of sound cannons, and running from tear gas--Dowd fully committed to the work of anti-racism and abolition. Now she wants to help other white allies do the same.Like in baptism, this transformation requires parts of us to die: our lack of power analysis, our commitment to white niceness, our tone policing, our respectability politics--all of those impulses we have been socialized by since birth must die so that something new can be resurrected in our lives and in the world. The uprising in Ferguson changed Dowd, and through it, God made her into something new.Now it's our turn.Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Director of Outreach for an addiction recovery center. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her work at meggambino.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Rickson Gracie is one of the most fascinating professional athletes in the world. It is not hyperbole to call him a "living legend". A scion of a famed family of professional fighters, he was arguably the greatest Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner of his time. He went on to fight professional mixed martial arts in Japan where he retired undefeated and achieved a level of fame that is difficult to imagine. Despite being born into an elite family in Rio de Janeiro and blessed with an incredible physique and striking good looks, Rickson Gracie has seen more than his share of difficulties. In Breathe: A Life in Flow, he reflects upon his life, including his father's unorthodox parenting decisions and how he overcame the horrific loss of his first-born son. Peter Maguire, who holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and has published several books on the Nuremberg trials and the Khmer Rouge genocide, has been a Jiu Jitsu student and friend of Rickson since the early 1990s. Together they co-authored, Breathe: A Life in Flow (Dey Street, 2021).Peter is a wonderful conversationalist and quite the storyteller. As we are both historians, surfers, and students of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and as well have both spent a fair amount of time in Cambodia and Hawai’i, I always enjoy any opportunity to chat with him. This podcast (Peter’s third appearance on the New Books Network) was no exception. We discussed the book, Rickson’s amazing life, and a range of other topics such as his interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge genocide, my brief modeling career, and the ways in which martial arts offers opportunities for personal growth.Peter Maguire is the author of several books, including of Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, and Thai Stick. Maguire has taught history, law, theory of war, and the history of surfing at Columbia University, Bard College, and University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He founded the Fainting Robin Foundation which provides financial support to independent scholars, writers, and thinkers whose work falls outside the mainstream. It is a scholar-led, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that rewards genuinely independent intellectual work.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

People with disabilities have always struggled to make ends meet. Finding a job you can actually do, a housing situation you can afford that meets your needs, and simply going about the various daily tasks most of us take for granted all compound to make life under capitalism especially challenging. This makes the many disabled people who not only rise to meet their life-circumstances but go beyond them particularly inspiring.One such figure in this category would be E.T. Kingsley, a socialist activist at the turn of the 20th century. After an injury working on railway lines in Montana left him a double-amputee, Kingsley traveled west, first to California and then eventually to British Columbia where he would work as a political speaker, candidate for office, editor and writer in the radical left.His life is the focus of the book under discussion today, Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley (U British Columbia Press, 2021) coauthored by Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt. Pooling their combined academic backgrounds and intellectual resources, the authors are able to tease out a number of quiet yet profound elements of Kingsley’s life and times, from the legal status of injuries and workers compensation to discussions around freedom of speech and the changing nature of the security-state. In all this contextual discussion, the authors still never allow Kingsley to disappear as a dynamic and passionate activist, one who managed to stand as a unique example of what it means to tirelessly fight for a better world. Drawing from a number of fields, the book will be of interest to a number of people, from labor historians and disability activists to legal scholars and political theorists, showing us that even as we are flung into circumstances not of our choosing, we can still rise above our circumstances and change the world.Ravi Malhotra is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. Benjamin Isitt is a historian and legal scholar based in Victoria, British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Janica Towne Anderson (author of Zen Odyssey) is a master falconer and has been a student and teacher of esoteric traditions for fifty years. She has worked as a research assistant in the psychology department at Harvard University and served as an instructor at Esalen Institute. She founded Big Sur Tapes, which preserved and published audio archives from teachers such as Ram Dass, Buckminster Fuller, and Alduous Huxley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Today I talked to Tinatin Japaridze about her book Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism (Lexington Books, 2022).In this timely interview, Japaridze discusses not only the legacy of Stalin, but also her personal reflections in growing up in Georgia during the Cold War, and her experiences in the immediate drama of post Cold-War Moscow. To add to her both personal and professional reflections on legacy and nationalism, she attended an American school where she integrated into the west. Thus her reflections on McDonaldization and its fallout are both driven by an acute level of professional study as well as personal empathy for the individuals who live in the times we come to call historical. This same interest in both the human and the institutional informs her exploration of memory and particularly museums as sites of the construction of nostalgia and shame. In a compelling moment, Japaridze notices a brand new pair of boots in an exhibit that labeled them Stalin's. She takes us into our universe as the curator shares a secret: they were never worn by Stalin and surely stitched well after his death in 1953. Almost sixty years later, Stalin like these boots, are refashioned, imagined, and put into place as an observable reality for the next generation. And that next generation, her generation, peers through the glass and suspects they are not as they have been neatly labeled by curators of the past. With the Russian waging war in the Ukraine in a bid that seems driven by a macabre nationalism or fun-house of mirrors Stalinist nostalgia, Japaridze's book is more necessary than ever. What she felt was opaque is now in plain sight, no longer hiding. While Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and those who came after him, had an ideology, however manipulated, Japaridze draws the curtain back on today's empty-rhetoric old-fashioned land grab by Putin. Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography