"The Forgotten Singer" tells the conflicted life story of the gifted, undercelebrated novelist Esther Singer Kreitman (the sister of I.J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer) from the viewpoint of her son, Maurice Carr. Carr’s dark, brooding... Read More

Librarian Linda Maxie’s intriguing, original reference text does an impressive job of collecting notable books about interesting people. Librarian Linda Maxie’s "Library Lin’s Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs" is a... Read More

Drawing on his letters home, "Searching for Charles" vivifies a nineteenth-century English immigrant’s new life on the Illinois prairie. Stephen Watts’s family biography "Searching for Charles" makes use of an ancestor’s... Read More

"A Slow, Calculated Lynching" is Devery S. Anderson’s biography of Clyde Kennard, whose desire for an education and opportunities led to his gradual martyrdom. Kennard was born in Mississippi in 1927; he grew up facing entrenched... Read More

Antonia Fraser’s biography of Caroline Lamb reassesses the English noblewoman’s life—too often defined and confined by her notorious affair with Lord Byron. Born in 1785, Caroline was a bright, charming, and rather high-strung... Read More

Judith Hicks Stiehm’s thorough biography covers the legal career of the United States’s first woman attorney general. Reno grew up “deeply rooted in Miami” at a time when the future metropolis retained a small-town feel. Her... Read More

In Nothing Could Stop Her, Rona Arato tells the remarkable life story of trailblazing Jewish American journalist Ruth Gruber. Born in Brooklyn in 1911 to a Jewish family from Russia, Gruber was unstoppable from the start. Intelligent and... Read More

"Serving Herself" is Ashley Brown’s impressive biography of Althea Gibson, a multifaceted trailblazer in sports. Gibson was a sports prodigy whose drive and career path bewildered her working-class family. She had to take side gigs to... Read More