Biography

2010

Scalia v. The World

Michael O'Donnell : Supreme Court

Who is the purest archetype of the conservative legal movement, Antonin Scalia or John Roberts?
Ghostly Demarcations

Alice Kaplan

The novelist Dominique Fernandez struggles to understand his father's years as a Nazi collaborator.
Misterioso

David Yaffe : Jazz

Thelonious Monk was a more nuanced figure than the flimsy characterization of a way-out jazz cat could ever convey.

The Misunderstood Robber Baron

Steve Fraser : History

T.J. Stiles's The First Tycoon is a gilded portrait of the robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Mahler's Body

David Schiff : Music

Gustav Mahler's embrace of Germanness and battles with anti-Semitism.
Not Easy Being Greene

Michelle Orange : Letters

A Life in Letters as chronicled by the determinedly elusive Graham Greene.
This Small Extravagance

James Longenbach : Theater

Writing a biography of the mind of Shakespeare is a challenge that requires the ingenuity of an artist.
An Alienation Artist

Alexander Provan : Literary Criticism

Unraveling the Kafkaesque mystique of Franz Kafka.
In His League

Scott Sherman

An affectionate and absorbing oral history raises questions of whether George Plimpton's amiable exterior concealed a man without qualities.

That Girl

Rick Perlstein : History

Was Patty Hearst really a rebel in search of a cause?
Her Nature Was Future

Ange Mlinko : Poetry

The intimate friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson takes wing in two new books.
Naipaul's Darkness

Scott Sherman

Biographer Patrick French offers a vivid, sometimes enthralling portrait of a deeply enigmatic writer.
Walter Benjamin Forever

Noah Isenberg : Philosophy

Following the quirky, revolutionary life path of one of the most celebrated twentieth-century intellectuals.
A Hungry Mind

Paula Findlen : Non-Fiction

Ingrid Rowland's Giordano Bruno rediscovers the Renaissance philosopher and heretic.
An Unlikely King

Bernard Avishai : Middle East

An authoritative new biography of Jordan's King Hussein offers an absorbing diplomatic history of the Middle East.
The James Gang

Brenda Wineapple : Books, Literature, & Ideas

In Henry James and his family, biographers find a fascinating story of dynastic melodrama.
Green Days

Anson Rabinbach : Foreign Leaders & Political Figures

The biography of Joschka Fischer tells the story of postwar Germany.