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 Rarely does a biographer capture the sense of being in a different time and mindset to the extent that readers feel they are reliving events through the eyes of the biographer’s subject. This is the skill of Dan Vogel—after twenty-five years of researching Joseph Smith’s life and publishing on such related issues as Seekerism, the Book of Mormon, views of Smith’s contemporaries about Indian origins, and the existing documents pertaining to Smith family experiences.

Vogel weaves together strands of evidence into a complete fabric including, among other aspects of Smith’s environment, the content of his daily dictation of scriputre and revelation—all contributing to a nearly complete view of what occurred on any given day in Smith’s lfie. The result is as much intellectual history as traditional biography. Readers will feel engaged in the dramatic, formative events in the prophet’s life against a backdrop of theology, local and national politics, Smith family dynamics, organizational issues, and interpersonal relations. One can form a mental picture, and many will find themselves carrying on an internal dialogue about the issues raised.

Vogel addresses the following broad themes:
1. The home that Joseph Smith was raised in was religiously divided. His mother’s family was orthodox and partly mystical; his father’s family tended toward rationalism and skepticism. Joseph’s maternal grandfather published an account of seeing a heavenly light and hearing Jesus’ voice. Joseph’s paternal grandfather promoted Thomas Paine’s skeptical critique of the Bible, The Age of Reason.

2. When Andrew Jackson was elected U.S. president in 1828, it was a key transitional period in American history. Jackson was a Mason and an advocate of secularism, which alarmed evangelical Protestants.

3. The Smith family experienced a series of financial setbacks and lost their farm in 1825. Joseph felt disinherited and saw no way of escape—no chance for his family to regain its former standing in the community.

4. Joseph found solace in religion. In the early 1820s, he had a powerful conversion experience and felt that Jesus had forgiven him of his sins. This inspired him to share the gospel message with others, particularly with his own family. About the same time, Smith found a talent for preaching and delivered “passable” Methodist sermons at a nearby revival.

5. Over time, Joseph became aware that people trusted him and that he could be an influence for good or ill, that even through nefarious means, God worked through him when his heart was right. He realized this when he led groups in search of Spanish treasure in New York and Pennsylvania. Although no treasure was found, the men sincerely believed that Smith had a spiritual gift and could see where casks of gold were hidden in the earth. This training ground in spiritual leadership was invaluable because the prophet learned how to create an environment for belief—one in which people could exercise faith and be converted to Christ through the sensible influence of the Spirit, all prior to the overarching work of restoring primitive Christianity.

A quintessentially American saga, the life of Joseph Smith offers believers and non-believers alike an epic narrative that inhabits both grounded history and a heavenly sphere of action. Zachary McLeod Hutchins renders Smith’s early life as a poetic narrative in two parts. The first introduces a very human Joseph and his youthful encounter with demonic powers seeking to prevent any communication with heaven. Following his First Vision, the teenaged prophet is charged by the angel Moroni to retrieve and translate a sacred record inscribed on gold plates. The second part picks up the story four years later, as Joseph marries Emma Hale and undertakes the plates’ translation. Hutchins supplies a fictionalized excerpt from that translation, The Book of Lehi, and details Joseph’s efforts to organize his growing band of followers, concluding on a note of contentment at odds with the tumultuous times to come in Smith’s final years. An innovative perspective on Smith’s early exploits, Joseph: An Epic reinterprets the origin story of a religious seeker and the faith he created.

It is said that Josh Gibson is the only man ever to have hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. Some claim he hit as many as seventy-five home runs in a season. All agreed he was a frightening hitter to face.  What Satchel Paige was to pitching in the Negro leagues, Gibson was to hitting: their greatest star, biggest gate attraction, and most important symbol.
 
Though Gibson is best remembered as "the black Babe Ruth," Ruth became a beloved symbol of the national pastime, while Gibson lived a life veiled in the darkness that came both from the shadow world of the Negro leagues and from within his own tortured soul.
 
Mark Ribowsky, the widely acclaimed biographer of Satchel Paige, pulls no punches in his portrait of this magnificent, troubled athlete. This is the most complete, thorough, and authoritative account of the life of black ball's greatest hitter, and one of its most important stars.

A gifted and charismatic entertainer, Josh White (1914-1969) was a blues star of the 1930s, a cabaret star of the 1940s, and a folk star of the 1950s and the 1960s. In 1963, a Billboard magazine poll ranked him America's third most popular male folksinger, surpassed only by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, and ahead of Bob Dylan. White brought American folk and blues to audiences around the world and released several dozen albums, all featuring his distinctive guitar style, supple voice, and unique showmanship.

In this compelling biography, Elijah Wald traces White's journey from a childhood leading blind singers on the streets of Greenville, South Carolina, to the heights of Manhattan cafe society. He explores the complexities of White's music, his struggles with discrimination and stereotypes, his political involvements, and his sometimes raucous personal life.

White was always drawn to music and made his first recordings at age fourteen. By the 1930s he had become a recording star, with equally strong careers in blues and gospel. In the 1940s he was discovered by white audiences and regularly appeared in New York cabarets alongside such artists as Billie Holiday. He also became an outspoken proponent of civil rights and frequently appeared at rallies and benefits, as well as at the Roosevelt White House, becoming known as "the Presidential Minstrel." He was one of the few black figures to star on Broadway and appear in Hollywood films, the only black solo performer to have his own national tour, and a daring sex symbol with adoring fans on both sides of the color line.

In the 1950s, White won acclaim in Europe, then saw his achievements collapse in the polarized political ferment of the McCarthy era. Attempting to strike a balance that would keep his career afloat, he instead ended up alienating both political camps. Although still a star in England, he became the forgotten man at home until his resurrection during the folk revival.

While African National Congress narratives dominate much of the scholarship on South Africa’s freedom struggle, Josie Mpama/Palmer’s political life offers a different perspective. Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered black women from actively participating in politics, Mpama/Palmer was an outspoken advocate for women’s social equality and encouraged black women to become more involved in national conversations. The first black woman to join the Communist Party of South Africa and an antiapartheid activist, Josie Mpama/Palmer remained involved in critical issues all her life, especially protests against Bantu Education and other forms of racial and sexist discrimination. She was an integral figure in establishing the Federation of South African Women, an organization open to women of all races. Mpama/Palmer’s activism and political legacy would become an inspiring example for women in South Africa and around the world to get up and get moving.

José Martí (1853–1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the “Great Liberator” Simón Bolívar rivals Martí in stature and legacy. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, Martí was a giant of Latin American letters, whose poetry, essays, and journalism still rank among the most important works of the region. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the “apostle” of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint.

In José Martí: A Revolutionary Life, Alfred J. López presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Martí biography, López strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Martí as Cuba’s greatest founding father and one of Latin America’s literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. In a lively account that engrosses like a novel, López traces the full arc of Martí’s eventful life, from his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, to his first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala, through his mature revolutionary period in New York City and much-mythologized death in Cuba on the battlefield at Dos Ríos. The first major biography of Martí in over half a century and the first ever in English, José Martí is the most substantial examination of Martí’s life and work ever published.

Journal I is a story of revewal—of the new life that began for Mircea Eliade in the fall of 1945 when he became an expatriate. Eliade came to Paris virtually empty-handed, following the death of his first wife and the Soviet takeover of Romania, which made him a persona non grata there. He had left half a lifetime in Romania: his parents, whom he never saw again; his library; unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, including the journal notebooks prior to 1940; an academic career; and Zalmoxis, the journal of religious studies he founded.

During the lean years in Paris Eliade lived and worked in small, cold rooms; prepared meals on a Primus stove; pawned his valuables; and asked friends for loans. Eventually he secured a research stipend from the Bollingen Foundation. His ten years in Paris were among his most productive; the books he wrote during this period brought him worldwide acclaim as a historian of religions. He records his first meetings with Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gershom Scholem, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and many other scholars and writers.

Eliade also continued to write literary works. Numerous entries describe his five-year struggle with his novel The Forbidden Forest. Spanning the twelve fateful years from 1936 to 1948, it expresses within a fictional framework the central themes of Eliade's work on religions. Writing the novel was a Herculean task in which Eliade summarized and memorialized his old Romanian life.

Mircea Eliade's journal of the years 1957-1969, originally published in English under the title No Souvenirs, is the testimony of a "wandering scholar" caught between three worlds: his native Romania, the France he fled to, and his last homeland, the United States. The journal is filled with his work, dreams, memories of his youth, stories of his travels, the reflections of each day.

More an eloquent chronicle of the mind's life than a recital of daily routine, this volume of Mircea Eliade's journal offers a remarkably candid portrait of a renowned scholar and his work. The entries—full of marvelous ideas, outlines for works never written, responses to the works of others, and much more—reveal many rarely glimpsed sides of the private, as well as public, man. What did he really think of the students who came to him for instruction in black magic? What were his private reflections on feminism, student drug use, the sexual revolution, the nature of American scholars and scholarship? Who were his best friends, why did he enjoy their company, and why did he shun the company of others?

Quite apart from the personal, biographical interest the journal holds, it is a document of cultural and intellectual significance. Eliade remarks on such colleagues and friends as Jung, Dumézil, Ricoeur, Bellow, and Ionesco. Moreover, the period covered encompasses Eliade's most active years as a teacher, and the journal beautifully reflects his developing views on religion, history, and the nature of academic culture. Bits and pieces of Eliade's past life are juxtaposed with thoughts about ongoing projects and work yet to be undertaken as well as with anecdotes of his travels and comments on world events.

A genuine treat for Eliade readers and those interested in history of religions, Journal III provides new perspectives on many of Eliade's other works—the History of Religious Ideas, Ordeal by Labyrinth, the Autobiography. At the same time the journal is a mature scholar's record of the aftermath of the 1960s, a turbulent period that profoundly affected American university life. As such, these writings hold valuable insights into not only the life and work of one man but also the cultural history of an entire era.

Journal IV is the first publication, in a translation from the Romanian manuscript, of the journal that Mircea Eliade kept during the last seven years of his life. In this period, Eliade is ensconced as a famous scholar—his works are being translated into many languages and books about him arrive regularly in the mail. His encounters with scholars of like repute are recorded in the journal; after a party in Paris, Eliade shares a taxi with Claude Lévi-Strauss and inadvertently makes off with his raincoat.

Running like a fault line through the peak of his success, however, is Eliade's painful awareness of his physical decline—failing vision, arthritic hands, and continual fatigue. Again and again he repeats how little time he has to finish the projects he is working on—his autobiography, the third and fourth volumes of his History of Religious Ideas, and the duties associated with his editorship of the Encyclopedia of Religion. He poignantly recounts the sharpest blow: the disorganization and eventual destruction by fire of his personal library.

Within the scope of Journal IV Eliade and his world go to ruin. What does not decline is the vivid and persistent voice of Eliade the writer, an unbreaking voice that—with death only months away—plans a reply to critics, plots out an article, and ruminates on characters to people another novella.

Renowned writer, critic, and teacher, Wallace Fowlie has devoted his life to the study and teaching of the French language and literature. Author and translator of thirty books, Fowlie’s contributions include translations of Rimbaud (the complete works), Molieré, Claudel, Baudelaire, and Cocteau, and literary studies of, among others, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Gide, and Mallarmé. His widely acclaimed Journal of Rehearsals, originally published in 1977, is the first in his series of memoirs. In this passionate book, Fowlie explores his "love affair" with the literature and culture of France, and offers insights into his own intellectual and social life, his early love for the French language, and his encounters and relationships with an impressive cast of characters: Kenneth Burke, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, and others.

"The only way out," writes Howard Nemerov, "is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present—henceforth?—the subject to which you are condemned." This is the record of the struggle to compose a novel; a struggle transformed by Nemerov into a far-reaching exploration of the creative process itself.

"He often shows bravery and shrewdness; the book is full of fine criticism and psychological insight. As always, his prose has that ease and transparency that make one forget one is reading; one seems simply to hear a voice speaking. Nemerov's improvised self-analysis has weaknesses, but few that he himself doesn't eventually recognize."—New York Times Book Review

"In an age of explicitness, Nemerov's Journal of the Fictive Life is explicitly without vulgarity; in an age of revelation, it reveals only what counts. More then a book about creativity, it is a beautiful creation."—Richard G. Stern

This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces.

The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

World famous concert pianist Grant Johannesen completed this memoir shortly before his sudden death in 2005. Born in Salt Lake City, Johannesen gives an account of his childhood and education in Utah, his early career and study in Europe and New York, his growing reputation as a pianist, and his worldwide performances. He writes also of his early marriage to Helen Taylor, who died suddenly in an auto accident, his later marriage to the renowned cellist Zara Nelsova, his activity as a teacher and as a judge in piano competitions, and his octogenarian thoughts for the benefit of younger generations of musicians.

Journey of an American Pianist presents an extensive examination of Johannesen’s artistic commitment and the importance of certain kinds of training and experience, framed in large part as advice to the young pianist seeking a concert career. At the same time, it has plenty of everyday-living experience, showing what pianists do and think about when they are not actually playing or performing.

Four early American women tell their own stories:  Mary Rowlandson on her capture by Indians in 1676, Boston businesswoman Sarah Kemble Knight on her travels in New England, Elizabeth Ashbridge on her personal odyssey from indentured servant to Quaker preacher, and Elizabeth House Trist, correspondent of Thomas Jefferson, on her travels from Philadelphia to Natchez.  Accompanied by introductions and extensive notes.

"The writings of four hearty women who braved considerable privation and suffering in a wild, uncultivated 17th- and 18th-century America.  Although confined by Old World patriarchy, these women, through their narratives, have endowed the frontier experience with a feminine identity that is generally absent from early American literature."—Publishers Weekly

In this remarkable book, recounting his long, influential career as a congressman from New York, Stephen Solarz gives an insider’s view of the life of a hard-working legislator in the forefront of democracy movements and human rights during a tumultuous time in our nation’s history. A member of the class of 1974, the so-called “Watergate” class, when 75 freshman Democrats were elected to the Congress, Solarz was part of the group that brought about a power shift in the House from an inner circle of senior committee chairs to a much larger group of subcommittee leaders. Early on he sought and won a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he earned a reputation as an expert in international relations, traveling to more than 100 countries and meeting the likes of Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Nelson Mandela, Indira Gandhi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, and Robert Mugabe. Solarz gives fascinating, detailed descriptions of his role in bringing democracy to South Korea and Taiwan, the triumph of people power in the Philippines, the peace agreement in Cambodia, the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, and the adoption of the resolution authorizing the use of force in the first Gulf War. Written in an engaging style, Journeys to War and Peace will appeal to all who value the struggle for human rights and seek a better understanding between differing cultures and peoples.

Joyce Westerman grew up on a farm in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. As a kid, she cleaned the barn, picked vegetables, and helped her father cut down trees. But what she really loved to do was play baseball. Joyce played ball at recess and with friends whenever she could. She even joined her aunt’s adult softball team when she was only twelve.

As Joyce got older, she went to work at a factory in Kenosha. But when World War II broke out, she got a chance to try out for the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Women from all over the country signed up to show off their skills. Only a few were good enough, and Joyce was one of them. For eight years, Joyce travelled around the United Stated playing ball, winning the league championship in her last season.

This addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers tells the story of a woman who lived her dream of becoming a professional athlete. In a time when women had few opportunities for careers, and next to none in professional sports, Joyce and her teammates showed that women have what it takes.

A timeless study of a man who revolutionized the literary landscape.

James Joyce (1882–1941) is hailed as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Rejecting his homeland and its religion as a young man, Joyce went on to reinvent the Dublin of his youth in his fiction. His masterpiece, Ulysses—once banned in Britain and the United States—redefined the modern novel and has become a canonical classic. Finnegans Wake, written as Joyce’s eyesight deteriorated, cemented his legacy as one of the founding figures of modernist literature.

In a revised edition of this lucid and compelling biography, containing a new foreword from the author, crucial events in Joyce’s life, from his self-imposed exile to his creative triumphs, are explored vividly. Ian Pindar reveals how Joyce’s work carefully blends the abstract and the mundane, capturing the great human comedy of which we are all part.

The first biography of an eighteenth-century Basque immigrant who became a silver miner, a cattle rancher, and commander of the cavalry in Sonora, Mexico. The name of Juan Bautista de Anza the younger is a fairly familiar one in the contemporary Southwest because of the various streets, schools, and other places that bear his name. Few people, however, are familiar with his father, the elder Juan Bautista de Anza, whose activities were crucial to the survival of the tenuous and far-flung settlements of Spain’s northernmost colonial frontier. For this first comprehensive biography of the elder Anza, Donald T. Garate spent more than ten years researching archives in Spain and the Americas. The result is a lively picture of the Spanish borderlands and the hardy, ambitious colonists who peopled them.

The Colombian activist Juan Gregorio Palechor (1923–1992) dedicated his life to championing indigenous rights in Cauca, a department in the southwest of Colombia, where he helped found the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca. Recounting his life story in collaboration with the Colombian anthropologist Myriam Jimeno, Palechor traces his political awakening, his experiences in national politics, the disillusionment that resulted, and his turn to a more radical activism aimed at confronting ethnic discrimination and fighting for indigenous territorial and political sovereignty.

Palechor's lively memoir is complemented by Jimeno's reflections on autobiography as an anthropological tool and on the oppressive social and political conditions faced by Colombia's indigenous peoples. A faithful and fluent transcription of Palechor's life story, this work is a uniquely valuable resource for understanding the contemporary indigenous rights movements in Colombia.

Juana Briones de Miranda lived an unusual life, which is wonderfully recounted in this highly accessible biography. She was one of the first residents of what is now San Francisco, then named Yerba Buena (Good Herb), reportedly after a medicinal tea she concocted. She was among the few women in California of her time to own property in her own name, and she proved to be a skilled farmer, rancher, and businesswoman. In retelling her life story, Jeanne Farr McDonnell also retells the history of nineteenth-century California from the unique perspective of this surprising woman.

Juana Briones was born in 1802 and spent her early youth in Santa Cruz, a community of retired soldiers who had helped found Spanish California, Native Americans, and settlers from Mexico. In 1820, she married a cavalryman at the San Francisco Presidio, Apolinario Miranda. She raised her seven surviving sons and daughters and adopted an orphaned Native American girl. Drawing on knowledge she gained about herbal medicine and other cures from her family and Native Americans, she became a highly respected curandera, or healer.

Juana set up a second home and dairy at the base of then Loma Alta, now Telegraph Hill, the first house in that area. After gaining a church-sanctioned separation from her abusive husband, she expanded her farming and cattle business in 1844 by purchasing a 4,400-acre ranch, where she built her house, located in the present city of Palo Alto. She successfully managed her extensive business interests until her death in 1889. Juana Briones witnessed extraordinary changes during her lifetime. In this fascinating book, readers will see California’s history in a new and revelatory light.

Born in 1898 in Bunkerville, Nevada, Juanita Brooks led an early life similar to that of many who grew up in isolated, tightly knit, rural Mormon communities. An early marriage suggested her future would follow a predictable course, but the death of her husband, the need to raise a young son, and a passion for knowledge led her along a different path, when at mid-life she became a well-known author after publishing The Mountain Meadows Massacre. In this book she exposed the killing of some 100 California-bound emigrants traveling through southern Utah in 1856 as an atrocity carried out by a Mormon militia with Indian allies and not solely as an Indian massacre, as it had been for so long portrayed.

Juanita Brooks was a faithful and active member of the Mormon Church, and her courage to tell the truth about this dark moment in Mormon history established her reputation as a respected historian. While there was no official church condemnation of the book, there was unofficial disapproval and Brooks was shunned by many in her community. She nevertheless doggedly pursued church authorities to revise their stand on the incidents at Mountain Meadows. The desire to tell the truth as she saw it became her hallmark, and Brooks’s life as wife, mother, teacher, community member, and undaunted historian became an uncommon story of personal stamina and intellectual courage.

Winner of the Evans Biography Award and the Mormon History Association Best Book Award. 
 

Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity.

What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other.

The younger Hawthorne's name and work ethic gave him influence in spite of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and Collier's Weekly. As a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era's most important events: McKinley's assassination, the Galveston hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.

When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.

In 1830, a young woman named Juliette Magill Kinzie moved from her fancy home in Connecticut to a rustic log cabin in what would later be called Wisconsin. Juliette lived there with her husband, John, who worked as an Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, one of Wisconsin’s earliest settlements. While living at the fort, Juliette came to know the Indian communities that called the land home, as well as the non-Indian settlers who were moving in. She later wrote a best-selling book about her experiences, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the Northwest, an important first-person account of life on the frontier.
 
This new biography in the Badger Biographies Series turns the lens on the writer herself, detailing her life as she detailed the lives of those she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s. Juliette Kinzie: Frontier Storyteller details war, hunger, and the rapidly changing times Juliette witnessed on the Midwestern frontier, following the pioneering woman through her own changes from socialite to pioneer to famous writer and even to the work of her granddaughter, Juliette Gordon Low, who founded the Girl Scouts of the USA in 1912.

With vision, hard-nosed judgment, and biting humor, Julius Nyerere confronted the challenges of nation building in modern Africa. Constructing Tanzania out of a controversial Cold War union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Nyerere emerged as one of independent Africa’s most influential leaders. He pursued his own brand of African socialism, called Ujamaa, with unquestioned integrity, and saw it profoundly influence movements to end white minority rule in Southern Africa. Yet his efforts to build a peaceful nation created a police state, economic crisis, and a war with Idi Amin’s Uganda. Eventually—unlike most of his contemporaries—Nyerere retired voluntarily from power, paving the way for peaceful electoral transitions in Tanzania that continue today.

Based on multinational archival research, extensive reading, and interviews with Nyerere’s family and colleagues, as well as some who suffered under his rule, Paul Bjerk provides an incisive and accessible biography of this African leader of global importance. Recognizing Nyerere’s commitment to participatory government and social equality while also confronting his authoritarian turns and policy failures, Bjerk offers a portrait of principled leadership under the difficult circumstances of postcolonial Africa.

Mark Wayne Nelson details the efforts of one of America’s most underappreciated public servants. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Marriner S. Eccles, a Mormon from Utah, to join his administration. As a Republican businessman, Eccles seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of leading crusader for a fairer and more economically sound distribution of the nation’s wealth. From his first position in the Treasury Department, though, he emerged as the central mover in revolutionizing the mortgage structure of the private home market in the United States.

After FDR appointed him to head the Federal Reserve, Eccles drafted legislation that restructured that institution as well. Throughout the remainder of the New Deal, he was the most powerful advocate of what came to be called “Keynesian Policy,” which involved direct federal stimulus of the economy. Presenting the first comprehensive and independent analysis of Eccles’s influential career, Jumping the Abyss wrestles with economic issues that remain relevant today. 

Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.

An eye-opening account of time served in the great battles of our century— for workers’ rights, against Fascism, Communism, and racism—Jumping the Line is the life story of an American original. William Herrick chronicles his adventures and misadventures on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, in (and very much out of) the Communist Party, driving a tractor on a communal farm in Michigan, jumping the line as a hobo, organizing African American sharecroppers in Georgia, at work with Orson Welles, and immersed in his own writing.
     Herrick chronicles a life of great conviction and great disillusion. He went to Spain in 1936 to fight against the Fascists and there witnessed the horrifying acts that Fascists and Communists alike committed, before he was felled by a near-fatal wound. Here he tells about the life that led him, a working-class Jewish kid from New York, into the idealism and then the murky politics of this internecine conflict. From the bloody fight in Spain he takes us to the battlefields of the Communist movement in the U.S., where he found himself parading up and down the garment district of Manhattan, denouncing his former comrades.
     When Paul Berman interviewed Herrick in the Village Voice in 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Herrick’s remarks so incensed other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln battalion that they picketed the paper. What William Herrick has to say doesn’t always go down easily. But for those who like the truth, with a dash of wit and a healthy dose of history, it can be exhilarating.

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

From Eleanor Roosevelt to feminist icon Gloria Steinem to HIV/AIDS activist Dazon Dixon Diallo, women have assumed leadership roles in struggles for social justice. How did these remarkable women ascend to positions of influence? And once in power, what leadership strategies did they use to deal with various challenges? 

 

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements explores these questions by introducing twelve women who have spearheaded a wide array of social movements that span the 1940s to the present, working for indigenous peoples’ rights, gender equality, reproductive rights, labor advocacy, environmental justice, and other causes. The women profiled here work in a variety of arenas across the globe: Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, New York City labor organizer Bhairavi Desai, women’s rights leader Charlotte Bunch, feminist poet Audre Lorde, civil rights activists Daisy Bates and Aileen Clarke Hernandez, Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai, Nicaraguan revolutionary Mirna Cunningham, and South African public prosecutor Thuli Madonsela. What unites them all is the way these women made sacrifices, asked critical questions, challenged injustice, and exhibited the will to act in the face of often-harsh criticism and violence.

 

The case studies in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements demonstrate the diversity of ways that women around the world have practiced leadership, in many instances overcoming rigid cultural expectations about gender. Moreover, the cases provide a unique window into the ways that women leaders make decisions at moments of struggle and historical change. 

 

Jurek Becker, the author of the first comic novel on the Holocaust, Jacob the Liar, and other highly acclaimed works, was one of West Germany's most famous exiles from the GDR. A survivor of the Shoah-his mother died in a Nazi death camp-and witness to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Becker endured most of the trials that Jews experienced in Europe from the onset of World War II to the end of the Cold War.

In the first biography of this fascinating figure, Sander Gilman tells the story of Becker's life in five worlds: the Polish-Jewish middle-class neighborhood where Becker was born; the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps where Becker spent his childhood; the socialist order of the GDR, which Becker idealized, resisted, and finally was forced to leave; the isolated world of West Berlin, where he settled down to continue his writing; and the new, reunified Germany, for which Becker served as both conscience and inspiration.

Gilman was close friends with Becker for nearly thirty years, and his biography is based on unprecedented access to both the man and his papers. As Gilman reveals, Becker's story encapsulates the fractured experience of life in twentieth-century Europe, a time and place in which political systems and national borders were constantly in flux. The life of Becker, we learn, was one of great literary achievement and notoriety, but it was also one of profound cultural dislocation. An important theme in the book is Becker's struggle with his Jewishness, an identity he repressed in socialist East Germany, but embraced after reunification, when he found himself at the center of Jewish culture and literature.

Sander Gilman's story of Jurek Becker is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily gifted artist whose hope and courage are manifested in his legacy as one of the greatest German writers of the past century.

Winner, 2021 Housatonic Book Award
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

You have a history, and a body. You are a history, and a body. Your body has (is) a history, too. As a girl, Julie Marie Wade was uninterested in makeup, boy-watching, and other trappings of conventional girlhood, much to her mother’s disappointment. Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe—movie stars immortalized as feminine ideals, even as they both died tragically and young—were lodestars that threw Wade’s own definition of beauty into relief as she stumbled into adulthood.

Now, in Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, Wade traces the intimate story of coming of age in one particular body (as a lesbian, an only child, a Protestant attending Catholic school). She uses the language and tenets of music, math, religion, fairy tales, poetry, and art to reckon with the many facets of embodiment, sexuality, and love in our contemporary world. The diet industry, popular culture, and her own family all provide rich material for what is ultimately a lyrical and unflinching investigation into the questions that prickle deep within the human heart.
 

Winner, 2019 Booker Worthen Prize from the Central Arkansas Library System.

A dedicated advocate for social justice long before the term entered everyday usage, Rabbi Ira Sanders began striving against the Jim Crow system soon after he arrived in Little Rock from New York in 1926. Sanders, who led Little Rock’s Temple B’nai Israel for nearly forty years, was a trained social worker as well as a rabbi and his career as a dynamic religious and community leader in Little Rock spanned the traumas of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the social and racial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Just and Righteous Causes—a full biographical study of this bold social-activist rabbi—examines how Sanders expertly navigated the intersections of race, religion, and gender to advocate for a more just society. It joins a growing body of literature about the lives and histories of Southern rabbis, deftly balancing scholarly and narrative tones to provide a personal look into the complicated position of the Southern rabbi and the Jewish community throughout the political struggles of the twentieth-century South.