Biography & Memoir

Ireland’s Coming of Age and Mine

For a Dublin kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the whole experience was mirrored in the nation’s quest for identity.

October 18, 2021

Not to Be

A Matter of Death and Life presents the closing scenes of a long marriage as both an informal diary and an instructive text.

November 4, 2021 issue

‘This Obstinate Little Man’

Tom Segev’s biography of David Ben-Gurion depicts a man who intended to become a Zionist Lenin but ended up “an Israeli King Lear.”

November 4, 2021 issue

The Double Bookkeeper

A new biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new edition of her journals give us a personal history of twentieth-century sexual control, of lives lived not in the closet but in the cellar.

November 4, 2021 issue

Calling Grandma

“Rouhi yamama, you know you are my favorite.” These endearments, even when they sloshed in her mouth like the ice cubes in her drink, always made my troubles melt away.

October 2, 2021

The Storyteller

W.G. Sebald’s books suggest that we are powerless to remember adequately and powerless to forget.

October 21, 2021 issue

Hollywood’s Master Builder

The African-American architect Paul R. Williams channeled the glamorous but breezy spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood in designs that allowed his clients and the public to imagine themselves in fantasies akin to those spun out by the great movie studios.

October 21, 2021 issue

A Mind in Pain

For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate.

October 21, 2021 issue

In the Fire

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi fearlessly told unpleasant truths about discrimination against women in Arab countries.

October 21, 2021 issue

Wits’ End

Pat Rogers’s new book is salutary because it gives us a modern sense of Alexander Pope, a figure usually portrayed as ultra-traditional.

October 21, 2021 issue