[Wilfred] Owen collected antiques, even searching for them while on leave from the Front, hoping perhaps to sell them professionally after the war. He was inordinately attached to his mother, … [and] was obsessed, too, with growing older, something he never experienced given the mortal wound that killed him at age 25 just weeks before the war’s end.
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THIS COMPREHENSIVE biography covers the life and writings of one of the best-known American novelists of the 20th century, from his birth and early life in St. Louis, Missouri, to his final years in Lawrence, Kansas.
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THERE’S A REASON why Henry James burned his papers in the garden of Lamb House: when a famous writer dies, he’s vulnerable. People swoop in and write up his life, often in a way that Joyce Carol Oates would later call “pathobiography.”
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Carl van Vechten receives the copious and discriminating biographical analysis he has long needed, in the form of The Tastemaker, an exceptional publication and Edward White’s first book.
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In Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, B. Jack Copeland argues that we should not assume that Turing took his own life, because we don’t really know how he died. What matters more is …
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GROWING UP in a leftist family in the 1950s, my cultural education included lectures given by my mother on the connection between politics and the arts. She would tell me of her experiences as a young socialist during the 1930s attending politi- cal theater in New York City. Her favorite socially conscious composer was Marc Blitzstein. Howard Pollack, professor of music at the University of Houston, has written a comprehensive biography that opens a window onto the creative genius of Blitzstein while offering a thorough study of his innovative music.
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Steve Finbow has written a brief biography of Allen Ginsberg as part of the Critical Lives series published in England.
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YOU MAY NOT NEED Kirk Lake’s recent biography of Rufus Wainwright to learn that the singer-songwriter has a penchant for peacocks. …
[and Kirk] Lake’s portrait of Wainwright, titled There Will Be Rainbows, is the perfect complement to the Canadian-American’s loud and lavish œuvre and, with its references to Tennyson, Wilde, Kubrick, and Barthes, …
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BIOGRAPHER Judith Chazin-Bennahum, former ballet dancer and distinguished professor emerita of theatre and dance at the University of New Mexico, has taken on the task of recovering from obscurity the extraordinary life of René Blum (1878-1942). Youngest brother of Leon Blum, the first Jewish prime minister of France (1936-37), René devoted his life to the arts and ballet, and to the Ballets Russes above all.
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SOME 700 PAGES into this comprehensive and even-handed biography of Michael Jackson, author J. Randy Taraborrelli remarks that the King of Pop would have paid a million dollars for a good night’s sleep. In the wake of his first child molestation scandal in 1994, Jackson worried that his image had been irrevocably tarnished, and there began a fatal descent into insomnia and substance abuse.
Given the details of his sudden death at fifty-he stopped breathing on June 25, 2009, due to an overdose of propofol, an anesthetic so powerful it’s known as “Milk of Amnesia” among surgeons-Jackson’s desperate search for the big sleep takes on an eerily gothic resonance.
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