New Books in Biography Podcast
1) William Kelleher Storey, "The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the world's most important diamond mining company, De Bee...Show More
2) Edward Stanley et. al., "A North American Tour Journal 1824-1825: The Making of a Prime Minister" (Sutton Publishing, 2025)
A North American Tour Journal 1824-1825: The Making of a Prime Minister (Sutton Publishing, 2025) follows Edward Stanley's 1824-25 journey through North America, a formative tour that profoundly shape...Show More
3) Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, "Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
Claire McCardell forever changed fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women’s clothes, and today much of what we wear traces back to her ingenious, reb...Show More
4) Susana M. Morris, "Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler" (Amistad Press, 2025)
A magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical...Show More
5) Tracy Slater, "Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp" (Chicago Review Press, 2025)
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the Western U.S., s...Show More
6) Micaela Sahhar, "Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family" (Newsouth, 2025)
"If we were different people, to write down these words might be to leave them behind us. But words are our artifacts, and I am seeding a trail for the journey, home." What does the daughter of a Nak...Show More
7) Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025)
From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and id...Show More
8) LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025)
On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when ...Show More
9) Brendan Simms, "Hitler: A Global Biography" (Basic Books, 2019)
Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras...Show More
10) Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune" (Ballantine, 2013)
Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions, shares the extraordinary story of a reclusive copper heiress, the battle over her...Show More