Biographies
From these roots : my fight with Harvard to reclaim my legacy
Lanier, Tamara, 1962- author.
342.730873 /Lanier
Black History, Nonfiction, Biographies, History
"Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother's stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother's health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. "Tell them about Papa Renty," she would say. It was her mother's last wish. Thus begins one woman's remarkable commitment to document that story. Her discovery of an eighteenth-century daguerreotype, one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa, reveals a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiseled cheekbones. The information read "Renty, Congo." All at once, Lanier knew she was staring at the ancestor her mother told her so much about-Papa Renty. In a compelling story covering more than a decade of her own research, Lanier takes us on her quest to prove her genealogical bloodline to Papa Renty's that pits her in a legal battle against one of the most powerful institutions in the country, Harvard University. The question is, who has claim to the stories, artifacts, and remnants of America's stained history-the institutions who acquired and housed them for generations, or the descendants who have survived? From These Roots is not only a historical record of one woman's lineage but a call to justice that fights for all those demanding to reclaim, honor, and lay to rest the remains of mishandled lives and memories"--
The Paris girl : the young woman who outwitted the Nazis and became a WWII hero
White, Francelle Bradford, author.
940.5344 /White
Nonfiction, Biographies, History
Written by her own daughter, this biography chronicles the astonishing courage Andrée Griotteray, a teenage girl in Nazi-occupied Paris who would become a hero of the French Resistance through her harrowing work as an underground intelligence courier.
There have been several fiction books published recently that focus on women performing acts of derring-do in WWII, and this here is the real thing. -Candice
A matter of complexion : the life and fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt
Chakkalakal, Tess, author.
ON ORDER BOOK
Black History, Nonfiction, Biographies, History
"A biography of Charles Chesnutt, one of the first Black authors to write for both Black and white readers. In A Matter of Complexion, Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered "mixed race." He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin. Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry"--
This is a person I wasn't familiar with until reading the reviews for the book, and his story is so intriguing. A man who could have passed as white during a time when that would have opened many doors, but instead chose to remain in his Black community as a teacher and then writer, his story deserves to be told. -Candice
Why fish don't exist : a story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life
Lulu Miller
590.92 /Miller
Biographies, History, Memoir, Philosophy, Science
Nineteenth-century scientist David Starr Jordan built one of the most important fish specimen collections ever seen, until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shattered his life's work.
One of those books that fundamentally changed how I view the world. Highly relevant today with a liberating perspective on binary thinking and the human tendency to categorize and control chaos. -Annie
Family romance : John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
Jean Strouse
759.13 /Sargent
Nonfiction, Art / Art History, Biographies
"Jean Strouse captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent's portraits of the Wertheimer family"--
I really enjoy John Singer Sargent portraits--there is a great one at the Des Moines Art Center! Strouse's Family Romance tells the story of Sargent's portraits of the Wertheimer family giving context to the culture and politics of early 20th century England, the art scene, and this period of Sargent's life. -Anne M
The five sides of Marjorie Rice : how to discover a shape
Amy Alznauer
j510.92 Rice
Picture Books, Nonfiction, Biographies
"When Marjorie Rice was a little girl in Roseburg, Oregon, in the 1930s, she saw patterns everywhere. Swimming in the river, her body was a shape in the water, the water a shape in the hills, the hills a shape in the sky. Some shapes, fitted into a rectangle or floor tilings, were so beautiful they made her long to be an artist. Marjorie dreamed of studying art and geometry, perhaps even solving the age-old "problem of five" (why pentagons don't fit together the way shapes with three, four, or six sides do). But when college wasn't possible, she pondered and explored all through secretarial school, marriage, and parenting five children, until one day, while reading her son's copy of Scientific American, she learned that a subscriber had discovered a pentagon never seen before. If a reader could do it, couldn't she? Marjorie studied all the known pentagons, drew a little five-sided house, and kept pondering. She'd done it! And she'd go on to discover more pentagonal tilings and whole new classes of tessellations." --
I'm so inspired by this book, which describes the work of self-taught mathematician Marjorie Rice, who discovered not one, not two, but THREE new tesselating five-sided shapes despite being held back from even attending college in the 1960s and 1970s by familial and societal expectations about women's roles at the time. I didn't know that a person could...discover a new shape until I read this book? (A tesselating shape, I learned, is one that fits together with itself infinitely with no gaps or overlaps.) Absolutely astonishingly beautiful illustrations tie together the themes of nature, patterns, and math that "shape" this story and give personality and verve to Rice and her life. With puzzling so popular, this book is timely, interesting, and inspiring. -Anne W
Lucy! : how Lucille Ball did it all
Amy Guglielmo
jBIOGRAPHY Ball, Lucille
Kids, Picture Books, Nonfiction, Biographies
"Lucy was not a proper little girl. She was sassy. She was bold. She was funny. She was a rule-breaking, chance-taking, comedy pioneer. Can't act? Can't sing? Can't dance? Lucy proves them all wrong - and then has the last laugh when she finally lets her inner funny girl shine. In 1951, the hit show I Love Lucy took television by storm, and has made millions laugh ever since. Lucy! is the true story of how Lucille Ball overcame the odds to become the world's Queen of Comedy"--
I appreciate this book's focus on the value and power of comedy as part of culture and history! I love to laugh and I think funny people don't get the cultural recognition they deserve beyond just entertainment - comedy is an art and a powerful agent of healing, community-building, and joy. This book highlights Lucille Ball's trailblazing career as an early female comedian, and also just shows how driven she was by the powerful feeling of making people laugh. Fun, loud, retro-style illustrations perfectly complement the text. -Anne W
Stalking Shakespeare : a memoir of madness, murder, and my search for the poet beneath the paint
Lee Durkee
704.942 /Durkee
Nonfiction, History, Art / Art History, Biographies
"Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee's fascinating memoir about an obsession gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee's own unrelenting search-via X-ray and infrared technologies-for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life. As Durkee becomes better at beguiling curators into testing their paintings with spectral technologies, we get a front-row seat to the captivating mysteries plaguing the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare. Whisking us backward in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Durkee takes us from Vermont to Tokyo to Mississippi to DC and ultimately to London to confront the stuffy curators forever protecting the image of the Bard. For his part, Durkee is the adversary they didn't know they had-a writer from Mississippi with nothing to lose-the "Dan Brown of English portraiture." A lively, bizarre, and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is as entertaining as it is rigorous and sheds new light on one of history's greatest cultural and literary icons"--
A fun little escapade through the major theories of who wrote Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, via the various portraits that are purportedly of him. There's a lot of very interesting stuff here, not just literary but also in the art history sense of who created the portraits, how they've been altered, and why they look the way they do. Lee Durkee is also a strong presence in this book, and tbh I veered between thinking of him as someone I felt sympathetic and appreciative towards, for his candor about his own mental health and personal issues, and then thinking that he'd be an absolute tour guide from hell. All in all, a very (VERY) well-researched and entertaining read. -Candice
Rabbit heart : a mother's murder, a daughter's story
Ervin, Kristine S., author.
364.1523 /Ervin
Nonfiction, True Crime, Biographies
"Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life. In her mother's absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp-from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin's drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, she reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be-a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim-what a "true" victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be"--
This book has rave reviews, and Booklist says: "This may be the best way true crime should be written, with nuance and unfettered compassion and with the words of the living victims or their families at the center." It looks to have a deep emotional impact, especially related to missing/absent parents and growing up with familial trauma, so read with care if those are triggers. -Candice
Remainders of the day : a bookshop diary
Shaun Bythell
BIOGRAPHY Bythell, Shaun
Biographies
"The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland is a book lover's paradise, with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the portly bookshop cat. You'd think that after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to his quirky customers by now. Don't get him wrong, there are some good ones among the antiquarian porn-hunters, die-hard train book lovers, people who confuse bookshops for libraries, and the toddlers just looking for a nice cozy corner in which to wee. He's sure there are some good ones. There must be . . . Filled with the pernickety warmth and humor that has touched readers around the world, stuffed with literary treasures, hidden gems, and incunabula, Remainders of the Day is a warm and welcome memoir of a life in books"--Book jacket flap.
Another superb and fantastic dry-wit addition to Bythell's bookshop diaries. For anyone who has worked in a bookstore or library (or really most retail jobs) you'll get a kick out of his small-town observations of the funny and annoying customers, and the glimpses of delight in the every day. -Amanda
This is a fascinating story that melds historical acts of racism and exploitation with present-day conversations about who owns what, who gets to tell the story, and what people are owed. -Candice