Both sides of the author’s family were remarkable. His maternal grandfather, Alfred Wiener, was a prominent German Jew who created the most extensive archives documenting the Holocaust; Alfred’s wife and daughters were deported to a concentration camp. The author’s paternal grandmother was transported to a gulag in Siberia. A tale of survival, eloquently told.
Almost everyone on Earth has heard of James Bond. But fewer know the details of how exciting and tormented the life of 007’s creator, Ian Fleming, was. This biography has flaws, but it will still be remembered as definitive, tracing Fleming’s childhood, military service, espionage, love affairs and writing career.
Cândido Rondon, an orphan from Brazil’s poor hinterland, rose to become a military officer who oversaw monumental engineering works in the Amazon and pioneered a non-violent approach to local indigenous groups. A vivid look at a hero whose humanism was ahead of his time, by a journalist for the New York Times.
Most people are lucky if they enjoy one distinguished career: J.L. Austin had two. He shook up the study of philosophy at Oxford. And, as this scrupulous and engrossing biography shows, he played a crucial role as an intelligence analyst in the Allied invasion of France in 1944.
This magnificent biography is an overdue attempt to grapple with Martin Luther King in all his complexity. The author, an American journalist, makes the civil-rights leader’s courage and moral vision seem all the more exceptional for having come from a man with so many ordinary human flaws.
The most complete biography of the economist who did more than any other to inspire free-market reforms around the world in the 1980s. It documents Friedman’s role in shaping laissez-faire economic policies and libertarian thought and shows his enduring relevance, despite the world’s protectionist turn.
Written sympathetically and with skill by the chief art critic of the Financial Times, this is the first account in English of the much-loved artist’s life and work. Monet was a tempestuous man, whose most lasting relationship—in art as in life—was with water.
A kind of posthumous memoir in which a New Yorker writer (who died in 2021 and once compared journalists to con-men) probes memory, childhood and storytelling itself. “Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud?” she asks, with characteristic incisiveness.
A memoir from a Uyghur poet now living in exile in America. He recounts how Xinjiang was transformed into a panopticon of state control, as the Chinese government began the detention and torture of Uyghur Muslims. An urgent tale of survival and subversion.
In this thought-provoking inquiry into the life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s long-suffering wife, the author’s aim is not to “cancel” Orwell, a thinker she deeply admires. Instead, by imaginatively resurrecting Eileen, she explores patriarchy and asks why women still vanish into subordinate roles.