Posts Tagged ‘biography’

By Fawn M. Brodie First Vintage Books Edition, 1995; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1945. Click to buy this book! In the Preface of the first edition of her book, author Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981) sums up the challenges faced by all those who decide to undertake a serious study of the life […]

Monday, January 7th, 2013 at 00:01 | Comments Off on No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith

By Steven Watts University of Missouri Press, First Paperback Printing, 2001 Click to Buy this Book! In the Introduction of this 526-page biography of Walter Elias Disney (1904–1966), Steven Watts, Chairman of the History Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia, describes some of the challenges involved in the immense undertaking of this project: the sheer […]

Sunday, August 19th, 2012 at 00:01 | 1 comment
Categories: Biography, Reviews

By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, New York, 2005 Click to Buy this Book! In the Author’s Note and Acknowledgments section, Martin Sherwin informs the reader that this biography was 25 years in the making. The work began in 1979 with a visit to the “Oppenheimer Ranch” […]

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012 at 00:01 | Comments Off on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Categories: Biography, Reviews

By William Sheehan Published by Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2007 Click to Buy this Book! This 429-page biography of Edward Emerson Barnard (1857–1923), an astronomer who is best known for his discovery of Jupiter’s fifth satellite, now named Amalthea, and “Barnard’s Star,” was published in its paperback edition in 2007 and, with its new preface, […]

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 00:01 | 2 comments
Categories: Biography, Reviews

by Saul Bellow Published by Penguin Books; First Printing edition (April 26, 2001) Click to Buy this Book!   I don’t think that “Ravelstein” is really about Ravelstein — whoever he’s supposed to be in real life, some say Alan Bloom, but this doesn’t interest me much. The real antagonist of “Ravelstein” is Chick, Ravelstein’s […]

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 at 00:01 | Comments Off on Ravelstein
Categories: Biography, Reviews