New Books in Biography

In this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals—from fish to bats to humans—American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress.We join Schutt on a tour from the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales. We visit beaches where horseshoe crabs are being harvested for their blood, which has properties that can protect humans from deadly illnesses. We learn that when temperatures plummet, some frog hearts can freeze solid for weeks, resuming their beat only after a spring thaw. And we journey with Schutt through human history, too, as philosophers and scientists hypothesize, often wrongly, about what makes our ticker tick. Schutt traces humanity’s cardiac fascination from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, who believed that the heart contains the soul, all the way up to modern-day laboratories, where scientists use animal hearts and even plants as the basis for many of today’s cutting-edge therapies.Written with verve and authority, weaving evolutionary perspectives with cultural history, Pump: A Natural History of the Heart (Algonquin Books, 2021) shows us this mysterious organ in a completely new light.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The Strange Genius of Mr. O.: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2021) by Carolyn Eastman is at once the biography of a remarkably odd celebrity---a gaunt, opium-addicted Scottish orator who lectured in a toga--and a tour of the fledgling United States. James Ogilvie arrived in the United States in 1793 as an educated, impoverished, and deeply ambitious teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1819, he was a celebrity known simply as "Mr. O" who counted the nation's leading politicians, writers, and intellectuals among his admirers. Following Ogilvie on lecture tours from the Atlantic coast as far west as frontier Kentucky, Eastman reconstructs his path to renown, explaining how and why Ogilvie mattered to the citizens of the early republic. His example inspired countless men and more than a few women to become amateur orators and helped inaugurate America's golden age of oratory. At a time when Americans were eager for national unity, Ogilvie and his audiences hoped that eloquence might knit a divided public together---that educated, elevated oratory might provide a bedrock for citizenship and civic belonging. In Eastman's hands, Ogilvie's remarkable life story has as much to tell us about a fascinating man as it has to reveal about the nation he helped fashion.Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (Duke UP, 2021), Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan’s first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Few figures in the American arts have stories richer in irony than does architect Minoru Yamasaki. While his twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center are internationally iconic, few who know the icon recognize its architect’s name or know much about his portfolio of more than 200 buildings. One is tempted to call him America’s most famous forgotten architect. He was classed in the top tier of his profession in the 1950s and ’60s, as he carried modernism in novel directions, yet today he is best known not for buildings that stand but for two projects that were destroyed under tragic circumstances: the twin towers and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. This book undertakes a reinterpretation of Yamasaki’s significance that combines architectural history with the study of his intersection with defining moments of American history and culture. The story of the loss and vulnerability of Yamasaki’s legacy illustrates the fragility of all architecture in the face of natural and historical forces, yet in Yamasaki’s view, fragility is also a positive quality in architecture: the source of its refinement, beauty, and humanity. We learn something essential about architecture when we explore this tension of strength and fragility.In the course of interpreting Yamasaki’s architecture through the wide lens of the book we see the mid-century role of Detroit as an industrial power and architectural mecca; we follow a debate over public housing that entailed the creation and eventual destruction of many thousands of units; we examine competing attempts to embody democratic ideals in architecture and to represent those ideals in foreign lands; we ponder the consequences of anti-Japanese prejudice and the masculism of the architectural profession; we see Yamasaki’s style criticized for its arid minimalism yet equally for its delicacy and charm; we observe Yamasaki making a great name for himself in the Arab world but his twin towers ultimately destroyed by Islamic militants. As this curious tale of ironies unfolds, it invites reflection on the core of modern architecture’s search for meaning and on the creative possibilities its legacy continues to offer.Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color illustrations of Yamasaki’s buildings, Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture (Routledge, 2021) will be of interest to students, academics and professionals in a range of disciplines, including architectural history, architectural theory, architectural preservation, and urban design and planning.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

Zwingli: God's Armed Prophet (Yale, 2021) is a major new biography of Huldrych Zwingli--the warrior preacher who shaped the early Reformation. Zwingli (1484-1531) was the most significant early reformer after Martin Luther. As the architect of the Reformation in Switzerland, he created the Reformed tradition later inherited by John Calvin. His movement ultimately became a global religion. A visionary of a new society, Zwingli was also a divisive and fiercely radical figure. Bruce Gordon presents a fresh interpretation of the early Reformation and the key role played by Zwingli. A charismatic preacher and politician, Zwingli transformed church and society in Zurich and inspired supporters throughout Europe. Yet, Gordon shows, he was seen as an agitator and heretic by many and his bellicose, unyielding efforts to realize his vision would prove his undoing. Unable to control the movement he had launched, Zwingli died on the battlefield fighting his Catholic opponents.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Leonard Cohen's troubled relationship with God is here mapped onto his troubled relationships with sex and politics. Analysing Covenantal theology and its place in Cohen's work, Marcia Pally's From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (Bloomsbury, 2021) is the first to trace a consistent theology across sixty years of Cohen's writing, drawing on his Jewish heritage and its expression in his lyrics and poems.Cohen's commitment to covenant, and his anger at this God who made us so prone to failing it, undergird the faith, frustration, and sardonic taunting of Cohen's work. Both his faith and ire are traced through:  Cohen's unorthodox use of Jewish and Christian imagery  His writings about women, politics, and the Holocaust  His final theology, You Want It Darker, released three weeks before his death Professor Marcia Pally teaches at New York University, at Fordham University, and is an annual guest professor at Humboldt University’s Theology Faculty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Global thinker, public intellectual, and world-famous theorist of ‘liquid modernity’, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful academic career and, after retirement, became a prolific and popular writer and an intellectual talisman for young people everywhere. Izabela Wagner's Bauman: A Biography (Polity Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of his life and work. Dr. Wagner, Professor of Sociology at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, returns to Bauman’s native Poland and recounts his childhood in an assimilated Polish-Jewish family and the school experiences shaped by anti-Semitism. Bauman’s life trajectory is typical of his generation and social group: the escape from Nazi occupation and Soviet secondary education, communist engagement, enrolment in the Polish Army as a political officer, participation in WWII, and the support for the new political regime in the post-war Poland. Dr. Wagner sheds new light on Bauman’s activity as a KBW political officer. His eviction in 1953 from the military ranks and his academic career reflect the dynamic context of Poland in 1950s and 1960s. His professional career in Poland was abruptly halted in 1968 by the anti-Semitic purges. Bauman became a refugee again - leaving Poland for Israel, and then settling down in Leeds in the UK in 1971. His work would flourish in Leeds, and after his retirement in 1991 he entered a period of enormous productivity which propelled him onto the international stage as one of the most widely read and influential social thinkers of our time.Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

“When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.”So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith.In Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement (Yale UP, 2021), author Julian Zelizer tracks Heschel’s early years and foundational influences—his childhood in Warsaw and early education in Hasidism, his studies in late 1920s and early 1930s Berlin, and the fortuitous opportunity, which brought him to the United States and saved him from the Holocaust, to teach at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. This deep and complex portrait places Heschel at the crucial intersection between religion and progressive politics in mid-twentieth-century America. To this day Heschel remains a symbol of the fight to make progressive Jewish values relevant in the secular world.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America (Lexington, 2021) argues that the core commitments of the nihilist movement of the 1860's made their way to 20th century America via the thought of Ayn Rand. While mid-nineteenth-century Russian nihilism has generally been seen as part of a radical tradition that culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the author argues that nihilism's intellectual trajectory was in fact quite different. Analysis of such sources as Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What is to Be Done? (1863) and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957), archival research in Rand's papers, and broad attention to late-nineteenth century Russian intellectual history all lead the author to conclude that nihilism's legacy is deeply implicated in one of America's most widely-read philosophers of capitalism and libertarian freedom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners. When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with his family for slave labor. As the tide turned against the Nazis, Panasenko, now separated from his family, tramped westward with the retreating German army. The Long Vacation is Alex Panasenko’s war memoir, remembering the formative, often harrowing experiences that shaped his character.In this conversation, Mr. Panasenko discusses the extremities of life, death, terror, lust, and hunger from a child’s perspective, and with a child’s canny reactions aimed at survival, even when the prospect seemed most unlikely. With things falling apart around him—laws, governments, the conventions of the adult world—Panasenko came to rely only on himself. Consequently, as an adolescent in the chaotic period following the war, he became an astonishingly successful black marketeer in the liberated Bavarian town of Memmingen. Finally, Mr. Panasenko reflects on his life in the 75 years since the war, including his forty years as a biology teacher at Berkeley High School in northern California.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Empire; he had the privilege of being one of Alex Panasenko’s biology students in 1993-94. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography