new biographies october 2021

Biography Books To Read | October 2021

In biography & memoir , books to read if you like... , ebook , news, 28 oct 2021.

Healers or Dealers?

By richard p. allison.

Release Date: October 26, 2021

Readers get a front-row seat to the jaw-dropping true accounts written by the retired investigator who experienced them and attempted to hold these doctors accountable. His stories show a direct correlation between doctors’ questionable conduct with illegal administrating, dispensing, and prescribing of opioids and the craze that plagues our nation today. Couple this with the addictions that unwaveringly rival those we see in the worst of America’s inner cities…

The Storyteller

By dave grohl.

Release Date: October 5, 2021

Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities (“It’s a piece of cake! Just do 4 hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!”) I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I’ve recorded and can’t wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child.

To Rescue the Republic

By bret baier & catherine whitney.

Release Date: October 12, 2021

Deep with contemporary resonance and brimming with fresh detail that takes readers from the battlefields of the Civil War to the corridors of power where men decided the fate of the nation in back rooms, To Rescue the Republic reveals Grant, for all his complexity, to be among the first rank of American heroes.

E.R. Nurses: True Stories from America’s Greatest Unsung Heroes

By james patterson & matt eversmann.

Release Date: October 11, 2021

Around the clock, across the country, these highly skilled and compassionate men and women sacrifice and struggle for us and our families. You have never heard their true stories. Not like this. From big-city and small-town hospitals. From behind the scenes. From the heart. This book will make you laugh, make you cry, make you understand. When we’re at our worst, E.R. nurses are at their best.

Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

By laurence leamer.

New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote’s never-published final novel, Answered Prayers—the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote’s ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his “swans.”

Unprotected: A Memoir

By billy porter.

Release Date: October 19, 2021

From the incomparable Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winner, a powerful and revealing autobiography about race, sexuality, art, and healing…Billy Porter’s Unprotected is the life story of a singular artist and survivor in his own words. It is the story of a boy whose talent and courage opened doors for him, but only a crack. It is the story of a teenager discovering himself, learning his voice and his craft amidst deep trauma. And it is the story of a young man whose unbreakable determination led him through countless hard times to where he is now; a proud icon who refuses to back down or hide. Porter is a multitalented, multifaceted treasure at the top of his game, and Unprotected is a resonant, inspirational story of trauma and healing, shot through with his singular voice.

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Best Biographies of 2021

OCT. 12, 2021

by Mary Beard

A lively treatise on Roman art and power, deliciously opinionated and beautifully illustrated. Full review >

AUG. 3, 2021

by Peter Bergen

Essential for anyone concerned with geopolitics, national security, and the containment of further terrorist actions. Full review >

OCT. 5, 2021

by Daniel de Visé

The thrill is here, as B.B. King finally gets his due in this first meticulous account of his historic life. Full review >

NOV. 2, 2021

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

by James Horn

Swift-moving prose along a twisting storyline lends this brilliant book the feel of a mystery. Full review >

SEPT. 1, 2021

by Kate Clifford Larson

A social justice pioneer gets her due in this inspiring story of toil and spirit. A must-stock for libraries. Full review >

FEB. 23, 2021

by Hermione Lee

Authoritative and exhaustive—another jewel in Lee’s literary crown. Full review >

by Claire Tomalin

A vivid portrait of the early years of an author of astounding vision, who predicted many of the horrors of the 20th century. Full review >

JULY 13, 2021

by Richard Zenith

Impressive research and evident enthusiasm inform a definitive biography. Full review >

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The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2021

Featuring tom stoppard, michelle zauner, mike nichols, d. h. lawrence, chimamanda ngozi adichie, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

First up: Memoir and Biography .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)

24 Rave • 6 Positive

“… powerfully maps a complicated mother-daughter relationship cut much too short … Zauner’s food descriptions transport us to the table alongside her … a rare acknowledgement of the ravages of cancer in a culture obsessed with seeing it as an enemy that can be battled with hope and strength …Zauner carries the same clear-eyed frankness to writing about her mother’s death five months after her diagnosis … It is rare to read about a slow death in such detail, an odd gift in that it forces us to sit with mortality rather than turn away from it.”

–Kristen Martin ( NPR )

2. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nullally and Michael Favala Goldman (FSG)

23 Rave • 4 Positive Read an excerpt from The Copenhagen Trilogy here

“… beautiful and fearless … Ditlevsen’s memoirs…form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor’s bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn’t just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality—the chapters have the quality of just-written diary entries, fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman—but that it exists at all. It’s a bit like discovering that Lila and Lenú, the fictional heroines of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, were real … A half-century later, all of it—her extraordinary clarity and imperfect femininity, her unstinting account of the struggle to reconcile art and life—still lands. The construct of memoir (and its stylish young cousin, autofiction) involves the organizing filter of retrospection, lending the impression that life is a continuous narrative reel of action and consequence, of meanings to be universalized … Ditlevsen’s voice, diffident and funny, dead-on about her own mistakes, is a welcome addition to that canon of women who showed us their secret faces so that we might wear our own.”

–Megan O’Grady ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Real Estate by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury)

18 Rave • 9 Positive Read an excerpt from Real Estate here

“[A] wonderful new book … Levy, whose prose is at once declarative and concrete and touched with an almost oracular pithiness, has a gift for imbuing ordinary observations with the magic of metaphor … The new volume, which follows the death of one version of the self, describes the uncertain birth of another … She herself is not always a purely likable, or reliable, narrator of her own experience, and her book is the richer for it.”

–Alexandra Schwartz ( The New Yorker )

4. A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Biblioasis)

17 Rave • 4 Positive Read an excerpt from A Ghost in the Throat here

“… ardent, shape-shifting … The book is all undergrowth, exuberant, tangled passage. It recalls Nathalie Léger’s brilliant and original Suite for Barbara Loden : a biography of the actress and director that becomes a tally of the obstacles in writing such a book, and an admission of the near-impossibility of biography itself … The story that uncoils is stranger, more difficult to tell, than those valiant accounts of rescuing a ‘forgotten’ woman writer from history’s erasures or of the challenges faced by the woman artist … What is this ecstasy of self-abnegation, what are its costs? She documents this tendency without shame or fear but with curiosity, even amusement. She will retrain her hungers. ‘I could donate my days to finding hers,’ she tells herself, embarking on Ni Chonaill’s story. ‘I could do that, and I will.’ Or so she says. The real woman Ni Ghriofa summons forth is herself.”

–Parul Sehgal ( The New York Times )

5. Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf)

12 Rave • 7 Positive

“… achingly of its time … I really appreciated Adichie’s discomfort with the language of grief … Books often come to you just when you need them, and it is unimaginable to think just how many people have, like the author, lost someone in this singularly strange period of our history. Adichie’s father didn’t die from COVID-19, but that doesn’t make the aftermath of that loss any less relevant … A book on grief is not the kind of book you want to have to give to anyone. But here we are.”

–Allison Arieff ( The San Francisco Chronicle )

1. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee (Knopf)

13 Rave • 18 Positive • 3 Mixed Read an excerpt from Tom Stoppard: A Life here

“Lee…builds an ever richer, circular understanding of his abiding themes and concerns, of his personal and artistic life, and of his many other passionate engagements … Lee’s biography is unusual in that it was commissioned, and published while its subject is still alive. Lee is a highly acclaimed biographer whose rigor and integrity make her decision to write under such conditions surprising … Lee is frank and thoughtful about the challenges of writing about a living subject. She is aware, as the reader will be, that her interview subjects do not want to speak ill of a friend and colleague who is still among them. In addition to the almost unrelievedly positive portrayal of Stoppard, the seven-hundred-fifty-plus pages of this volume might have been somewhat condensed, were its subject no longer living, thereby rendering the biography easier to wield and to read. In spite of these quibbles, this is an extraordinary record of a vital and evolving artistic life, replete with textured illuminations of the plays and their performances, and shaped by the arc of Stoppard’s exhilarating engagement with the world around him, and of his eventual awakening to his own past.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

2. Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (Penguin)

18 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Mark Harris’s portrait of director Mike Nichols is a pleasure to read and a model biography: appreciative yet critical, unfailingly intelligent and elegantly written. Granted, Harris has a hyper-articulate, self-analytical subject who left a trail of press coverage behind him, but Nichols used his dazzling conversational gifts to obfuscate and beguile as much as to confide … Harris, a savvy journalist and the author of two excellent cultural histories, makes judicious use of abundant sources in Mike Nichols: A Life to craft a shrewd, in-depth reckoning of the elusive man behind the polished facade … Harris gently covers those declining years with respect for the achievements that preceded them. His marvelous book makes palpable in artful detail the extraordinary scope and brilliance of those achievements.”

–Wendy Smith ( The Washington Post )

3. The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura (W. W. Norton)

12 Rave • 11 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from The Doctors Blackwell here

“Janice P. Nimura, in her enthralling new book, The Doctors Blackwell , tells the story of two sisters who became feminist figures almost in spite of themselves … The broad outlines of their lives could have made for a salutary tale about the formidable achievements of pioneering women; instead, Nimura—a gifted storyteller […] recounted another narrative of women’s education and emancipation—offers something stranger and more absorbing … A culture that valorizes heroes insists on consistency, and the Blackwell sisters liked to see themselves as unwavering stewards of lofty ideals. But Nimura, by digging into their deeds and their lives, finds those discrepancies and idiosyncrasies that yield a memorable portrait. The Doctors Blackwell also opens up a sense of possibility—you don’t always have to mean well on all fronts in order to do a lot of good.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

4. Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey (W. W. Norton)

13 Rave • 13 Positive • 6 Mixed • 4 Pan

“Bailey’s comprehensive life of Philip Roth—to tell it outright—is a narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight into desire, and desire into destiny. Roth was never to be a mute inglorious Milton. To imagine him without fame is to strip him bare … The biographer’s unintrusive everyday prose is unseen and unheard; yet under Bailey’s strong light what remains on the page is one writer’s life as it was lived, and—almost—as it was felt.”

–Cynthia Ozick ( The New York Times Book Review )

5. Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 8 Positive • 5 Mixed

“… the feeling you get reading Frances Wilson’s Burning Man … The flare of a match, a man on fire, raging, crackling, spitting, consuming everything and everyone around him. Wilson too is on form and on fire … I’m not totally convinced the Dante business works. Wilson’s voice is so appealing—confiding, intelligent, easy, amused—I would happily have read a straightforward blaze through the life, cradle to grave, basket to casket … This is a red-hot, propulsive book. The impression it leaves is of Lawrence not so much as a phoenix (his chosen personal emblem) rising from the flames, but of a moth coming too close to a candle and, singed and frantic, flying into and into and into the wick.”

–Laura Freeman ( The Times )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The Best Books of 2021

The best biographies: the 2021 nbcc shortlist, recommended by elizabeth taylor.

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley

Elizabeth Taylor , the author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics' Circle biography committee, discusses their 2021 shortlist for the title of the best biography—including a revelatory new book about the life of Malcolm X, a group biography of artists in the 1960s, and a book built from a cache of letters written in Japan's shogun era.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s by Maggie Doherty

1 Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley

2 the price of peace: money, democracy, and the life of john maynard keynes by zachary d. carter, 3 the dead are arising: the life of malcolm x by les payne & tamara payne, 4 red comet: the short life and blazing art of sylvia plath by heather clark, 5 the equivalents: a story of art, female friendship, and liberation in the 1960s by maggie doherty.

W elcome back to Five Books! This is the third year in a row that we’ve come together to discuss the National Book Critics Circle finalists for biography. Before we look at the 2021 shortlist, could you reflect on the qualities that unite the best biographies?

Biographies have a special antenna for what’s happening in the world. This year, three excellent biographies about living men dealt directly with politics that provided a bit of a refuge from current personalities but, at the same time, elucidated the present day: His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser and Man of Tomorrow: The Restless Life of Jerry Brown by James Newton.

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The best biographies adapt form to subject—they come from an angle, tell the story of a group, focus on a moment. They can do this because they inhabit the people and times about which they are writing. Most of all, readers respond to a special alchemy of subject and biographer, and while I think Janet Malcolm is brilliant, I don’t quite endorse her idea that the biographer at work “is like the professional burglar.”

Biographies often have to contend with or respond to how their subject or subjects have been defined by previous works of biography. Of the books we’re looking at here, that’s certainly true of the Plath and Malcolm X biographies. Keynes too.

To some extent, with the exception of Amy Stanley, each biography finalist wrestles with the interpretations of previous biographies. Heather Clark responds more deliberately in Red Comet because she is contending not only with Plath, but the myth of Plath. Les Payne challenges interpretations of biographies about Malcolm X, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Manning Marable. As an investigative reporter, Payne not only challenges interpretations but also corrects the historic record and Malcom X’s own autobiography. Biographers live with their subjects, and the shadows of their subjects.

Shall we start off by discussing the first of your 2021 finalists for the title of best biography? This is Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World. It’s very much a life-and-times book, as it uses the story of a single woman to offer a sweep of 19th-century Japanese society.

You have that just right: Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo through the life of Tsuneno, daughter of a Buddhist priest in a rural province at a moment that Japan ’s transformation is taking root.

Just to be clear for those who don’t know: the city we call Tokyo was known as ‘Edo’ until 1869. 

Tsuneno attends school, learns to sew and dreams of the big city. At age 12, she is married off and dispatched to an even more remote province. Three failed marriages later, she literally walks for weeks on a horrific journey to reach Edo where, impoverished and degraded, she proves to be a skilful survivor, finding a form of independence to which she clings, even after she marries a louche of a samurai . She dies in 1853, just before Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan.

She was remarkably resilient and tenacious, but Tsuneno was also rebellious, troublesome and not entirely likeable. And her death brought me to tears. Stanley renders Tsuneno’s messy life, unique struggles and the quotidian particulars of her world so richly that this Japanese woman from another era becomes achingly human and resonant. Tsuneno emerges as a sort of everywoman who transcends time and is more than a vessel to represent Edo’s transformation into Tokyo and Japan’s path to power.

“It’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city”

Stanley, an historian of early and modern Japan, happened to find a letter from Tsuneno hidden in an archive online which led her to Japan and the discovery of a rich archive of letters written by Tsuneno which had been saved by her family, along with a trove of documents. Stanley is quite understated about this dedication and accomplishment. As she explains in the book, she reads and speaks Japanese, but the brushstrokes of 200 years ago posed quite a challenge. Stanley photographed everything from the archive, and painstakingly translated it all to create a narrative of Tsuneno’s life through her very detailed and personal letters.

Stanley has recovered a lost world. Drawing on her knowledge of the history, Stanley contextualizes the letters, which enhances their power. So, it’s a biography of a woman, but also a portrait of what would become a great world city and its evolving culture.

I’m really interested in the decision Stanley has made to focus on a subject who is herself not famous or historically significant. I guess by its nature the book gives us insight into what it was like to be a ‘normal’ person during that period, in that society.

This biography is such a sharp reminder of the importance of archives. I fear that we will soon face a future in which we will have to rely on redacted government documents. The victors will dominate the narrative, and the stories of the powerless will vanish unless we work to preserve them. With email replacing letters and so much news disappearing online, we need a coordinated effort to create new archives, especially for those who may not have reached a moment of fame, or infamy.

Do you think this would have been a difficult book to find a publisher for, because of Stanley’s low-key choice of subject?

I try not to look at the publishing history of books as they come up for awards and, instead, focus on the book itself. So I don’t know the particulars here, but kudos to Scribner on this one. My sense, though, is that there’s increasing enthusiasm to recover forgotten, overlooked figures and histories and that Stanley’s book could find a wide audience.

Finding that universality in specificity. Well, let’s move on to Zachary Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes . This is much closer to the ‘great man’ style of biography that you alluded to earlier. How one person impacts the world, rather than how the world impacts upon the person. The Guardian called this “a solid, sombre intellectual biography”—does that sound right to you? Why is it one of the best biographies of 2021?

I’m not sure that the ‘Bloomsberries,’ as Virginia Woolf named them, were sombre in Carter’s vivid depictions! The Price of Peace is a biography of an eminent, visionary economist, the story of how John Maynard Keynes came to his revolutionary ideas, refined and advanced them through his life and how they came to dominate economic thought.

Carter makes a bold move as a biographer: Keynes dies in 1946 on page 390, but Carter gallops on for a good 250 more pages, tracing the battles over Keynesianism as they evolved through the New Deal, McCarthyism and the 2008 financial crisis. Carter captures the ideological warfare between luminary intellectuals like James K. Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger and even extends to the monumental 2015 National Book Critics Circle finalist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century .

We spoke to Thomas Piketty quite recently.

Carter begins his book with Keynes in midlife, as he’s falling in love with the Russian ballerina who became his wife, a critical turning point that informed his philosophy—and illustrates Keynes as a tangle of paradox. He was a pacifist who advocated for war. He was married to a woman but had serious amorous relationships with men. He’s so interesting, and was, at that time, quite radical. People are still debating his ideas, he was really ahead of his time.

Clearly Keynes is comfortable with contradiction and his ideas are often counterintuitive—the notion, as Paul Krugman put it: “Your income is my expense and my income is your expense.” Spending more to get out of a financial depression continues to be debated. Back to your question about intellectual biography, Carter’s book illustrates that ideas originate in lived experience, and he illuminates Keynes’s experience and shows how it took root.

One may think of Keynes as an economist, but Keynesianism is much more than that—he has views on war, art, culture and a vision of fairness. Keynes had a dream of a fairer and more fulfilling life for all. Carter’s writing about economic theory is so lucid, so colourful, and such a pleasant surprise for me.

The afterlife of Keynesian thinking is interesting, how it continues to thread through contemporary economics .

Indeed, that is right. We can see the drama playing out today in America with the intense battles over President Joe Biden’s Covid stimulus and relief bill. Carter seems to suggest that Keynes would have been frustrated by growing inequality and that his radical vision withered, leaving us with the question of whether good ideas can triumph on their own. The question Carter poses was: did Keynes believe that good ideas would triumph on their own? One comes away from this book thinking that Keynesianism is not a school of thought as much as a spirit of radical optimism.

And how about the Bloomsbury Group? I’m sorry, I’ll always be interested in this. Does it goes into salacious detail?

Perhaps not salacious but absolutely interesting to read about. At Cambridge Lytton Strachey was impressed by Keynes’s “active brain” and recruited him to the group although he was just a freshman. Keynes and Strachey were lovers but it was a rivalrous friendship, and Keynes made a habit of poaching Strachey’s lovers. He wasn’t an artist, as others were in Bloomsbury; Keynes expressed feelings of inferiority and Strachey and Clive Bell sneered at his aesthetic judgement.

Keynes’s time with the Bloomsbury set, Carter argues, was a formative experience in which Keynes became skeptical of rules of conduct and edicts from the ruling elite and developed political sympathies and keen interest in the Liberal Party. His relations with the Bloomsbury crowd seemed to provide him with a keen understanding of the post- World War One world.

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Let’s talk about the Payne book next. This is The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, which is third on our shortlist for the 2021 title of best biography. It’s the result of three decades of research by Les Payne and his daughter Tamara, who completed it after his death. It’s won the National Book Award, and was one of the New York Times’s ‘notable books’ of last year. So a landmark piece of work.

Landmark indeed, and brave. It follows Malcolm Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2012 and The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm which was published in 1965 to great acclaim.

The Payne biography is a rebuke to those who insist that if a subject has won the attention of one biographer, it is off the market to others. New evidence can be unearthed, existing evidence can be challenged or lead to other inquiries. Perspective, structure, and expression matter. Payne has elevated oral history and narrative to an art form and excavates Malcolm X’s origin story, from his birth as Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska to his assassination in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City’s Washington Heights. Payne captures the winding arc of Malcom’s life through the death of his father—which Malcolm believed to be nefarious, and Payne disproves—and the confinement of his mother in a psychiatric hospital. As a troubled adolescent, he landed in prison while his brothers, who Payne interviewed, found their way to the Nation of Islam. Malcolm joined them, and transformed into an evangelist for Black self-respect and a fierce critic of white America.

“The Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive”

It is remarkable that the Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive through thousands of eyewitness reports and personal documents. They went way beyond the declassified FBI files and secondhand stories of the legend of Malcolm’s transformation. Payne may have drawn on his journalistic skills to build this biography on firsthand accounts and oral history, but he also worked as a historian to contextualize these contradicting accounts and synthesize them into an extraordinary narrative.

Payne writes the 20th-century American history of the Nation of Islam and situates Malcom in these ideological battles— through his parents, who adhered to Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of self-reliance, Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism; through activist intellectuals like W E B Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. Payne explains Malcolm X’s route to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, including his break from them which led to his assassination. Payne shows his experience as an investigative reporter, especially regarding the recovery of details involving the plot to kill Malcolm.

This book is often discussed as a counterpoint to that explosive biography by Marable, but it offers its own revelations. The current leader of the Nation of Islam admits in an interview that he might have been complicit in the murder, for one.

Indeed. Payne confirms that the assassination order came directly from Muhammad’s headquarters in Chicago to the gunmen. We also learn that Malcolm, on the direction of Elijah Muhammad, met with Ku Klux Klan leaders in 1961 about a land deal. It turned out that the Klansmen were really set on the assassination of Martin Luther King, which led to Malcolm’s break with the Nation of Islam.

And this must be one of the benefits of working on something for so long. Let’s turn to the next book on our 2021 shortlist of the best biographies. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. I’m excited about this book, but I suppose that’s because I know a lot about Sylvia Plath already. Her life is relatively well-trodden ground, not only thanks to previous biographies but the writing of Plath herself. Is there room for a new Plath biography? What can this book add?

Personally, I share your enthusiasm about all matters Plath. As a critic, let me say that Clark not only unearths new evidence about Plath’s life but also brings a fresh, subtle and nuanced critical perspective to her work. Plath is mythologised and pathologised; she has come to be seen as an icon or a victim, a “high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death,” as Clark writes. What Clark does here is recover Sylvia Plath as an aesthetically accomplished, important poet.

Clark discovered letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist, delved into the Plath family history (including her father’s FBI file and grandmother’s institutionalization), found a portion of Plath’s last novel, and used her unpublished diaries and creative work as well as police, hospital and court records. She also drew from an archive that opened in 2020 which contained scores of interviews with Plath’s contemporaries in the 1970s for an uncompleted biography.

From the start, Clark is clear in her intention to reposition Plath as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. I was skeptical initially, because the biography weighs in at 1118 pages. Well, 937 pages without notes.

But after the prologue, I was hooked. Clark nestles details so deftly in flowing narrative prose and successfully positions Plath in the era. It’s literally a heavy book, but Clark writes with a light touch, evoking Plath’s psychological and poetic landscape as well as her social milieu. Well known now as the wife of Ted Hughes, Plath emerges so clearly in her other relationships. Clark vivifies Plath not only as a mother, but also a daughter who was just eight years old when her father died, leaving her to be raised by her single mother.

Plath grew up at a harrowing and difficult time for German immigrants in America, during and before the Second World War . Plath’s father Otto was repeatedly investigated and eventually detained by the FBI but, as Clark shows, he renounced his German citizenship in 1926 and watched Hitler’s rise with trepidation.

It seems unfair that he’s likened to a Nazi soldier in her famous poem ‘Daddy’, then?

‘Daddy’ runs through the biography and Clark tracks interpretations and it’s almost as if those reveal more about the perceiver than the poem. For some, ‘Daddy’ is a rallying cry for feminists, others believe it reflects Plath’s youth and others damn it for appropriating the Holocaust . Clark makes clear that Plath’s father was a committed pacifist. In addition to his German heritage, Clark suggests that as a professor and scientist, he embodied patriarchal authority and a kind of imperial aggression just as resentment of her husband was boiling. There’s also an argument that the poem is based on an entirely different person, her friend’s father who abandoned his family to join the fascist Blackshirts.

Clark reveals Plath wrestling with ‘Daddy’ in successive drafts, with one reading like an elegy, and others more resilient and forgiving. The poem’s placement in Ariel , published posthumously and out of her control, possibly shifted its meaning.

I could talk about ‘Daddy’ all day but would much rather read about it in Clark’s biography! Clark argues that Plath’s aesthetic impulse was more surrealist than confessional and that ‘Daddy’ illustrated that Plath had her finger on the pulse of contemporary poetry.

The thing I find most interesting about Plath is the way she embodies that pressure-cooker atmosphere of girlhood and early womanhood—the twin pressures to be feminine, and yet to strive intellectually. They are not quite opposites, but one interferes with the action of the other. I think that’s why Plath became a cultural phenomenon, a figurehead for troubled young women.

As a reader, I could hear Plath’s mother preaching: “excel, but conform.” While Sylvia Plath is known for her death, Clark shows how hard she worked, how many poems she sent out before she found success. Clark reads Plath’s juvenile short stories and poetry really seriously, and asks questions: how did she get to be who she was? Clark recognizes Plath’s incredible ambition and dedication to her work.

So does Clark succeed in her stated aim of repositioning Plath as one of the most important writers of the 20th century?

Some of the social pressures that Plath was contending with will be common to those faced by some of the women in the final book on our list of the best biographies of 2021. This is The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s , by Maggie Doherty. It’s a group biography, and there’s an excerpt available on the New York Times website for those who want to try before they buy.

First, that sly, smart title. Radcliffe College President Mary Bunting had the brilliant idea to support “intellectually displaced women.” By that, she meant women whose ambitions as artists and intellectuals had been thwarted by gender expectations and the demands of domesticity, marriage and motherhood. The College’s Institute for Independent Study would provide hefty stipends, private offices and its resources to a group of women who had “either a doctorate or its equivalent” in creative achievement. Bunting described it as her “messy experiment.”

In The Equivalents , Maggie Doherty captures that glorious mess. She focuses on five women artists: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, sculptor Marianna Pineda, painter Barbara Swann from the East Coast and fiction writer Tillie Olsen, mother of four from San Francisco who had been a community organizer and aspired to write the great proletarian novel. None of them had PhDs; they nicknamed themselves ‘the Equivalents’.

The Equivalents is magnificent social history, a collective snapshot of an overlooked moment in American feminism; we meet these women crossing the bridge between first and second wave feminism. The institute provided them with the rooms of their own to which Virginia Woolf had aspired, but it turned out they needed more of E M Forster’s edict to “only connect.”

With insight and subtlety, Doherty explains the alchemy of solitude and community as “ideal conditions for artistic growth.” They read one another’s work and collaborated on projects. The deep creative bond between the charismatic poets—Sexton and Kumin—provides a narrative backbone. Their friendships revealed the importance of the collective, and how they really did give and draw strength from one another. The idea of five women artists being freed—receiving money and office space and affiliation from Radcliffe was really radical and groundbreaking.

Olsen was, in many ways, the outlier of the group. In a crowd of upper-class Boston and New England women, Olsen was from the West Coast, not at all part of the eastern intelligentsia. While others used stipends to pay for nannies and domestic help, Olsen often had to borrow money. She was sort of a Marxist and emphasized that women—and all people—could be creative and fulfil their promise.

How refreshing. It’s tiring to constantly see histories or biographies in which women apparently have no inner lives—or develop only in relation to, or thanks to, men. A group biography which examines not only the intellectual concerns of women, but their interaction with one another, feels an important corrective.

A very important corrective.

I wonder if we should institute some form of the Bechdel test for books. Do you know that term? To pass the test, a film simply has to contain a scene in which women talk to each other about something, anything, except a man.

I suspect that the women of The Equivalents found Radcliffe a turning point where they could do that. But, knowing that Betty Friedan was an early visitor, they also talked about equity – and the “problem that had no name.” This was a space where a woman could discover that the wandering, absent husband, or the imperious male colleague was not her problem alone. As Doherty writes, these shared confidences could lead a woman to realize that “there was nothing wrong with her, but there might be something wrong with the world.”

I would just raise the ante on the Bechdel test and suggest that a book must contain a scene in which mothers talk to one another about anything other than their children!

Doherty captures so well the intensity and vicissitudes of these relationships. One can feel moments when Sexton’s needs are too much for Kumin, for instance. Then there’s the electricity of collaboration between mediums, for instance Swann’s artwork appears on the poets’ book covers. The Equivalents arrived as “well-behaved women” and may not have thought of themselves as feminists, but their determined efforts at self-expression radiated out into the world and laid the groundwork for revolution. In closing her sublime book, Doherty relates that when Bunting was asked why her “messy experiment” was so successful, she modestly responded: “We spoke to their condition.”

Doherty closes her marvellous book with a call to arms: “Women today live under new conditions. It is time for another messy experiment and for a new group of women to speak.”

March 19, 2021

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is a co-author of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley; His Battle for Chicago and the Nation with Adam Cohen, with whom she also cofounded The National Book Review. She has chaired four Pulitzer Prize juries, served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, and presided over the Harold Washington Literary Award selection committee three times. Former Time magazine correspondent in New York and Chicago and long-time literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, she is working on a biography of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras for Liveright/W.W. Norton.

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Book News & Features

October book-ahead: what we're excited to read next month.

Meghan Collins Sullivan

October has plans to bring us some new works from established authors — and some attention-grabbing books from new ones, proving to be packed full of great reads. Here are some of the books we're excited about that are hitting shelves in October.

I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

"At first I feared I'd picked up I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness for the wrong reasons — namely, loving Claire Vaye Watkins ' dystopian near-future in Gold Fame Citrus when this is more contemporary (if surreal!) autofiction," says our critic Natalie Zutter. "But Watkins exposes just how dystopian modern motherhood is, and this novel winds up being a triumphant bookend to her viral essay 'On Pandering.'"

Oh William!

Critic Heller McAlpin says: "Some sequels are irresistible — particularly those with great characters like Elizabeth Strout 's Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. Oh William! is Strout's third novel about Lucy, who's overcome an egregiously deprived childhood to become a successful writer. The titular William — who elicits concern and exasperation in equal measure — is Lucy's first husband, the father of her children, with whom she's remained friendly over the years. Not long after losing her second husband, Lucy is pulled in to help William, who's going through a rough patch of his own. She is repeatedly reminded that everyone is a mystery we can't fully understand."

Our critic Kristen Martin writes: "In 2016, Anne Elizabeth Moore won a "free" bungalow in Detroit's Banglatown from an arts organization that claimed it had been abandoned for years. Told in a series of darkly comic vignettes, Gentrifier grapples with life as a queer white woman in a Bangladeshi neighborhood in a Black city "shaped" by "corporate greed," where a quarter of residents lose their homes to property tax foreclosure, and where municipal services cannot be relied upon to function. While Gentrifier is an investigation of the costs—monetary, psychological, ethical—of Moore's free house, it's also an ode to community and neighbors, especially the girls on her street."

Dear Memory

According to critic Thúy Đinh, Victoria Chang 's Dear Memory represents a groundbreaking work blending mementos, epistolary form, poetry, and literary criticism to pose a profound question, "Can memory be/unhoused, or is it/ the form in which/everything is held?" She says Chang's innovative process showing us how the poet's deconstructing effort to "put language at risk," "write into and toward ambiguity," and expose the "homicidal tendency" of memory, in fact embodies ways of shaping narrative out of erasure, or "making birds out of silence."

I'll Take Your Questions Now

"The image of a White House press secretary standing at a lectern being peppered with questions from the reporters is a standard trope in pop culture," says NPR White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe. "The press secretary is usually the one of the most visible officials in the White House — a stand-in for the president. But, what happens when that mouthpiece is silent? Stephanie Grisham , a former top spokesperson for then President Trump, notoriously never publicly briefed the press corps. Now that she's breaking her silence with a book, the political world is waiting to see what the estranged Trump insider has to say."

1-16 of 810 results

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

Entrances and Exits

Out of the Shadows: My Life Inside the Wild World of Hunter Biden

Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest

Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice

Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery

Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

Just Add Water: My Swimming Life

Quilting Through Life: Patterns and Prose for Every Stage of Life (Spiral Bound to Lay Flat)

I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: (But I'm Going to Anyway)

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder

Playing from the Rough: A Personal Journey through America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses

Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve

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17 New Books to Watch For in October

New biographies shed light on Malcolm X, Sylvia Plath and the Beatles, plus the latest fiction from Tana French, Martin Amis, Sayaka Murata and more.

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By Joumana Khatib

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork , by Reeves Wiedeman (Little, Brown, Oct. 20)

After it was founded in 2010, WeWork seemed poised to change work culture around the world, attracting interest from high-profile investors and expanding at a breakneck pace. The company’s flaws have been well-reported, and ultimately, it’s a story of 21st-century boom and bust. Wiedeman, a contributing editor at New York magazine, has written a satisfying ticktock of the company’s rapid rise and crash, culminating in its disastrous I.P.O. in 2019 and Neumann’s ouster.

[ Read our review. ]

Black Sun , by Rebecca Roanhorse (Gallery/Saga Press, Oct. 13)

Roanhorse, an Indigenous author and the winner of Hugo and Nebula awards, often weaves Navajo elements into her writing. In “Black Sun,” the first book in a projected trilogy, she draws on pre-Columbian civilizations to tell an epic story, centering on a mysterious young man, Serapio, who sets out to avenge a crime.

The Cold Millions , by Jess Walter (Harper, Oct. 27)

Set in 1900s Spokane, this novel follows two orphaned brothers and a series of larger-than-life characters (think union organizers, madams and vaudeville performers), and unfolds against a decade of class tensions and free-speech protests.

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X , by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright, Oct. 20)

This biography is 30 years in the making: Les Payne , a pioneering Black journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, died in 2018, leaving his daughter Tamara to finish the manuscript. It fills in some of the gaps of Malcolm X’s autobiography, rounding out the years of his childhood and adolescence and exploring how his incarceration and conversion shaped his views. The book's most compelling moments put readers in the room with Malcolm X at critical junctures, including the moments before his assassination. Last week, it was named to the National Book Awards longlist for nonfiction.

[ Read our review . ]

Earthlings , by Sayaka Murata. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. (Grove Press, Oct. 6)

Growing up, Natsuki feels deeply out of place, finding relief only after her cousin Yuu tells her he’s convinced he’s an alien. This novel shares themes with Murata’s acclaimed English-language debut , “ Convenience Store Woman ”: a deadpan, detached narrative style, a woman caught between her own feelings of being an outsider and society’s pressure to conform.

Inside Story , by Martin Amis (Knopf, Oct. 27)

This book is billed as a novel, but it draws heavily on Amis’s own life and its principal figures: his father, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, Iris Murdoch and others. The death in 2011 of his best friend, the journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens, is at the book’s emotional core, as Amis explores aging, grief and more.

Leave the World Behind , by Rumaan Alam (Ecco, Oct. 6)

Amanda, Clay and their children are a middle-class, white Brooklyn family, entranced by a vacation rental home on Long Island that promises near-total seclusion. But when a catastrophe strikes, the arrival of the home’s owners is a shock — not least because they’re wealthy and Black. Alam’s third book, this novel is set for a film adaptation and was longlisted for the National Book Award .

Let Love Rule , by Lenny Kravitz with David Ritz (Henry Holt, Oct. 6)

A far-ranging memoir looks back at Kravitz’s coming-of-age, creative career and personal life. His story derives its power from his contradictions, he writes: “Black and white. Jewish and Christian. The Jackson 5 and Led Zeppelin. I accepted my Gemini soul. I owned it. I adored it. Yins and yangs mingled in various parts of my heart and mind, giving me balance and fueling my curiosity and comfort.” Ritz is a prolific ghostwriter and biographer who has worked with musicians like Ray Charles, B.B. King and Janet Jackson.

Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck , by William Souder (Norton, Oct. 13)

A comprehensive new biography of America’s best-known novelist of the Great Depression arrives at a timely moment. Though Steinbeck’s books remain his most significant literary output, Souder also dives into Steinbeck’s life as a journalist, including overseas postings during World War II and the Vietnam War, and how they shaped his worldview. And he doesn’t shy away from Steinbeck’s vices — philandering, heavy drinking — along with the feelings of inferiority that haunted him throughout his career.

Memorial , by Bryan Washington (Riverhead, Oct. 27)

Benson and Mike are a couple at an impasse, and their future is murky at best. Mike leaves for Japan to care for his terminally ill father just as his mother arrives for a visit, leaving her and Ben, who is Black, to become uneasy roommates. Race, sexuality and class all commingle against the backdrop of Houston’s Third Ward.

[ Read our profile of Washington . ]

Missionaries , by Phil Klay (Penguin Press, Oct. 6)

Klay’s debut story collection, “ Redeployment ,” about the experiences of Americans fighting overseas, was one of the Book Review’s 10 best books of 2014 . Now, he returns with his first novel, set in Colombia amid its long and bloody civil conflict. Klay, a Marine veteran, explores in painstaking detail how people respond in extremis, while respecting that some experiences can’t be fully expressed.

150 Glimpses of the Beatles , by Craig Brown (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 13)

The author of the highly entertaining “ Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret ” (the princess makes an appearance in these pages, too) eschews a linear narrative in favor of correspondence, imagined outcomes that never came to pass and cascades of interviews to convey the singular cultural importance of the Beatles. This is the biography for anyone who’s wondered which Beatle Fran Lebowitz liked best. (Ringo Starr — “the contrarian position,” she says.)

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath , by Heather Clark (Knopf, Oct. 20)

This vast new biography sets out to recover Plath from her melodramatic legacy. Her life story — from her institutionalizations to her tempestuous marriage to Ted Hughes — has often been reduced to that of a depressive, literary femme fatale, which Clark believes ignores the poet’s true genius. Her book draws on all of Plath’s surviving letters and incorporates part of an unfinished novel, “Falcon Yard.” Plath’s poem “Stings” is a fitting epigraph for the project: “They thought death was worth it, but I / Have a self to recover, a queen.”

The Searcher , by Tana French (Viking, Oct. 6)

A new novel by French, whose books are “superb,” according to our critic Janet Maslin , is always an event. Cal Hooper has left behind his job as a Chicago cop, settling in rural Ireland in the wake of an ugly separation from his wife. But he’s unnerved by his new surroundings, and after he begins investigating a disappearance, some dark secrets come to light.

[ Read our profile of French . | Read our review . ]

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World , Fareed Zakaria (Norton, Oct. 6)

The CNN host moves beyond current questions (When will a vaccine be ready? How might it change things?) and looks at the longer-term economic, medical and biological effects of the coronavirus. Despite the grim circumstances, he finds reason for some optimism: “This ugly pandemic has created the possibility for change and reform,” he writes. “It has opened up a path to a new world.”

War: How Conflict Shaped Us , by Margaret MacMillan (Random House, Oct. 6)

In MacMillan’s view, war is not an aberration — it’s a fundamental element of human nature. The author, a Canadian historian known for her scholarship about the Treaty of Versailles and British imperialism, surveys war’s far-ranging effects over the centuries, showing how it has time and again altered human history and influenced everything from a culture’s artistic output to the values it exalts.

The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom , by H. W. Brands (Doubleday, Oct. 6)

A fascinating study of two Americans who opposed slavery, but by different means. John Brown favored violence and direct action, and paid with his life. Abraham Lincoln supported the Constitution and political action, but in the end he also paid with his life.

[ R ead our review . ]

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Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

Don DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here are his essential books .

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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A.K. Smiley Public Library Blog

Serving the City of Redlands, California since 1894

June is LGBTQ+ Pride Month “Somebody, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.” — James Baldwin, "Giovanni’s Room"

Consider this variety of intriguing new biographies

May 5, 2024 By Nancy McGee

Have you read any biographies recently? They can provide some very interesting reading. Here is a sampling of some of Smiley Library’s titles and their authors currently in our New Book section.

“ American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton ,” Victoria Houseman

“ My Name is Barbra ,” Barbra Streisand

“ John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community ,” Raymond Arsenault

“ A Dangerous Country: An American Elegy ,” Ron Kovic

“ Madonna: A Rebel Life ,” Mary Gabriel

“ Carson McCullers: A Life ,” Mary V. Dearborn

“ The Making of a Leader: The Formative Years of George C. Marshall ,” Josiah Bunting, III

“ The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence ,” David Waldstreicher

“ My Effin’ Life ,” Geddy Lee with Daniel Richler

Be on the lookout for the following new biographies, and others, coming in soon.

“ You Never Know: A Memoir ,” Tom Selleck with Ellis Henican

“ The Backyard Bird Chronicles ,” Amy Tan

“ Ghost Town Living: Lessons from Chasing an Impractical Dream ,” Brent Underwood

“ Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent ,” Judi Dench with Brendan O’Hea

“ Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery ,” Joseph McGill, Jr. and Herb Frazier

“ On Location: Lessons Learned from my Life on Set with the Sopranos and in the Film Industry ,” Mark Kamine

“ The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of Our Solar System ,” Dante S. Lauretta

Make sure and also visit our extensive biography section downstairs for more selections that may be of interest to you.