Browsing: Biography

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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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There Will Be Rainbows:A Biography of Rufus Wainwright by Kirk Lake
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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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Michael Jackson: The Magic, the Madness, the Whole Story, 1958-2009 by J. Randy Taraborrelli
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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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THE FACT THAT Ronald Firbank was an innovator in his medium, that he was a humorous commentator on social mores, has long been recognized. That his novels are wise as well as witty has not been generally acknowledged, a fact that may be due to the strong influence of Oscar Wilde upon his work. However, as literary and cultural criticism has come increasingly to appreciate Wilde as a major writer and as a prophet of our age, Firbank’s fortunes have risen accordingly.

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Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. Ansky by Gabriella Safran
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IN WANDERING SOUL, Gabriella Safran has written an erudite biography of the Yiddish radical, Russian revolutionary, writer, ethnographer, and playwright S. Ansky (or An-sky), who’s best remembered for his haunting play, The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds. Drawing from Ansky’s own writings, Safran, who teaches Slavic literature at Stanford, depicts Ansky as a person of multiple identities …

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HOW DOES one tell the story of Sergey Pavlovich Diaghilev, the impresario whose artistic accomplishments over three decades beginning at the turn of the 20th century seem to surpass what is humanly possible? How did this homosexual Russian émigré who spent the majority of his life exiled in Europe do it?

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