Good Biography Research Articles

Servant of the Crown and Steward of the Church: The Career of Philippe of Cahors by William Chester Jordan

Reviewed by: Servant of the Crown and Steward of the Church: The Career of Philippe of Cahors by William Chester Jordan Gregory Lippiatt Servant of the Crown and Steward of the Church: The Career of Philippe of Cahors. By William Chester Jordan. [Medieval Academy Books.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2020. Pp. xi, 128. $28.95. ISBN 978-1-487-52461-6.) This short biography of Philip of Cahors, bishop of Évreux (c. 1220–81), examines the character and career of an important—if hitherto only regionally [End Page 187] recognised—figure in both French royal administration and the Norman Church. With his characteristically admirable archival scrutiny and attention to illustrative detail, William Chester Jordan has produced a succinct but illuminating account of a member of the reformist circle surrounding King Louis IX of France and an exemplary shepherd of his diocese. As with all good biography, this concentration on Philip of Cahors also brings more fully to light the wider field of northern France in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 reconstructs Philip’s early life from what hints are available from the evidence and wider context. Offspring of a Cahorsin family that made good as creditors to the Albigensian Crusade (1208–29), Philip became a clerk and almost certainly a student of law, probably at Orléans after preparatory schooling in Cahors, before serving as an officialis for the archdeacon of Rheims—and future pope—Ottobuono Fieschi. Much of the information about Philip’s life before his appearance in Rheims is presented as conclusions rather than argument, as the latter appears in a chapter of Elizabeth A.R. Brown’s Festschrift. While understandable, the need to consult a separate volume may frustrate a reader hoping to consult immediately the reasoning behind the claims made for this less thoroughly documented period of Philip’s life. Philip’s effective service in the archdiaconal court recommended him to royal service in 1256/7, the subject of chapter 2. As a legal clerk of the Parlement, Philip investigated claims competing with royal jurisdiction on a host of issues and assisted in rendering judgements. His skill and reliability earned him the post of keeper of the royal seal—‘chancellor in all but name’ (p. 31)—in the early 1260s. He emerges from Jordan’s study as a skilful diplomat and disinterested judge, marked by strict fidelity to both the structure and the content of custom, as in his ruling against the peasants of Ézy, a Norman village, who in 1263 pleaded without (written) proofs for exemption from a triennial hearth tax, a case again dealt with by Jordan at greater length elsewhere, this time in the Haskins Society Journal. Chapter 3, the longest of the book, treats Philip’s career as bishop of Évreux from his election in 1269. As the head of an important Norman see, he leaves a greater personal impression on the sources. Philip’s recommendation to the episcopate by his friend, Louis IX, was swiftly followed by the king’s death before Tunis on his final crusade. His decade as bishop therefore took place under the reign of Louis’ son, Philip III, and was spent upholding the saintly king’s legacy (including in a literal sense, as one of the dead crusader’s executors). Amidst disputes and controversies with the powerful interests of his diocese—such as the abbey of Saint-Taurin d’Évreux and various knightly families—and despite his reduced role in the new court, Philip of Cahors maintained the reforms introduced in Louis’ reign, though Jordan may too confidently read the silence surrounding the bishop’s attitude toward the important Jewish population of Évreux as benevolent. The ‘formalism’ (p. 28) of Philip’s earlier years seems to have been tempered by an inclination toward mercy, though still exercised within the bounds of procedure. For instance, Jordan interprets Philip’s warning of the widowed [End Page 188] mother of one of his wards against an unauthorised betrothal of her daughter as sparing the family from the crippling fine to which he would have been entitled had the marriage gone ahead. Elsewhere, Philip relinquished his rights to the...

Biography of Sultan Muhammad Shah II as the 12th Sultan of Terengganu

This study emphasizes the biography of Sultan Muhammad Shah II as the 12th Sultan of Terengganu. Sultan Muhammad Syah II assumed the leadership of Terengganu in November 1918 after the passing of his father, Al Marhum Sultan Zainal Abidin III, until May 1920. From an early age, Tengku Muhammad was nominated as Tengku Kecik Muda and was subsequently elected as Raja Muda or Yang Dipertuan Muda. When he was 30 years old, Your Highness was assigned as the 12th sultan of Terengganu. Having a good biography and personality convinces that the government that stands conducted will also be good. These refute the British claim that Sultan Muhammad Shah II was a frightened leader and did not have high supervision power. Therefore, to unravel the biography of Sultan Muhammad Syah II, the acquisition of data is focused on primary sources such as documents and manuscripts from the British Adviser of Terengganu, the Secretary of the Government of Terengganu, the Office of the Sultan of Istana Badariah, and the Office of the Chief Minister. In addition to the primary sources, secondary sources such as journals and books are being used to strengthen the research findings obtained from the National Archives of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, and Terengganu branches. In addition, data was also obtained from the Terengganu State Museum and Terengganu State Public Library. This source proves that Sultan Muhammad Shah II, in his youth, had a high attitude and went on to serve as an authoritarian and responsible leader.

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien

Reviewed by: Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien Paul Lindholdt O. Alan Weltzien, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2020. 257 pp. Hardcover, $40. Professor emeritus Alan Weltzien has hit upon a captivating story that begins in Dillon, Montana, where he taught for twenty-nine years at the University of Montana Western. Author Thomas Savage was raised there, moved East for college, wed his sweetheart, fathered three children, wrote thirteen novels— and conducted an adulterous homosexual affair that threatened to disintegrate his household. A batch of family facts buoys the psychological insights in this first Savage biography. The book ventures into territory many straight angels fear to tread— into gender politics. Annie Proulx, in her afterword to the reissue of Savage’s novel The Power of the Dog (1967, 2001), characterizes the male protagonist as “a vicious bitch,” which Weltzien considers “a violent, homophobic phrase” (101). In novel after novel Thomas Savage returned to the landscapes of his childhood and young adulthood. Those landscapes include southwestern Montana and Central Idaho. “In his fiction,” Weltzien writes, “ranches wreck people and small towns often do as well” (223). In an approach-avoidance pattern combining inspiration and disdain, Savage recalls Thomas Wolfe and his Asheville, North Carolina; Sherwood Anderson and his Clyde, Ohio. Savage wrote a more autobiographical fiction than most of his predecessors, though, and Weltzien does a fine job of cross-referencing Savage relatives with their fictional avatars. The philistines that people his novels become mouthpieces for Savage to satirize the dearth of elegance he discovered in the Intermountain West. There is much to admire in the way this book places Savage within American intellectual history. Eschewing the genre Westerns of Zane Gray and Owen Wister, Savage instead practiced “a steady excoriation of his hometown” (178). He criticized the settler-colonial tradition made popular by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and other “professional Montanans” whom he discredited (188). Invited back to Dillon in 1983, Savage was a featured writer and keynote speaker at an arts festival— only after Guthrie turned the sponsors down. A fan of Savage and his “queer-inflected” West (215), Weltzien presents [End Page 87] an extended lament that the author remains a mere “footnote in American literary history” (208). The gender studies elements in this good biography recommend it. “Savage flaunted his gay desires through his luxury sports cars,” Weltzien writes, “the bright luster of their finish and the purr of their engines” serving as stand-ins for himself (73). Costly cars as identity markers, including a Rolls Royce, belied his economic condition: his books never sold well. The thirteen superb photos in the book modestly exclude a revealing nude photo of him that features “a festooned braid of seaweed serving as his G-string” (79). Commendable, too, is Weltzien’s sleuthing through Savage’s life to discover his male lover, one Tomie dePaola, who told a chilling story. The two were caught by surprise in Boston, and dePaola was battered by Savage’s upset son. Afterward, “Tom insisted on sex, which dePaola characterized as ‘very rough’” (93). Following that sad interlude together, Savage “cut ties and reverted to his older loyalty,” his wife and children (94). Alan Weltzien is a good friend whose work I admire. Having edited volumes on Rick Bass, Norman Maclean, and John McPhee, he has built a solid standing as a biographer. He has also published multiple articles on Savage, spoken on him at conferences, and led tours within what he dubs Savage West. Contrary to that other West, which is “a repository of national wish fulfillment perpetuated by popular cultural production” (215), Savage West is a literary site where women are accorded great respect and male ranchers get bared as the brutes and bullies that would turn Montana politically red. Parts of this biography seem to have been rushed into print. In 2019 Palme d’Or winner and director Jane Campion began filming The Power of the Dog, Savage’s most celebrated novel (110). In the interim, COVID hit, film production was delayed, and this biography bears a couple dozen blotches in documentation, grammar, spelling, and punctuation...

The Gatekeeper

The Gatekeeper Steve Yates (bio) The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life Charles J. Shields University of Texas Press www.utpress.utexas.edu 320 pages; Cloth, $29.95 John Williams authored Augustus (1972), which shared the National Book Award for fiction, and Stoner (1965), which is now a globally admired American novel. Williams would demand that this review initiate a contract with the reader. He would strain to say that this review must declare its purpose and the rules of its universe and how that world will operate preferably in the first paragraph or at least by the end of the first page. I know this for certain because I was one of twelve graduate students in his last fiction workshop taught at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Williams would also insist that I eliminate “would” and all past subjunctive. “Have the character do something once, and we know it is always the case.” Charles J. Shields, author of The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life, does not mention this final workshop so near Williams’ death. In a teaching career that spanned forty-three years and multiple universities, that spring semester workshop in 1991 might only be notable for being his last, if it were notable at all. However, out of those twelve students, six I know of each went on to publish multiple books of fiction, nonfiction, and/or poetry with houses large and small. It is both traumatizing and enriching to read a good biography of a writer who taught so well and about whom we at that conference table knew so very little. None of us came to the creative writing program at Arkansas specifically to learn from him. Cajoled from retirement in the Ozarks, he agreed to fill in for faculty member William Harrison, who was begging to remain in Hollywood. We were more fortunate than we knew. And yet we should’ve known. Starting in 1988 University of Arkansas Press (a downhill stroll from that workshop table) reprinted Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing (1960), and then Nothing But the Night (1948), and finally in 1995, Augustus. Surely some Roman of Caesar Augustus’s day left us a couplet of counsel that our heroes were best never met. But then Shields points out Williams who, much like his best known character, assistant professor Stoner, was difficult to know and particularly hard to cast as heroic. I aim, then, in this review to do some of what a good biography, such as The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, does. With aid from comrades I intend to help us remember John Williams more clearly and more fully, and to let you know some of what you will get if you read this worthwhile biography. “He was sick, which was obvious to anyone, and he was tired, also obvious,” my classmate Brad Barkley, author of Money, Love (2000); Another Perfect Catastrophe (2004); Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual (2004); and many others, recalled. Williams suffered from COPD, and despite requiring oxygen, he continued smoking. He died of respiratory failure in 1994, less than three years after completing our workshop. “But what most impressed me was the love in his voice when he would read aloud—with barely the breath to do it—a favorite passage from, say, Madame Bovary. How his voice lingered over, savored each word. And I took away from that to always think of sentences that way. Each word counts. I wanted to write the kind of fiction that John Williams would read aloud with love in his voice.” Shields discovers and conveys the young life of Williams, a Texan from such hard circumstances that the family explained his biological father’s absence in what became the son’s elaborate first fiction. Born in 1922, Williams worked and studied his way through the Great Depression in cattle and oil country, but did so as an artistic type in a silk scarf and checked coat, like Ronald Colman in A Tale of Two Cities, a glorious detail Shields provides. Shields explores...

The Vanishing Messiah: The Life and Resurrections of Francis Schlatter by David N. Wetzel

Reviewed by: The Vanishing Messiah: The Life and Resurrections of Francis Schlatter by David N. Wetzel Susanne Bloomfield KEY WORDS Francis Schlatter, 19th century, 20th century, U. S. history, resurrection, healing practices, healing, biography, spiritualism, messianism, imposters david n. wetzel. The Vanishing Messiah: The Life and Resurrections of Francis Schlatter. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+280. I first became interested in Francis Schlatter while researching the 1890 writings of Elia Peattie, journalist for the Omaha World Herald. News of his amazing healing powers in Denver filled the Nebraska newspapers, especially when a Union Pacific supervisor from Omaha was “cured” and offered free railroad passes to all of his employees and their immediate families. I wish David N. Wetzel’s biography, The Vanishing Messiah: The Life & Resurrections of Francis Schlatter had been available when I was doing my own research, as a resource as well as a model of good biography. As a biographer of nineteenth-century subjects myself, I am greatly impressed by The Vanishing Messiah on many levels. First, a good biography must have a subject who has made an impact on the world in some way and is a unique individual in his or her own right. Schlatter, the Alsatian immigrant who arrived in America in 1884 and worked as a shoemaker in New York, became one of the most sensational healers in United States history. A Messiah, a miracle worker, or simply a conman, his life is intrinsically intriguing. Next, a biographer must undertake wide-ranging research. Wetzel has unearthed little-known information about Schlatter’s adolescence in Alsace, Paris, and London, and especially his early connections in New York. Once Schlatter became famous, information about him was widespread and prolific, and Wetzel had to sort through newspaper and magazine articles that ranged from the 1890s through the 1940s as well as analyze contemporary and modern books about his life and writings. His research is meticulous. In fact, in addition to extensive endnotes and illustrations, Wetzel has added a “Survey of Prior Works,” an informal annotated bibliography. He explains, “the body of work about him warrants documentation if only because it reveals wide differences in how historians and biographers approach a legendary subject” (265). However, discovering and researching all of this material, sifting through and evaluating it, selecting what to include in the biography, and then deciding how to organize it is a monumental task, but Wetzel excels here, too. [End Page 481] Wetzel has divided Schlatter’s biography into two parts. Part One documents the known facts about the life and wanderings of Schlatter until his mysterious disappearance from Denver on March 13, 1895. While in Denver, he treated thousands of people a day with some reports claiming he treated seven to twenty thousand total who came from all across the West and Midwest. Amazingly, he charged nothing for his healing and would not even take donations. After his departure, he was sighted in several small towns where he healed people as he headed south. He eventually ended up at the Datil, New Mexico, ranch of Ada Morley, who became an avid disciple, and who compiled and edited his book, The Life of the Harp in the Hands of the Harper. He spent the winter with her, and then on March 29, 1896, he headed south into Mexico. Nothing was heard about him until the announcement of his death in June 1897. A Mormon cowboy supposedly found his skeleton and possessions at the top of Tinaja Canyon. Morley never accepted his death, for he had told her, “They will find my clothes . . .but they will not find me” (123). She even went to Mexico to examine the skull but declared that it was not his since it had a full set of teeth. Besides, he had promised her that he would return in three years. Part One ends as Wetzel himself travels to the site of Schlatter’s presumed death and begins his own wanderings in search of the truth of what happened to the famous healer. Part Two is a “Biographical Quest” as Wetzel runs down leads into what might have happened to Schlatter. Did he really die, or was that...

Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett by Matthew Mason

Reviewed by: Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett by Matthew Mason Rachel Shelden Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett. Matthew Mason. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4696-2860-8. 448 pp., cloth, $39.95. Good biographies do more than simply bring a historical figure's story to life; the best accounts shed light on the complex moment in which that actor lived. From this perspective, Matthew Mason's political biography of Massachusetts conservative Edward Everett is an exceptional contribution to the history of the Civil War era. In ten tightly argued chapters, Mason demonstrates that Everett's political career was defined by an overwhelming commitment to the American Union above all else, disrupting the standard narrative of a sectional politics defined solely by northern or southern interests. Everett sought (sometimes successfully) to promote a vision of the Union based in "nationalism, law and order, and reform" even as the sectional crisis over slavery repeatedly threatened and disrupted that vision (8). In this way, Everett was a prisoner of his historical context but also managed to substantially shape the political world in which he lived. Mason traces Everett's political career from his early life as a scholar and newspaper editor during James Monroe's administration through his time as a congressman, diplomat, secretary of state, and private citizen during the remainder of the antebellum and Civil War years. Throughout, Mason portrays the Massachusetts Whig as an "ardent party and nation builder," committed to the Benevolent Empire, "restrained manhood and political moderation," and a close reader of American history (60, 69). While most of these interests blended easily within Everett's unionism, occasionally they could come into conflict. During Everett's early years in Washington, for example, the Massachusetts congressman's resistance to Indian Removal—which he believed threatened the Union—led him further from the political center. In this way, Mason builds on the key insights of David Potter and others that "loyalty is always complex and situational" (320). Nothing challenged Everett's loyalties more than what he called the "knotty subject of slavery" (99). While the Massachusetts politician repeatedly tried to avoid becoming enmeshed in debates over the peculiar institution, he was ultimately unable to transcend the sectional conflict that raged throughout the antebellum period. Slavery agitation disrupted many of his political goals, including his internal improvements agenda as Massachusetts governor, his diplomatic efforts as minister to Great Britain, and especially his campaign against the Republican Party during the 1860 election. Yet, Mason does not portray Everett as an unprincipled "doughface"; although maintaining the Union was his primary goal, Everett held a consistent "conservative antislavery position" (199). In fact, the Civil War allowed him to "resolve" many of these loyalties; "by the end of his life," Mason argues, Everett "had achieved a full synthesis of his love of the Union, antipathy to slavery, and commitment to benevolent reform" (269). Mason's biography is part of a growing body of literature interested in understanding unionism that includes Elizabeth Varon's Disunion! (2008) and Gary Gallagher's [End Page 430] The Union War (2011). He offers a cogent explanation for the importance of moderates in that ideology: although historians typically portray the antebellum period as a binary struggle between sectional visions of the nation—the northern commitment to free labor and southern insistence on a pro-slavery future—Everett's ideology demonstrates that there was "a three-way contest between Northern sectionalists, Southern sectionalists, and committed Unionists" (9). In other words, Mason provides a critical corrective that shows there was a tension between those who defined the Union in relationship to slavery (both North and South) and those who did not. Furthermore, even though Everett was unable to avoid the sectional controversy, Mason shows that his efforts to build unionist sentiment in the antebellum and Civil War years did have important successes. Throughout his career, Everett was "determined to use the past to shape the present," lecturing and writing about the lives of the founders as a means of promoting unionism (215). Perhaps Everett's most important contribution to American nationalism came in his efforts to save and purchase...

A Man for All Seasons: Monroe Sweetland and the Liberal Paradox by William G. Robbins

105 Reviews A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: MONROE SWEETLAND AND THE LIBERAL PARADOX by William G. Robbins Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2015. Illustrations, notes, index. 312 pages. $24.95 paper. Beginning in the 1880s, the Republican Party overwhelmingly dominated elections in Oregon for seven decades, often holding all but a handful of seats in the legislature and every statewide office. There were a few exceptions. In the 1930s, the Democratic Party gained control of the House of Representatives for four years. It was also able to capture the governor’s office on rare occasions when divisions in the Republic Party enabled a Democrat to triumph. But these victories were few and far between. In the 1950s, however, the Democratic Party’s fortunes changed. The pivotal year was 1954. Richard Neuberger was elected to the U.S. Senate. Edith Green defeated newcomer Tom McCall to win the third congressional district race. The number of Democrats in the state house grew from nine to twenty-five and in the state senate from four to six. A large part of the party’s newfound success reflected postwar demographic changes in the state, which boosted Democratic Party registration. Yet two men were also vital in rebuilding the party: Howard Morgan, chair of the Oregon Democratic Party, and Monroe Sweetland, one of two Oregon representatives to the Democratic National Committee. William G. Robbins, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History at Oregon State University , tells Sweetland’s story. Robbins follows Sweetland from his birth in Salem, Oregon, in 1910, to his death in Milwaukie in 2006. Along the way, Sweetland was reared in Constantine, Michigan; attended Cornell and Syracuse law schools without graduating from either; worked for the progressive League for Industrial Democracy, organizing students on college campuses in the 1930s; married Lillie Megrath; was hired by the American Red Cross to be a field director in the central Pacific during the Second World War; published the Milwaukie Review, Molalla Pioneer, Newport News, and the Oregon Democrat; served in the Oregon Legislature for a decade; and ran twice unsuccessfully for secretary of state. Robbins provides a fine overview of Sweetland’s importance in Oregon politics from the mid 1930s to the early 1960s, explaining his critical role in organizing the left, rebuilding the Democratic Party, and working with other Oregon leaders throughout this period. Yet he also shines light on Sweetland’s later career as a legislative consultant for the National Education Association . In this position, Sweetland played a key role in the passage of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 and the adoption of the Twentysixth amendment, granting eighteen-year-olds the right to vote. One can find a few faults in the book. The epilogue is a bit unfocused. An occasional adjective is ill-advised. The index could be better organized, especially the three-page entry for Sweetland. The sub-title of the book seems to be a bit of an afterthought. While the author discusses what he labels a paradox in Sweetland ’s beliefs and actions, the observation is not particularly profound. Sweetland’s switch from being a pacifist and civil libertarian in the 1930s to becoming a strong supporter of President Lyndon Johnson despite the war in Vietnam may seem surprising, but political attitudes do change, as they did for many on the left after both the onset of World War II and the growing revelations about Stalin. Fortunately, Robbins does not belabor this point. These are minor quibbles. Over the years, there have been several good biographies written on different political leaders in Oregon, but a lot of the state’s political history remains unexplored . This book fills a critical gap, providing a valuable understanding of a central political figure during an important transitional period in the state. Overall, this is a well-researched and written book by one of Oregon’s foremost historians. It should be of interest to anyone who wants to better understand Oregon’s history and politics. Richard A. Clucas Portland State University ...

Who’s Afraid of Ukrainian Nationalism?

Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. 654 pp. Stuttgart: ibidem, 2014. ISBN-13 978-3838206042. $45.00. Myroslav Shkandrij, Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929-1956. 344 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. ISBN-13 9780300206289. $85.00. Yolodymyr Viatrovych, Drub a pol's'ko-ukrains'ka viina, 1942-1947 (The Second Polish-Ukrainian War, 1942-47). 287 pp. Kyiv: Vydavnychyi dim Kyevo-Mohylians'ka akademiia, 2011. ISBN-13 978-9665185673. With Ukraine and its prospects recently in the news, its dramatic, often tragic past has also come to the fore. One of its contentious aspects is the history of the Organization of Nationalists (OUN) and the Insurgent Army (UPA). Throughout the Cold War, the nationalist movement of the first half of the 20th century was vigorously defended by diaspora scholars in North America and the West more generally, while it was the subject of consistent and often hyperbolic denunciation in the Soviet press and literature. (1) Since 1991, more discursive space and archives in Ukraine have opened to allow for a reevaluation of various aspects of the movement, including its theoretical underpinnings, especially in relation to right-wing radicalism and fascism in interwar Europe; its cooperation with Nazi Germany; the use of violence against Ukraine's minorities and even other Ukrainians; the relationship with US intelligence after the war; and biographical studies of the movement's leaders and thinkers. A number of scholars have produced new and integrative works in the past five to ten years that tackle an array of issues on nationalism. (2) At the same time, there has also been a tendency to define the debate within the crude parameters of the Cold War era: for example, whether the OUN and the UPA were protectors of Ukrainians or mass-murdering fascists. (3) Therefore this reevaluation of nationalism is very much a work in progress. In this context, the three new books under review discuss different aspects of nationalism from diverging perspectives. These are Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe's of Stepan Bandera, the most influential nationalist leader; Myroslav Shkandrij's history of nationalist writers and ideologues; and Volodymyr VTatrovych's polemical publication on mass violence between Ukrainians and Poles during World War II. Two books are by established scholars, Myroslav Shkandrij and Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, the third by Ukraine's most influential national-memory activist, who has a degree in history and is now the head of its Institute of National Memory, Volodymyr Viatrovych. It is necessary to situate their works within the contexts from which they have emerged, consisting of debates about both the history and the memory of nationalism. Recently, a leading historian, Yaroslav Hrytsak, has remarked that in 25 years of independence, Ukrainian historians have not managed to write a single good biography of Stepan Bandera, a topic of such great interest in both Ukraine and Russia. (4) Indeed, it may speak to the lasting explosiveness of Bandera in contemporary debates that the first historian to do so was not a but a Polish historian trained in Germany, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe. (5) The author in his voluminous study reveals why society, including much of its scholarly community, seems reluctant to face the full legacy of the most famous and notorious nationalist of the 20th century. Rossolinski-Liebe not only provides Bandera's biography, focusing on his ideas and politics, but also examines the historical context of nationalism, in particular, of the OUN and the UPA. Furthermore, he discusses Bandera's legacy since his death in 1959, tracing his cult in the West and its export to post-Soviet Ukraine after 1991. …

The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography

The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography

The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography

The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography

Mailer Unbound

Abstract According to Fitzgerald, “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good” (qtd. in Wilson, The Crack-Up 177). Yet it would be hard to imagine a better told writer's life than J. Michael Lennon's Norman Mailer (2013). When Mailer directed his friend and longtime scholar of his work to feel free to put in everything, Lennon did just that—at least everything relating to Mailer's work as psycho-autobiography. We knew Mailer's work was intensely personal, but now we know the unique nature of Mailer's fictional self-revelations; they are a continuous working out of complex psychological oppositions at the heart of what Lennon aptly calls Mailer's “double life.” Lennon's Mailer reads like one of Mailer's own absorbing journalistic books. It will prove invaluable to readers hoping better to understand and to evaluate the author's place in American literature.

Mailer Unbound

Abstract According to Fitzgerald, “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good” (qtd. in Wilson, The Crack-Up 177). Yet it would be hard to imagine a better told writer's life than J. Michael Lennon's Norman Mailer (2013). When Mailer directed his friend and longtime scholar of his work to feel free to put in everything, Lennon did just that—at least everything relating to Mailer's work as psycho-autobiography. We knew Mailer's work was intensely personal, but now we know the unique nature of Mailer's fictional self-revelations; they are a continuous working out of complex psychological oppositions at the heart of what Lennon aptly calls Mailer's “double life.” Lennon's Mailer reads like one of Mailer's own absorbing journalistic books. It will prove invaluable to readers hoping better to understand and to evaluate the author's place in American literature.

Adam Begley, Updike

Adam Begley’s Updike satisfies every hunger a reader might have for a good literary biography: sound reporting, trenchant analysis, numerous and apt examples of John Updike’s writing and evidence of a respect for his subject. Begley follows a chronological path through Updike’s bustling writer’s life, examining along the way important moments and milestones that inspired his writing. Begley also makes dozens of connections between the author’s life and his work. Few important events in Updike’s life went unused in his fiction and poetry. Begley’s triumph in Updike is to reveal these connections, shine light on them and explain why they are important. He does so with a keen eye, a sensitive ear and an instinctive empathy for John Updike’s life and art.

Myanmar. The authority of influence: Women and power in Burmese history. By Jessica Harriden. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2012. Pp. 370. Index.

The authority of influence: Women and power in Burmese history By JESSICA HARRIDEN Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2012. Pp. 370. Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000489 The authority of influence provides an overview of the development of Burmese women's role in their country's history. The author appears to include some ethnic minority women such as Olive Yang, Kokang state patroness during the 1960s, and a few representatives of other major minorities such as the Karen and Shan in this review. The book may have begun life as a doctoral thesis which has been slightly revised. Although it was published in 2012, the main perspective of the writing appears to be prior to the 2010 elections and the subsequent initiation of the reform processes, the major focus is on the misdeeds of the former military government. The author skips through many centuries of Burmese history up to the colonial takeover from 1826 up to 1885 with a general rendition of the historical trajectory, but without, however, contributing any innovative insights. The main conceptual framework appears to be that Burmese women (read also ethnic minority women) occupy a subordinate place in both Burmese history and society, but exert influence on their menfolk through their marriages and family connections. One feels like remarking, is this not also the way of the world in other societies both in the past and currently? The author singles out a few historical exceptions such as Queen Me Nu, consort to King Bagyidaw, and Queen Supayalat, consort to the last Konbaung dynasty monarch, King Thihaw, whose uncharacteristic accessions were marked by the usual distasteful bloodletting resulting in the loss of the kingdom to the invading foreign forces. No new perspectives are however given to the reader about these historical figures and their rather pedestrian interpretation and portrayals are standard fare. When one arrives at the redoubtable, revolver-toting, drug-smuggling Olive Yang, about whom there is already a very good biography, one might be forgiven for anticipating that at last the author will have found an exciting, atypical female to examine critically. But alas, Olive is passed over with only cursory treatment despite her very modern lifestyle and lesbian film-star lover. The author's description of some of the women involved in the exile movement and the long-running civil war promised greater reward and some of the information proferred about these females is revealing. However, not enough is made of this information and in the final analysis the author admits that they too were unable to rise to real power in their movements, but were mostly relegated to that subordinate role of influence without power which she sees as the province of most Burmese women. …

Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste Elinor Olin Charles Koechlin: Compositeur et humaniste. Edited by Philippe Cathé, Sylvie Douche, Michel Duchesneau and Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis. (MusicologieS, no. 3.) Paris: Vrin, 2010. [609 p. ISBN 9782711623167. €44.] Music examples, illustrations, index. The essence of good biography is found in the space between hagiography and apostasy, somewhere between a broad-stroke overview and a dry reporting of archival statistics. This is no small undertaking, even when motivated by the impulse to rehabilitate a good name to its well-deserved place in the musical—or in this case, humanist—pantheon. The task is more manageable, which is not to say simpler, when shared by a consortium of authors and when the subject has been generous enough to leave an abundance of evidence, written and otherwise. As editors Philippe Cathé, Sylvie Douche and Michel Duchesneau highlight in their introduction, the scope of this book is in itself evidence of Koechlin's "astonishing diversity" of interests and areas of intellectual expertise (p.11; translations throughout are mine). One of the founders of the Société musicale indépendante in 1910, Koechlin was a passionate advocate for musical modernism, yet refused to be limited by association with any aesthetic ideology or "school." A prolific author—of music criticism, public lectures, pedagogical treatises and radio broadcasts—as well as a composer of 226 works with opus number, Koechlin vigorously defied classification during his lifetime. This was no ordinary figure, as the twenty-four contributors to this volume make abundantly clear. Collectively, they present a nuanced portrait of a complex figure whose works contributed significantly to intellectual and musical life during the mercurial twentieth century. Their goal is to provide "the first French-language synthesis of Koechlin's oeuvre in the hope that new paths of inquiry will be opened" in exploring his extraordinarily diverse body of work (p. 14). If form follows function, it is no surprise that this work exceeds the boundaries of ordinary biography. After an introductory survey of Koechlin's life and works by Otfrid Nies, the body of this volume is organized into five sections, each focusing on a different facet of Koechlin's wide ranging, humanist contributions. The lead section, "Music and Society," examines his activities as politically engaged lecturer and critic. Liouba Bouscant's two chapters provide an excellent overview of Koechlin's conférences between 1909 and 1948, then a closer look at his political activities during the 1930s. Aude Caillet presents a candid investigation of the lectures between 1915 and 1918, in the context of prevailing anti-German sentiments in France. Even more specific is Michel Duchesneau's examination of Koechlin's encounter and sympathies with socialism. In all, these chapters shed light on fascinating contradictions: a "musical elitist" (p. 75) who, in his ardent defense of the avant-garde, sought to enlighten a universal audience about "[artistic] freedom conjoined with respect for musical instinct and sustained by deep knowledge of craft" (Koechlin, quoted on p. 124). Musical analysis takes the forefront in the next section, "Aesthetics and Compo sition," where specific works are discussed in detail. Sylvain Caron investigates Koechlin's religious ideology as manifested in his early work L'Abbaye for chorus and organ. Sylvie Douche makes the case for Koechlin as one of the most significant composers of the mélodie in the early twentieth century. Stéphan Etcharry's comparison of settings of Leconte de Lisle's "Colibri" by Ernest Chausson and Koechlin explores compositional characteristics of a single work, as does Patrick Otto's discussion of Koechlin's programmatic work for orchestra La Course de printemps. Christophe Corbier examines the influence of héllenomanie, or French enthusiasm for the spirit of ancient Greece. The strongest chapters in this section are [End Page 76] François de Médicis's assessment of Koechlin as "quartomancier" in a cogent analysis of the mélodie "Améthyste" and Danick Trottier's consideration of Schoenberg's considerable influence on Koechlin. Médicis is persuasive in suggesting that Koechlin integrated quartal harmonies not just for effects of sonority, but as essential to his compositional vocabulary. Trottier's essay is an excellent appraisal of the complex...

England, Brownson, and Dulles: Religious Biography and the Catholic Tradition

England, Brownson, and Dulles:Religious Biography and the Catholic Tradition Patrick W. Carey Ever since the Acts of the Apostles, which focused primarily on the words and deeds of Peter and Paul, Christian historians have valued biographies. St. Jerome illustrated this Christian appreciation in his own writings on the deeds of the illustrious men of the past. 1 The Christian hagiographical tradition emphasized the victory of redemptive grace in the lives of the martyrs and saints. That tradition, secularized to a considerable extent, continued in the early nineteenth century when Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, following the romantic stress on the dignity of the individual, emphasized what Pierre Leroux and Orestes Brownson called the role of "providential men" in the world's historical and cultural progress. 2 In the modern Catholic tradition the emphasis on the dignity of the human person continued in Church documents and declarations, and in the twentieth-century American Catholic portion of that tradition, historians Peter Guilday, John Tracy Ellis, Marvin O'Connell, David O'Brien, and others illustrated that emphasis on human dignity when they told the story of American Catholicism through the biographies they wrote. Good biographies are important genres for telling the story of the past and present because they do not reduce history to social trends, mass movements, or the crowd of sociological statistics. This comment is not intended to be a critique of social history but a reminder that social history and mass movements not only influence individual persons but are also shaped by some individuals. That interaction between the individual and the social trends of selected historical moments is complicated, and well-done [End Page 1] biographies help the readers of history to perceive how significant individuals helped to shape the generation they lived in and the future they hoped to see emerge. Focusing history on the lives of individuals helps readers to see that history is the arena of freedom, and because of this freedom, human beings generally cannot be reduced to some comprehensive identifying labels (e.g., liberal or conservative) that are sometimes used to characterize them in the past and in the present. Biographies have a way of representing, without fully being able to do so, the complexities of the human condition in any age. My own interest in history, theology, and biography (and their interconnections) stems from my years as an undergraduate at St. John's University (Minnesota) where I had the good fortune of being taught by Colman Barry, O.S.B., Godfrey Diekmann, O.S.B., and other stimulating teachers and publishing scholars. Father Colman sparked my interest particularly in American church history, and it was from him that I first became fascinated with Bishop John England's views of the relationship between Catholicism and American culture. When I went to graduate school some years after my graduation from St. John's, I already knew that I wanted to do a dissertation on England, which I did and which became the basis of the intellectual biography I later published. 3 My interest in the interdependence of history, theology, and biography was reinforced when in 1978 I started teaching at Marquette, where I offered a course on American Catholic life and thought with a heavy emphasis on the theology of representative American Catholics. In teaching that course, I discovered for myself (others had done so before me) that Brownson was almost the polar opposite, intellectually and culturally, of England, and it was out of this personal discovery that I began to see a dialectical development of the American Catholic intellectual and theological tradition. It was not a monolithic theological tradition as Thomas McAvoy, C.S.C., and others had presented it. And, in fact, there was much more to American Catholic intellectual life than John Tracy Ellis had perceived. My initial insight into Brownson's dynamic disagreement with England led me to a multi-year study of Brownson's works and eventually to the biography that Mark Noll asked me to write for Eerdmans' "Library of Religious Biography" series. 4 In my original course on American Catholic life and thought, I had a section on post Vatican II developments and selected for study three...

Making science accessible and scientists human

Much of the essay by Helen Quinn on the teaching of science deals with the field’s overall structure and process. She seems to downplay the importance of the human side of science; she mentions it only briefly at the end of her essay and in a negative way that involves jumping to conclusions, making mistakes, faking data, and committing fraud. After 31 years of teaching physics at a community college, I am convinced that it is important to stress that science is a human endeavor. By doing so, we can make science far more interesting and far less intimidating to students.If we portray science in too perfect an image, how could any student feel capable of pursuing it? And if a scientist is perceived as a cold and logical thinking machine, why would any student want to be one? I think good biographies of scientists should be required reading in introductory science courses so that students see their humanity. It’s good, too, for teachers to show their own human sides and tell students about mistakes they’ve made in their careers. I am not advocating that the approach be too casual, but we should make it clear that mistakes are a part of every human endeavor and that if a student does not do well on a particular quiz or messes up one experiment, it does not mean that the student is a failure. Let us not exaggerate the “perfection” of science and scientists.© 2010 American Institute of Physics.

A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary by Roger Gough (review)

744 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 history to explore the adaptive strategies of marginalized groups, in this case Old Believers in theUrals. Paert's essay is an extremelywell-researched and well-argued analysis of the coping mechanisms of Old Believers. She documents the survival of theOld Belief through combinations of resistance and adaptation. She argues that accommodation to the Soviet system did not necessarily mean compliance. Instead, Old Believers coped with the new government inmuch the same way as they had with the old government, viewing state repression as inevitable and often comparing theworst of the Soviet repression with the early days ofmartyrdom of theOld Belief. Essays by Anna Rotkirch, Victoria Semenova and Paul Thompson, and Marianne Liljestrom discuss women's experience in the Soviet Union, empha sizing agency and subjecthood in a departure from the traditional stress on victimhood and passivity. Nanci Adler presents a series of interviews with returnees from the Gulag, analysing the difficulties of return and the tendency of Soviet society toward a kind of double repression (political repres sion followed by a more Freudian type of repression of the very fact of the experience). Naomi Roslyn Galtz offers a strikingessay on the dacha and its meaning as one of the 'small freedoms' offered within the Soviet context. Finally, the editors present an epilogue with a survey of the 'state of the art' of contemporary interview projects on Russia. The authors in this anthology by no means present these new sources uncritically. The introduction offersan extended analysis of the strengthsand weaknesses of first-person narratives. The editors discuss the politicization of memory, gaps in family memories and the often present-minded nature of memory, among other key issues.Many of the lifehistories tell us as much about the present ? that is, the early-to-mid 1990s ? as they do about the past. This is,however, a strength,given that they capture a pivotal moment in time, a timewhen thepast came crashing down, bringing with ita rupture in a world systemand an entireway of lifeand moral economy. LivingThrough the SovietSystemisa valuable work of scholarship, which serves to chart a course for other serious scholars of the Soviet Union. Department of History LynneViola UniversityofToronto Gough, Roger. A Good Comrade:Jdnos Kadar, Communism andHungary. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2006. xii + 323 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?24.50. Janos Kadar was the great survivor of twentieth-centuryHungarian politics. Born Janos Csermanek, the son of an unmarried Slovak chambermaid, he devoted his entire adult life to a Communist movement characterized by residual paranoia, a popularity thatwas always in question, and a perennial requirement to serve both national interests and the interests of his Soviet masters. His devotion led to two spells inprison, (first by thewar-time Fascist regime and then, from 1953 to 1955, by his fellow Communists) yet Kadar stillmanaged to achieve, from 1956 onwards, a position of unquestioned reviews 745 dominance over his party and his country.Under his tutelage, theCommunist regime survived the shredding of its national and international reputation presaged by the 1956 revolution, to remain inpower for a further thirty-three years. As long as Kadar survived, the Communist regime survived with him. Perhaps as remarkably, his reputation has survived the dismanding of the regime which was itselfpresaged by Kadar's forced retirement and death in 1989. In recentHungarian public opinion polling Kadar has been chosen as the thirdgreatestHungarian of all time and the greatestHungarian politician of the twentieth century. This combination of endurance, influence and reputation makes Kadar a superb subject for a biographical study and it is, therefore, entirelywelcome that the firstEnglish-language biography of him has now appeared. This study has, however, more than novelty to recommend it. The author has familiarized himselfwith thebulk of thepublished research on Kadar, and has supplemented this sizeable secondary literaturewith his own research in Hungarian and American archives. Although a comprehensive account of Kadar's life would have required extensive research in Russian archives, a task the author neglected to undertake, this study does make some use of Soviet-era documents to help fill in the gaps. Moreover, a good biography is shaped not only by the information it contains but also by...

Christopher Booth, John Haygarth FRS: a physician of the Enlightenment (1740–1827), Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 254, Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 2005, pp. xv, 169, illus., $60.00 (hardback 0-87169-254-6).

Biography of the so-called “great men” of medicine has frequently been disparaged by academic historians—especially when the author is a retired clinician. This has often been justified, as some of the works are mere collections of readily available facts with no synthesis and little understanding. Whiggish hagiography is easy to write. But good biography is important. Those who would try to understand the fundamental trends of the past and interpret them for today must know about the protagonists and be able to rely on accurate scholarship about them. The skills that the experienced clinician biographer brings to the work are very similar to those he used with his patients. The collection of primary source material (clinical examination, x-rays and pathology results), formulating the hypothesis (diagnosis) and then testing it (the treatment and follow up) is little different to the technique of a trained historian. Haygarth was a “great man”. A true child of the Enlightenment, he had a wide circle of correspondents and friends including William Cullen, John Fothergill, Sir Joseph Banks, William Heberden and, across the Atlantic, Benjamin Waterhouse. He became an extremely busy physician in Chester, where he demonstrated that it was easier to put ideas into practice than in London. Thus he formulated a plan, which was in a great measure successful, to eradicate smallpox in the town by inoculation. Later, he wanted to extend the plan nationwide, but nothing came of it, and shortly afterwards vaccination was promoted. On the basis of his own experiments, he believed that fever was contagious. He set up fever wards for the poor in the local infirmary, and this work laid the conceptual foundations for isolation hospitals. At the age of fifty-eight he retired from clinical practice and went to Bath, the city of Jane Austen, Edward Jenner and Caleb Hiller Parry. For some years the Bath Philosophical Society met in his house. He turned his attention to literary work based on the mass of clinical notes he had made. This led to further publications on fever, rheumatism, and, possibly unwisely, he entered into the virulent controversy in Philadelphia as to whether what we now call yellow fever was endemic or imported from the Caribbean. Perkins' Tractors had become the fashionable cure-all among the valetudinarians in the town, and Haygarth exposed Perkins as a fraud and made sure that the deception was widely exposed. True to the spirit of the age, he engaged in philanthropy. A devout Anglican, he was always interested in education for the poor and, having been a governor of the Blue Coat School in Chester, he proposed that a similar scheme could be introduced in every parish in England at very little cost. In his later years his other great interest was in devising and setting up the Bath Provident Institution as a savings bank for the benefit of the thrifty and industrious. This study is not only a delight to read, but it will be of great value to many researchers. Anybody looking at the genesis of the understanding of fever, medicine in small town Georgian England, the history of smallpox, the transatlantic passage of medical knowledge, education for the poor and the start of the Friendly Society Movement will find something of value. Those interested in Booth's previous work on the medical connections of the Yorkshire Dales will not be disappointed. The book is well produced and impeccably referenced. Booth, a true clinical historian, has made his case that Haygarth's name should be placed “alongside the great pioneering philanthropists of the age”.