Non Fiction: Biography

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

Do also look out for events information and keep us posted if you are an organiser.

And remember, feedback is always welcome.

Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad

Marina Benjamin

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747586920    Published 5 February

The fascinating history of the Iraqi Jews told through one family's story

Marina Benjamin grew up in London feeling estranged from her family’s Middle Eastern ways, refusing to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home and rejecting the peculiar food they ate. But when Benjamin had her own child, she realised that she was losing her link to the past. And so, in 2004, Benjamin visited Baghdad for the first time.  

When Iraq gained independence in 1932, Jews were the largest and most prosperous ethnic group in Baghdad. Just twenty years later, the community had been utterly ravaged, its members effectively expelled from the country by a hostile Iraqi government. Benjamin’s grandmother Regina Sehayek lived through it all: born in 1905, her life of privilege was little affected when the British marched into Iraq. But with the rise of Arab nationalism and the first stirrings of anti-Zionism, Regina began to have dark premonitions of what was to come. By the time Iraq was galvanised by war, revolution, and regicide, Regina was already gone, wrenched from her beloved husband in a hair-raising escape from her homeland.  

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
Carmen Callil

Jonathan Cape ISBN 0224078100

Carmen Callil tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and conmen – Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and ‘Commissioner for Jewish Affairs’, who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work, ‘controlling’ its Jewish population.

Born into a politically moderate family, Louis Darquier (‘de Pellepoix’ was a later affectation) proceeded from modest beginnings to claw his way to power. He was the ultimate chancer: always broke, always desperate for attention, status, women and drink, he became ‘one of the few men to put on weight during the Second World War’. After it was over he decamped to Spain and would never be brought to justice for having sent thousands of Jews to the camps.

Early on in his career he married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of deception. Together they had a child, Anne Darquier, whom they promptly abandoned to grow up in England under an oppressive mantle of silence. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. Darquier’s ascent to power during the years leading up to World War II mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism and the role it played in the horrors that were to follow. The book is a portrait of a society that was desperate and fragmented and which was collectively guilty in choosing to turn a blind eye.

Carmen Callil founded the Virago Press. Among the writers she published were Iris Murdoch, A.S.Byatt, Angela Carter, David Malouf, Rosamond Lehmann, Amos Oz, Edward Said, Michael Ignatieff, Marina Warner and Toni Morrison. She is now a critic and wri

Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait

Uri Dan

Palgrave ISBN 1403977909

In 1954 reporter Uri Dan met a young military commander named Ariel Sharon and followed him closely for more than half a century. Dan became Sharon's trusted advisor and a witness to the defining moments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- from secret meetings with heads of state, to open warfare in the Sinai.

This riveting combination of political history, narrative biography, interviews, and correspondence sheds new light on the conflict in the Middle East and provides an intimate, definitive portrait of Ariel Sharon, a man whose life is inextricably intertwined with Israel's destiny. With Hamas governing Palestine, Ariel Sharon gravely ill and the party he founded, the Kadima, in control of the Knesset, this book couldn't be more timely.

Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life

Philip Davis

Oxford University Press ISBN 978-0-19-927009-5
September 2007

Philip Davis tells the story of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), the self-made son of poor Jewish immigrants who went on to become one of the foremost novelists and short-story writers of the post-war period. The time is ripe for a revival of interest in a man who at the peak of his success stood alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth in the ranks of Jewish American writers.

Nothing came easily to Malamud: his family was poor, his mother probably committed suicide when Malamud was 14, and his younger brother inherited her schizophrenia. Malamud did everything the second time round - re-using his life in his writing, even as he revised draft after draft. Davis's meticulous biography shows all that it meant for this man to be a writer in terms of both the uses of and the costs to his own life. It also restores Bernard Malamud's literary reputation as one of the great original voices of his generation, a writer of superb subtlety and clarity.

Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life benefits from Philip Davis's exclusive interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, unfettered access to private journals and letters, and detailed analysis of Malamud's working methods through the examination of hitherto unresearched manuscripts. It is very much a writer's life. It is also the story of a struggling emotional man, using an extraordinary but long-worked-for gift, in order to give meaning to ordinary human life.

Philip Davis is professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the Reader magazine.

Churchill and the Jews

Martin Gilbert

Simon & Schuster ISBN 0743294939

June 2007

Churchill and the Jews covers the whole life of this greatest of Britons -- from his youth, when he was shocked by the anti-Semitism displayed during the Dreyfus Affair, to his last meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1960, when he gave Ben-Gurion an article he had written about Moses. In the intervening years, during which Churchill cemented his place in history, his affinity with the Jews remained undimmed, even though his championing of Zionist issues and interests was often like a red rag to the bull of the British Establishment. One of those closest to Churchill once confided to the author that "Winston had one fault -- he was too fond of Jews." What does this mean? How did this fondness manifest itself?

Exploring all aspects of his life and career, Churchill and the Jews sheds new light on a key figure of the twentieth century and how his attitudes affected not just the prosecution of the Second World War but the establishment of a Jewish state that followed it.

Leonard Woolf: A Biography

Victoria Glendinning

Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-4653-5

Victoria Glendinning draws on her deep knowledge of the twentieth century literary scene, and on her meticulous research into previously untapped sources, to write the first full biography of the extraordinary man who was the "dark star" at the centre of the Bloomsbury set, and the definitive portrait of the Woolf marriage.

A man of extremes, Leonard Woolf was ferocious and tender, violent and self-restrained, opinionated and non-judgmental, always an outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers.

Leonard was a pivotal figure of his age, whose fierce intelligence touched the key literary and political events that shaped the early decades of the twentieth century and would resonate into the post-World War II era.

The scholarship boy from a prosperous Jewish family would cut his own path through the world of the British public school, contending with the lingering anti-Semitism of Imperial Age Britain. Immediately upon entering Trinity College, Cambridge, Woolf became one of an intimate group of vivid personalities who would form the core of the Bloomsbury circle: the flamboyant Lytton Strachey; Toby Stephen, "the Goth," through whom Leonard would meet Stephen's sister Virginia; and Clive Bell. Glendinning brings to life their long nights of intense discussion and charts Leonard's lifelong friendships with John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster.

She unearths the crucial influence of Woolf 's seven years as a headstrong administrator in colonial Ceylon, where he lost confidence in the imperial mission, deciding to abandon Ceylon in order to marry the psychologically troubled Virginia Stephen. Glendinning reveals through vivid depiction of their unconventional marriage how Leonard supported Virginia through her breakdowns and in her writing. In co-founding with Virginia the Hogarth Press, he provided a secure publisher for Virginia's own boldly experimental works.

As the éminence grise of the early Labour Party, Woolf became a leading critic of imperialism, and his passionate advocacy of collective security to prevent war underpinned the charter of the League of Nations. After Virginia's death, he continued to forge his own iconoclastic way, engaging in a long and happy relationship with a married woman.

This is a shrewdly perceptive and lively portrait of a complex man of extremes and contradictions in whom passion fought with reason and whose far-reaching influence is long overdue.

Vivien Goldman

Aurum Press ISBN 1845132106

Recorded in London after an assassination attempt sent him into exile from Jamaica, and named by "Time" magazine as the album of the century, "Exodus" is Bob Marley's masterpiece of spiritual exploration. Much more than just a making-of-the-record story, The Book of Exodus takes in the history of Jamaican music, Marley's personal journey from Trench Town ghetto to global superstardom, his political involvement, Rastafarianism, and the biblical roots of the "Exodus" story, culminating in his triumphant return to the stage in Jamaica at the Peace Concert of 1978.

As PR for Island Records, Vivien Goldman was instrumental in introducing white audiences to the Rasta sound of Bob Marley. Here, she provides a unique first-hand account of the album "Exodus", from its conception in Jamaica to the intense, sometimes raucous all-night studio sessions in London. The Book of Exodus is an unforgettable portrait of Marley from a member of his intimate circle and an acutely perceptive appreciation of his musical and spiritual legacy.

Einstein, His Life and Universe

Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-6473-8
April 2007

This is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.

How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk -- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate -- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography.

A Lover of Unreason : The Biography of Assia Wevill

Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev

Robson ISBN 1861059744

'Assia was my true wife, and the best friend I ever had', wrote a heart-broken Ted Hughes, after Assia Wevill surrendered her life and that of their four-year old daughter to the fumes from the gas oven in her London flat, in March 1969 six years after Sylvia Plath had suffered a similiar fate.

Diva, she-devil, enchantress, muse, Lillith, Jezebel. The exquisitely beautiful Assia Wevill inspired or provoked many epithets in the course of three marriages and in pursuit of a destiny that took her from dark pre-war Berlin, to Palestine during the British Mandate and then to London in the swinging 'Sixties. In the end, none would prove to be more fitting than the epithet- and epitaph- she chose for herself: 'Here lies a lover of unreason, and an exile'.

The story of the ultimately tragic failure in the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, twentieth-century poetry's most celebrated literary couple, has always been related from one of two conflicting points of view: hers or his. Missing for more than four decades had been a third, equally relevant and no less fascinating perspective: that of Ted Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill.  

The Lover of Unreason, the first biography of Assia Wevill, views afresh the Plath-Hughes relationship and marriage with a keen, revisionary eye, and at the same time, recounts the journey that shaped her life. Hers is a complex story, formed as it is by the pull of often contrary forces: fatal attraction and obsessive love, fidelity and adultery, cruelty and tenderness, dependence and rebellion, envy and self-sacrifice. 

Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev are both distinguished literary journalists and authors, and have been researching Assia Wevill's story for 15 years. In the course of their research they have unearthed a mass of personal documents, and interviewed all the key witnesses, most of them speaking here for the first time. Koren and Negev's previous book, In Our Hearts We Were Giants, a dwarf family's survival of the Holocaust, was published in eight languages, and inspired two documentary films.

Mendel's Daughter

Martin Lemelman

Jonathan Cape   ISBN: 0224078569

Just as Art Spiegelman’s Maus presented a dramatic new framework in which to view the Holocaust, Mendel’s Daughter combines an unforgettable true story with elegant, haunting illustrations to shed new light on one of history’s darkest periods. In 1989 Martin Lemelman videotaped his mother, Gusta, as she opened up about her childhood in 1930’s Poland and her eventual escape from Nazi persecution. Now, in Mendel’s Daughter, Lemelman lovingly transcribes his mother’s harrowing testimony in her own words. He brings her narrative to life with his own powerful black and white drawings, interspersed with reproductions of actual photos, documents and other relics from that unsettled era. The result is a wholly original, authentic and moving account of hope and survival in a time of despair.

Mendel's Daughter opens with a picture of shtetl life, filled with homey images that evoke the richness of foods and flowers, of family and friends and Jewish tradition. Soon, however, Gusta’s girlhood is cut short as her family becomes witness to the rise of Hitler, rumours of war, invasion, occupation, roundups and pogroms. We follow Gusta into flight, hiding and survival: into the unfolding uncertainty of those terrible times.

As solemn and as hopeful as a prayer, Mendel’s Daughter is Martin Lemelman’s testament to Gusta’s bravery and a celebration of her perseverance. The devastatingly simple power of a mother’s words and a son’s illustrations combine to create a work that is both intensely personal and universally resonant.

Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf

Simon Louvish

Faber & Faber ISBN 9780571229000

October 2007

Cecil B. DeMille is Hollywood's most enduring legend, remembered, and often reviled, for his grandiose Biblical sagas, such as Samson and Delilah and his 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, with its cast of tens of thousands before computer graphics made the modern epic mundane. Many judged DeMille a dinosaur both for his movies and his ultra-conservative politics. But in his vision of the Bible as an American frontier narrative he recast this old trend in American culture as a cinematic precursor of the 'neo-conservatism' of our own times.

The paradox of DeMille goes deeper, as despite his fame, most of his 70 films, of which 50 were silent pictures, remain unknown even to avid film fans, though his first 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and his 1927 tale of the Christ, King of Kings, linger in the imagination. A founder-pioneer of Hollywood as an industry, DeMille was an unsung auteur, a master of increasingly bizarre narratives, with tales of adultery and divorce, hedonism and sin, in an age in which modernity, the consumer society and the pursuit of money made America a battlefield of clashing values and temptations.

Simon Louvish tells the tale of Cecil B. DeMille through his work: a major re-examination of Hollywood's most monumental founder. Savant or sinner, artist or hack, defender of freedom or a hypocritical opportunist who embraced the golden calf of sheer commercialism, DeMille is a pervasive puzzle - a mirror of the larger puzzle and contradictions of America itself.

How to Survive Your Mother

Jonathan Maitland

Simon & Schuster ISBN 0743219988

In 2004, a chance encounter led TV broadcaster Jonathan Maitland to uncover a disturbing incident involving his parents in the 1960s. The subject of a huge local scandal at the time, they were ordered to close down the chain of old people's homes they owned. They'd been extorting money from their clients.

As he attempts to find out the truth about what happened, Maitland peels back the layers of his extraordinary childhood, revealing how he coped with the outrageous and unpredictable lifestyle of his larger-than-lifemother: her marriages, her public suicide attempts, her outlandish money making schemes. (Having a mother who ran a hostel for gay men can't have been easy for a Surrey schoolboy in 1974!)

Entertaining, humorous, disturbing and revelatory, How to Survive Your Mother is a movingly honest book about what it feels like to find out things about your mother that you weren't supposed to know. It will strike a chord with anyone who has ever had issues with their parents.

The Earl of Petticoat Lane

Andrew Miller

William Heineman ISBN 0434013307

When Henry Freedman met Miriam Claret in 1929, he was a barrow boy and she was a milliner's apprentice.

In 1953, they  were presented to the Queen.

In this remarkable and moving work of narrative non-fiction, Andrew Miller tells the story of his grandparents, the children of Jewish immigrants to the East End, tracing their fortunes from Poland and Lithuania to their arrival in Regent's Park and the world of Astors and Parker-Bowles. It is a story of immigration and Anglicisation, of the significance of race and class and language and accent in our country, of how it has been possible for people in this country to change themselves and their lives.

Born in London in 1974, Andrew Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton. He worked as a television producer before joining the Economist to write about British politics and culture. He is currently the magazine’s Moscow correspondent. The Earl of Petticoat Lane is his first book.

This is a truly delightful book, full of colourful and moving details. It also has great resonance in the present ongoing debate on immigration.

A LIfe: Isaac B. Singer

Florence Noiville

Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson

Farrar Straus Giroux ISBN 0-374-17800-3

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) is widely recognized as the most popular Yiddish writer of the twentieth century. His translated body of work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, is beloved around the world. But although Singer was a very public and outgoing figure, much about his personal life remains unknown. In Isaac Bashevis Singer, Florence Noiville offers a glimpse into the world of this much-beloved but persistently elusive figure.

An astonishingly prolific writer, Singer was able to recreate the lost world of Jewish Eastern Europe and also to describe the immigrant experience in America. Drawing heavily upon folklore, Singer’s work is noted for its mystical strain. But he was also heavily concerned with the problems of his own day, and through his novels and stories runs a strong undercurrent of social consciousness. Unafraid to celebrate peasant life, Singer was often accused of being vulgar, yet he was also recognized for a deeply moral sensibility. And much like his work, Singer’s personal life was marked by contradiction: the son of a Rabbi, he struggled with warring currents of devotion and doubt. Solicitous of affection, he was also known for his philandering. Devoted to the notion of family, he abandoned his own son before the Second World War.

Drawing on letters, personal recollections, and interviews with Singer’s friends, family, and publishing contemporaries, Florence Noiville speaks to these paradoxes. More appreciation than comprehensive biography, her narrative is rich in detail about the people, places, and ideas that shaped Singer’s world. A remarkably vivid portrait of the man and his work emerges—a compassionate, vivid, and insightful vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers.

Florence Noiville is a journalist and literary critic for Le Monde. She has written books on Greek and Roman mythology and a biography of Paul Faucher.

Israel Through My Lens

David Rubinger with Ruth Corman

Abbeville Press ISBN 978-0789209283

November 2007

Today, photojournalist David Rubinger stands at the peak of his profession: a winner of the Israel Prize for services to the media and a fixture on the masthead of Time, he is the only photographer whose work is on permanent display at the Knesset, Israel's legislature. In this fascinating volume, he reports his own story, which in many ways reflects the history of Israel that he has recorded so faithfully with his camera. Born in Vienna in 1924, he emigrated to British Palestine in 1939 and developed a passion for photography while serving in the British army's Jewish Brigade. After fighting in Israel's War of Independence, he became a professional news photographer, reporting on each of his young nation's subsequent wars from the front lines, at first for the Israeli media and later as a correspondent for Time-Life. He photographed all of Israel's leaders, many of whom have allowed him a remarkable degree of access to their lives; Ariel Sharon said, "I trust Rubinger even though I know he doesn't vote for me." But Rubinger has not confined his reporting to war and politics; by photographing the successive waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe, the Arab world, Russia, and Ethiopia, he has also created a valuable record of Israel's transformation from a country of six hundred thousand to one of seven million.

This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz

Piera Sonnino

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Palgrave ISBN 1403975086

December 2006

Ten years after her return home from the lager, Piera Sonnino found the courage and the strength to tell the story of the extermination of her family by the Nazis' the tragedy of deportation, the death of her parents, her three brothers and two sisters in the concentration camps. Extraordinarily written, this account is strikingly accurate in bringing to life the methodical and relentless siege, the erosion of the freedoms and human dignity of the Italian Jews, from Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 to the final catastrophe of Auschwitz. In describing her arrival at the death camps, her writing dwells on the sea of mud, on a 'dimension that is completely contrary to all that which is human, a dimension that has even absorbed its own creators'. But the strength of her testimony rises from the mud, the personal diary becomes a universal voice that gives a name to that which cannot be expressed. Through her words, memory has the power to disarm this unspeakable evil.

2006 National Jewish Book Award Biography Category

Piera Sonnino was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999.

Ann Goldstein is an editor at the New Yorker. She has translated works by Roberto Calasso, Alessandro Baricco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Aldo Buzzi. The recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award, she is the editor of the forthcoming collected works of Primo Levi. She lives in New York, USA.

The Children of Belsen

Hetty Verolme

Politico's ISBN 1842752057

January 2007

A painfully poignant, ultimately uplifting and highly unusual Holocaust story

When their father and then their mother was taken away, Hetty, Max and Jacky had to fend for themselves. Initially separated from her brothers, Hetty later joined them in the 'Children's House', a barrack room which directly overlooked one of the open mass graves. Under the inspirational figure of the children's mentor Sister Luba - 'The Angel of Belsen' - it came to form an oasis of hope and humanity amid the horrors.The children were finally liberated by the British in April 1945 - just too late for Anne Frank, who had died in the same camp the previous month.

'Her story is indeed a miraculous one' Jewish Chronicle

'

'Verolme's tale is shocking and harrowing, and a great example of triumph over adversity' Glasgow Herald

Hetty Verolme, oldest of three children of a Jewish family in Amsterdam, was thirteen when in 1943 she was transported with her parents and brothers to the repatriation camp at Westerbork, and from there to the concentration camp at Belsen.