New Books in Biography
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New Books in Biography
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000...
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Michael Staunton, "Thomas Becket and His World" (Reaktion Books, 2025)
Thomas Becket and His World (Reaktion Books, 2025) explores the turbulent life and violent death of Thomas Becket, one of the most controversial figu...
Henry Rausch, "Submerged: Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War" (Independently Published, 2024)
In Submerged: Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War (Independently Published, 2024), the author graduates from an elite un...
Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admir...
Adam Silverstein, "Haman" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Haman, infamous as the antagonist in the book of Esther, appears as a villainous figure in virtually all varieties of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam...
Brooke Barbier, "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father" (Harvard UP, 2023)
King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father (Harvard UP, 2023) is a rollicking portrait of the paradoxical patriot, whose measur...
Dennis Deletant, "In Search of Romania" (Hurst, 2022)
The imposition of Communist ideology was a misfortune for millions in Eastern Europe, but never for Dennis Deletant. Instead, it drew him to Romania....
Sarah Ruden, "Vergil: The Poet's Life" (Yale UP, 2023)
The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process...
Chris Yogerst, "The Warner Brothers" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)
One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formati...
Treena Orchard, "Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and the Darker Side of Dating Apps" (Aevo, U Toronto Press, 2024)
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Treena Orchard about her memoir, Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and the Darker Side of Dating A...
Christina Cecelia Davidson, "Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2024)
H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and th...
Emma Heaney, "This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation" (Pluto Press UK, 2025)
What does it feel like to experience your body cleaving into two while public discussion of reproductive healthcare centers around the viability line:...
Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)
Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Ma...
David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century At...
Simon Appleford, "Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America (U Virginia Press, 2023) is the first book-length critical examination of the po...
Dustin Condren, "An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film" (Cornell UP, 2024)
An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the unfinished cinematic projects developed and abandoned b...
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of S...
Philip Nash, "Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman" (Routledge, 2022)
Philip Nash's book Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman (Routledge, 2022) is a concise and highly readable political biography that examines...
Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include t...
Aaron Magid, "The Most American King: Abdullah of Jordan" (Universal Publishers, 2025)
The Most American King: Abdullah of Jordan (Universal Publishers, 2025) is the first comprehensive biography on Jordan’s King Abdullah. Drawing on int...
Meg Groff, "Not If I Can Help It" (Rivertown Books, 2025)
Meg Groff's memoir Not If I Can Help It (Rivertown Books, 2025) recounts some of the most harrowing, infuriating, yet inspiring stories from Groff’s w...
Judith L. Pearson, "Radical Sisters: Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, Evelyn Lauder, and the Dawn of the Breast Cancer Movement" (Mayo Clinic Press, 2025)
There was a time when women's health was marginalized. There was a time when breast cancer wasn't discussed. There was a time when October wasn't pink...
Al Posamentier, "Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians" (Prometheus, 2020)
Today I talked to Alfred S. Posamentier, a co-author (with Christian Spreitzer) of Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians (Prome...
Martha Biondi, "We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation" (U California Press, 2025)
Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt.
For many civil rights...
David T. Beito, "FDR: A New Political Life" (Open Universe, 2025)
David Beito's new book brings to bear the latest historical scholarship to shed light on the life and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Profe...
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1...
Mark L. Clifford, "The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic" (Free Press, 2024)
The extraordinary life story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai, a leading Hong Kong democracy activist fighting for freedom of speech who beca...
Elizabeth R. Hyman, "The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising" (Harper, 2025)
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the most storied events of the Holocaust, yet previous accounts of have almost entirely focused on its male parti...
Rob Wells, "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)
When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike o...
Brian Baker, "The Road" (Akashic Books, 2025)
The Road (Akashic Books, 2025) is an illuminating selection of photographs spanning iconic punk rock guitarist Brian Baker’s many years of global tour...
Diane Ravitch, "An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else" (Columbia UP, 2025)
For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear,...
Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of...
Ashley D. Farmer, "Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore" (Pantheon, 2025)
In the world of Black radical politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore d...
Sarah Smarsh, "Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class" (Scribner, 2024)
National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on...
Abhimanyu Kumar and Aletta André, "The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy" (HarperCollins India, 2025)
Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian ro...
Carl Rollyson, "The Making of Sylvia Plath (UP Mississippi, 2024)
Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her se...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it....
Maurice Samuels, "Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair" (Yale UP, 2024)
On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting “Death to Judas!” In Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the...
Stephen Fritz, "The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader" (Yale UP, 2018)
In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee St...
Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019)
Though his advice has saved the lives of millions of people, the name Ignaz Semmelweis is not one commonly known today. In his book Anthony Valerio’s...
Bill V. Mullen, "James Baldwin: Living in Fire" (Pluto Press, 2019)
In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press, 2019), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the person...