Biography Recent Picks

May 2010

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Burying the bones : Pearl Buck in China, Hilary Spurling.
"Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck’s father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion – a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family’s budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young. Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author(her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West. " (Amazon.co,uk)

Must you go? : my life with Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser.
"The subtitle of this wonderful memoir declares its contents: this is 'my life with Harold Pinter', not Lady Antonia Fraser's complete life, and certainly not his. In essence, it is a love story and as with many love stories, the beginning and the end, the first light and the twilight, are dealt with more fully than the high noon in between. The result is a marvellously insightful testimony to modern literature's most celebrated marriage, between the greatest playwright of the age and a beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer. Must You Go? is based partly on Antonia Fraser's own diaries, which she has kept since October 1968 when she suffered from withdrawal symptoms after finishing her first historical biography, Mary Queen of Scots. Antonia Fraser has also used her own recollections, both immediate reactions (she always writes her Diary the next morning, unless otherwise noted) and memories. She has quoted Pinter where he told her things about his past, once again noting the source, and has occasionally quoted his friends talking to her on the same subject. Intriguingly her Diaries always pay special attention to any green shoots where Pinter's writing is concerned, perhaps a consequence of a biographer living with a creative artist and observing the process first hand. Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser lived together from August 1975 until his death thirty-three years later on Christmas Eve 2008. 'O! call back yesterday, bid time return,' cries one of his courtiers to Richard II. This is Antonia Fraser's uniquely compelling way of doing so." (Amazon)

Lunch in Paris, Elizabeth Bard.
"In this pleasant memoir about learning to live and eat à la française, an American journalist married to a Frenchman inspires lessons in culinary détente. Bard was working as a journalist in London and possessed of the wonderful puppy-dog enthusiasm of young Americans when she first met her husband-to-be, Gwendal, a computer engineer from Brittany. Soon he had the foresight to put her name on the gas bill of his Parisian apartment in the 10th arrondissement, and they were destined to marry—and cook together. Her memoir is really a celebration of the culinary season as it unfolded in their young lives together: recipes for seduction (onion and bacon); getting serious over andouillette; learning to buy what's fresh at the Parisian markets (four and a half pounds of figs); surviving a long, cold winter in an unheated apartment; and warming up their visiting parents over profiteroles. Bard throws in some American recipes that feel like home, such as noodle pudding, and comforting soups for a winter's grieving over the death of the father-in-law. Bard carefully observes the eating habits of her impossibly slender mother-in-law for tips to staying slim (lots of water and no snacking). Bard keeps an eye to healthful ingredients (Three Fabulous Solo Lunches), and, as a Jewish New Yorker, even prepares a Passover seder in Paris, in this work that manages to be both sensuous and informative. (Feb.) " Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We two : Victoria and Albert, rulers, partners, rivals, Gillian Gill.
"Gillian Gill offers a revolutionary portrait of a queen and her prince, revealing at once both an intimate but far-from-idyllic relationship that succeeded against all odds as the strong, feisty queen and the brilliant, fragile prince worked together to build a family based on support, trust, and fidelity ." (Book jacket)

The girl on the wall : one life's rich tapestry, Jean Baggott.
"Jean Baggott is 'the girl on the wall' - a 1948 photograph taken of her when she was eleven - whose life was never going to be remarkable and the pinnacle of whose achievements would come from being a wife and a mother. Almost 60 years later, with her children gone, dealing with the loss of the love of her life, Jean began the education denied to her as a girl. Inspired by ceilings of Lincolnshire's Burghley House and by the History degree she had begun, Jean began to stitch a tapestry which looked back at her life and the changing world around her. It took sixteen months to complete. The tapestry consists of over 70 intersecting circles, each telling some aspect of her life. Some represent extraordinary events such as the moon landings or world historical news stories like the Cuban Missile Crisis; some circles comment on famous people and places she remembers, others about the music she loves - Pink Floyd - and the games she played as a child, and growing up during the second world war with her brothers. Each chapter of "The Girl on the Wall" features a circle from the tapestry and Jean's accompanying narrative, exploring the circle and the memories it evokes. It reveals an ordinary life in extraordinary detail. The result is a truly unique, touching portrait of a seemingly average British woman's life. To stand back and look at the tapestry is to be struck by the richness of one human journey - from 1940 to the present day. The girl on the wall would be proud. The book includes a full-colour pull-out of Jean's tapestry inside the back cover." (Amazon)

Splendour & squalor : the disgrace and disintegration of three aristocratic dynasties, Marcus Scriven.
"From stunning stately homes to the prisons of wartime Britain; from the House of Lords to Edwardian asylums; from the Ritz and the Dorchester to East End pubs, "Splendour and Squalor" tells the stories of four of Britain's most illustrious aristocratic dynasties and of the black sheep who brought them down. They kept monkeys in West End hotels, and rent-boys in Deauville and Kensington. They spiced up life in pre-war Britain by patronizing illegal gaming clubs and staging elaborate five-in-a-bed sex in stately homes. They used firearms with convincing disregard for their own and others' safety and drove their Rollses and Bentleys with apparently suicidal intent. They acquired yachts and helicopters as they shipped the family silver to California and disposed of Old Masters at auction. They married frequently and unsatisfactorily, humiliating their wives and always withholding from them dynastic secrets of schizophrenia and insanity. Lacking the energy and appetite to do so, they rarely developed their talents. Carpeting their lives with deceit, they sought consolation in ferocious expenditure, funding narcotic and alcohol-fueled blow-outs. They ignored the advice of sane relations, shrugged off trustees, and experimented with burglary, shop-lifting, vagrancy and fraud. Their primary, possibly sole, accomplishment was to drag down their families with them. They were the black sheep of aristocracy and this." (Amazon)

Claiming ground, Laura Bell.
"In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots." (BOOK JACKET).

Nancy Cunard : heiress, muse, political idealist, Lois Gordon.
"Lois Gordon's biography tells the story of a writer, activist, and cultural icon who embodied the dazzling energy and tumultuous spirit of her age, and whom William Carlos Williams once called "one of the major phenomena of history."" "Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) led a life that surpasses Hollywood fantasy. The only child of an English baronet (and heir to the Cunard shipping fortune) and an American beauty, Cunard abandoned the world of a celebrated socialite and Jazz Age icon to pursue a lifelong battle against social injustice as a wartime journalist, humanitarian aid worker, and civil rights champion." "Cunard fought fascism on the battlefields of Spain and reported firsthand on the atrocities of the French concentration camps. Intelligent and beautiful, she romanced the great writers of her era, including three Nobel Prize winners, and was the inspiration for characters in the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, and Ernest Hemingway, among others." (BOOK JACKET).

Outside of a dog : a bibliomemoir, Rick Gekoski.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. Groucho Marx Outside of a Dog is the captivating account of twenty-five books drawn from the fields of literature, psychology and philosophy, and a memoir of a reading self. Tracing the formative role books have played in his life, Rick Gekoski trains the same ironic and analytic eye on these books and their authors as he does on himself. The result is unique: a sustained, witty book dedicated to the proposition that we are what we read. Outside of A Dog might be described as an intellectual bibliomemoir, except that the author regards the noun ‘intellectual’ as a term of abuse. Gekoski’s twenty-five include: Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg; Magnus Hirschfeld Sexual Anomalies and Perversions; Allen Ginsberg, Howl; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Descartes, Meditations; David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding; W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems; F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy; Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; R.D. Laing, The Divided Self; Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; A.S. Neill, Summerhill; Roald Dahl, Matilda; Alice Miller, Pictures of a Childhood; A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic; Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy; Peter Wright, Spycatcher; and Rick Gekoski, Staying Up." (Amazon.co.uk)

In Susan Boyle : dreams can come true, Alice Montgomery.
"From that moment when Susan Boyle burst onto our screens on Britain’s Got Talent, she has became an unexpected phenomenon, and has gone on to become the creator of the fastest selling female debut album of all time – in the UK and worldwide – hitting the number one spot in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland. Susan's own personal dream has finally come true, but the phenomenal success story doesn't end here - Susan has arrived and she's here to stay. This book will be the first to tell the full story of Susan’s incredible journey from rags to riches, from West Lothian to Times Square. Ever since her mesmerising, historic performance on Britain’s Got Talent, Susan has captured the heart of millions. Hers is a very modern fairytale that is at once uplifting and compelling. Bestselling biographer Alice Montgomery charts her meteoric rise from humble beginnings to global superstardom, exploring the relationships, events and people that have played a role in her astonishing story - a 21st century fairytale that became reality." (Amazon.co.uk)

Mark Twain : man in white : the grand adventure of his final years, Michael Shelden.
"Mark Twain: Man in White brings the legendary author's twilight years vividly to life, offering surprising insights, including an intimate, tender look at his family life. Includes rare and never-published Twain photos, delightful anecdotes, and memorable quotes, including numerous recovered Twain." (BOOK JACKET)

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