Staff Picks
What's New in Biography
- Bland L.
- Monday, April 15, 2019
Collection
If you're pondering your next read, consider one of these biographies and memoirs recently added to our collection. Of some note is Robert Caro's Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, recently excerpted in The New Yorker. Caro, who is nearing completion of his decades-in-the-making multivolume biography of LBJ, reminisces about his days in New York journalism and how he was drawn to the kind of meticulous biographical research for which he is now celebrated.
The list also includes new memoirs from such literary greats as Ruth Reichl and Barry Lopez. Some of these titles already have holds lists, but others are available now, so make your request today!
Never a Lovely So Real
The Life and Work of Nelson Algren
Published in 2019
"This definitive biography reclaims Nelson Algren as a towering literary figure and exposes how his radical politics sabotaged his career. For a time, Nelson Algren (1909-1981) was America's most famous author. Millions bought his books; The Man with the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award, was made into a film starring Frank Sinatra. Yet the cause of Algren's decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away, others cited writer's block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic. In this magisterial biography--drawing from interviews, archived correspondence, and the first unredacted version of Algren's FBI file--Colin Asher reestablishes Algren not only as a legendary figure, but a dramatic iconoclast. He recounts the author's development as a thinker, his affair with Simone de Beauvoir, and his unapologetic left-leaning politics. Most intriguingly, Asher uncovers the true cause of Algren's artistic exile: a reckless creative decision that led to increased FBI scrutiny and may have caused a mental breakdown"-- Provided by publisher.
The Back Channel
A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal
Published in 2019
"Ambassador William J. Burns is the most distinguished and admired American diplomat of the last half century. Over the course of four decades, he played a central role in the most consequential diplomatic episodes of his time--from the bloodless end of the Cold War to post-Cold War relations with Putin's Russia, from post-9/11 tumult in the Middle East to the secret nuclear talks with Iran. Upon his retirement, Secretary John Kerry said Burns belonged on "the short list of American diplomatic legends, alongside George Kennan." In The Back Channel, Burns recounts with vivid detail and incisive analysis some of the seminal moments of his career. He draws on a trove of newly declassified cables and memos to give readers a rare, inside look at American diplomacy in action, and of the people who worked with him. His dispatches from war-torn Chechnya and Qadhafi's camp in the deserts of Libya and his searing memos warning of the "Perfect Storm" unleashed by the Iraq War will reshape our understanding of history and the policy debates of the future. Burns sketches the contours of effective American leadership in a world that resembles neither the zero-sum Cold War contest of his early years as a diplomat, nor the "unipolar moment" of American primacy that followed. Ultimately, The Back Channel is an eloquent, deeply informed, and timely story of a life spent in service of American interests abroad, as well as a powerful reminder, in a time of great turmoil, of the importance of diplomacy"-- Provided by publisher.
Working
Researching, Interviewing, Writing
Published in 2019
"Short autobiography about author's processes of researching, interviewing, and writing his books"-- Provided by publisher.
What You Have Heard is True
A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
Published in 2019
Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
Published in 2019
"From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world--where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she)"-- Provided by publisher.
A Sin by Any Other Name
Reckoning with Racism and the Heritage of the South
Published in 2019
An activist, pastor, and indirect descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee traces his upbringing in the American South with a name associated with the double-sided realities of honor, privilege, inequality, and the misinterpretation of Christian values.
Horizon
Published in 2019
Recounts the author's travels to six regions of the world and the extraordinary encounters with people, animals, and natural elements that shaped his life.
L. E. L.
The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "female Byron"
Published in 2019
Madame Fourcade's Secret War
The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler
Published in 2019
The Lady from the Black Lagoon
Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick
Published in 2019
Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
Published in 2019
If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905-1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article "The Hell of Treblinka" became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman's powerful anti-totalitarian works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art. Because Grossman's major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff's authoritative biography illuminates Grossman's life and legacy.
Let's Play Two
The Legend of Mr. Cub, the Life of Ernie Banks
Published in 2019
"The definitive and revealing biography of Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks, one of America's most iconic, beloved, and misunderstood baseball players, by acclaimed journalist Ron Rapoport"-- Provided by publisher.
Save Me the Plums
My Gourmet Memoir
Published in 2019
The journalist and author chronicles her groundbreaking tenure as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and her work with legendary fellow epicureans to transform how America thinks about food.
First
Sandra Day O'Connor
Published in 2019
"Based on exclusive interviews and access to the Supreme Court archives, this is the intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of America's first female Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor--by New York Times bestselling author Evan Thomas. She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her class at law school in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O'Connor's story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings--doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. She became the first-ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona State Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the Supreme Court, appointed by Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer's, O'Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise. Women and men today will be inspired by how to be first in your own life, how to know when to fight and when to walk away, through O'Connor's example. This is a remarkably vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family and believed in serving her country, who, when she became the most powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for the women who followed her"-- Provided by publisher.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books
Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library
Published in 2019
Solitary
Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement
Published in 2019
Nearly forty years in solitary confinement in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell for 23 hours a day for a crime he did not commit, Albert Woodfox survived and emerged with his humanity and sense of hope for the future intact.