Past Programs
Books - Biography - 2007
Let the music do the writing... Read Transcript
16/11/2007
It's that time again -- Christmas is almost upon us, and with it the perennial question of what to give people who might already have everything. We all know at least one...
Well, pop biographies are pretty good stocking fillers. But they can also be more than that.
If you go beyond the glossy autobiographies of huge rock stars like Eric Clapton or even the slightly rougher Slash of the band Guns 'n' Roses, there's a wealth of rock, pop, and hip hop histories that might just be too big for a modest stocking this Christmas. They are histories that place the music in its wider social and cultural contexts.
Zulfikar Abbany has been reading a few, but is still wondering why we feel the need to write and read about the music we love to hear.
Inga Clendinnen on the impossibility of biography Read Transcript
09/11/2007
Virginia Woolf loved reading autobiography, but said biography itself was impossible. So, can life stories be told? It's a question that Inga Clendinnen, the writer and historian, faced when she was asked to give this year's National Biography Award Lecture.
Inga Clendinnen has been praised around the world for her work on Aztec and Mayan cultures, and her book, Reading the Holocaust, received many awards, including being named as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times in 1999.
The following year, Inga Clendinnen published her own memoir, Tiger's Eye, but it's something that she looks back on with mixed emotions.
She recently gave her lecture, on the impossibility of biography, in Sydney and a week later, in Melbourne. It was the fifth ever National Biography Award Lecture, an annual lecture tied to the National Biography Award, which was established in 1996 to encourage the highest standards of writing in biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in the genre.
And this year, the award went to Jacob G Rosenberg for East of Time, set in Poland during Rosenberg's own childhood.
Here is Inga Clendinnen giving the 2007 National Biography Award Lecture on Virginia Woolf's declaration of the impossibility of biography.
A tale of two Gertrudes -- with Robert Silvers
18/10/2007
Robert Silvers from the New York Review of Books with a tale of two Gertrudes: Gertrude Stein who, with her partner Alice B. Toklas, is the subject of a new book by Janet Malcolm, and Gertrude Bell, the snobbish Englishwoman who translated Persian poetry, climbed mountains, and was the architect of the modern state of Iraq.
Simon Sebag Montefiore on The Young Stalin
28/09/2007
Joseph Stalin may have been a man of steel, a force behind the Russian Revolution, a founding father of the communist party and head of the superpower Soviet Union until his death in 1953.
But he was also part punk gangster, part poet, intellectual, charismatic visionary and orchestrator of some of the worst human rights violations in modern history.
Stalin's personal journey from studying the priesthood to despot is brought to life in a new biography by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.
At the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival, Simon Sebag Montefiore talks about his most recent book, The Young Stalin, and unfolds one of the events that established Stalin as one of Lenin's key henchmen -- the most famous robbery of the early 20th century. Stalin was the man behind it all.
Claire Tomalin on Thomas Hardy: Edinburgh International Book Festival
21/09/2007
We're familiar with those lusty rural dramas served up like warm cider on Sunday night telly: fields and tumbles in haystacks, women defying social conventions, belligerent old men with handlebar moustaches, and stern young men with political passions. Hardy's novels have been favourites for morphing into movies or teledramas.
But he was also one of the most prolific English poets of the early 20th century, writing almost 1,000 poems, either tributes to his first wife Emma or romantic nature poems with an edge.
Today we bring you biographer Claire Tomalin, as she discusses her new exploration of Hardy's life and his poetry. The talk was recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Claire's highly acclaimed biographies include Mary Wolstonecraft, a book on Shelley and his world, on Kathryn Mansfield; The Invisible Woman, the story of Mary Turnin and Charles Dickens (which won a few awards including the NCR Book Award), and Samuel Pepys: The Unequal Self, which was named Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. She has also written on Jane Austen.
Germaine Greer: Edinburgh International Book Festival
07/09/2007
The irrepressible intelligence of Germaine Greer has recently been applied to a subject she knows a lot about. She did her PhD in 1968 on the ethic of love and marriage in Shakespeare's early comedies, and in her new book Shakespeare's Wife, she takes another look at the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. The marriage has had a very bad press from generations of Oxford and Cambridge dons, who regarded it as cold and loveless. But Germaine argues that Anne has been undervalued both for what she meant to Shakespeare and what she contributed to his work.
This lecture was recorded by the Book Show at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
David Leavitt on Alan Turing Read Transcript
30/08/2007
Champion of artificial intelligence and the mathematical mind behind the Allies' victory in World War II, Alan Turing was crippled by treatment that was meant to 'cure' him of homosexuality. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, David Leavitt sensitively portrays this tragedy, which led to Turing's suicide.
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, by Linda Colley Read Transcript
21/08/2007
In The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Linda Colley documents the life of British woman, Elizabth Marsh, who is conceived in Jamaica and born in Britain in 1735, to a British naval carpenter Milbourne Marsh, and a mother who may have been of mixed racial origin.
Elizabeth Marsh's story depicts a kind of female Candide who, among her many real life escapades, is captured at sea by Morocco corsairs and lives to literally write a book about this experiences. She survives being bankrupted twice due to a feckless husband, and after giving birth to two children, spends her early middle age years traipsing around India with another man!
Linda Colley, joins the Book Show from the BBC studios in Norwich.
Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books Read Transcript
11/07/2007
A new novel from JM Coetzee is always a publishing event. An excerpt just published in the New York Review of Books of Diary of A Bad Year suggests that Coetzee is yet again playing with the bridge between fiction and non-fiction.
Also we look at two new books which attempt to reveal the real Hillary Clinton...
And we ask, what's behind the new surge of interest in the writing of the late Latin American writer Roberto Bolano?
To discuss all this and more is the editor of the New York Review of Books and Book Show regular, Robert Silvers, speaking to Ramona Koval.
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
13/05/2007
The American writer Caroline Weber talks to the Book Show about her book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It is a biography told through wardrobe that captures the extravagance of Versailles and the political backlash against a monarch who played a life-long game of expensive dress-ups while her people starved – and then received the ultimate nip'n'tuck at the guillotine.
Caroline Weber joins Michael Gurr from a New York studio.
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
09/05/2007
The American writer Caroline Weber talks to the Book Show about her book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It is a biography told through wardrobe that captures the extravagance of Versailles and the political backlash against a monarch who played a life-long game of expensive dress-ups while her people starved – and then received the ultimate nip'n'tuck at the guillotine.
Caroline Weber joins Michael Gurr from a New York studio.
Ronnie Corbett's It's Goodnight From Him (review)
07/05/2007
Ronnie Corbett, comedic partner of actor Ronnie Barker, has written a warm, personal memoir of the duo's partnership and friendship during the hugely popular British television show The Two Ronnies. Polash Larsen reviews And It's Goodnight From Him: The Autobiography of the Two Ronnies for The Book Show.
Justin Wintle's The Perfect Hostage: the story of Aung San Suu Kyi Read Transcript
06/05/2007
Aung San Suu Kyi is more than one Burmese woman's name – it's a name that has come to represent a particular kind of resistance to dictatorship. As the imprisoned figurehead of the Burmese democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi is often spoken of with a kind of reverence.
Now freedom always needs its heroes, but sometimes the flesh-and-blood person can get lost behind the icon.
Justin Wintle is a British author, reviewer and journalist who's written a book that is as much a portrait of Burma as it is of its human subject.
Perfect Hostage is one of those rare non-fiction books that has you in suspense even when you know what's going to happen; you know what's coming even as you panic at its approach.
Justin Wintle has written widely about Vietnam, China, Spain, Islam...and now a book that goes a long way towards making very vivid the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi – the real one, not the silent enigma of Western imagination.
Justin Wintle joins Michael Gurr from London and Michael observes that this is a book underpinned by a fierce indignation. He asks Justin if that indignation was there for him when he started writing –or did it grow?
Justin Wintle's The Perfect Hostage: the story of Aung San Suu Kyi
02/05/2007
Aung San Suu Kyi is more than one Burmese woman's name – it's a name that has come to represent a particular kind of resistance to dictatorship. As the imprisoned figurehead of the Burmese democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi is often spoken of with a kind of reverence.
Now freedom always needs its heroes, but sometimes the flesh-and-blood person can get lost behind the icon.
Justin Wintle is a British author, reviewer and journalist who's written a book that is as much a portrait of Burma as it is of its human subject.
Perfect Hostage is one of those rare non-fiction books that has you in suspense even when you know what's going to happen; you know what's coming even as you panic at its approach.
Justin Wintle has written widely about Vietnam, China, Spain, Islam...and now a book that goes a long way towards making very vivid the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi – the real one, not the silent enigma of Western imagination.
Justin Wintle joins Michael Gurr from London and Michael observes that this is a book underpinned by a fierce indignation. He asks Justin if that indignation was there for him when he started writing –or did it grow?
The examined life
25/04/2007
Biography and storytelling are brought to life in a discussion about the skills required to be a good observer of life. Earlier this year we heard Robert Dessaix on observation, wisdom and narrative. He was one of the speakers at The Examined Life at the State Library of NSW. Today we bring you more from The Examined Life, titled 'The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion, The Writer, The Writing and the Narrative Powers of Transformation', in which the speakers were Alice Spigelman and Arnold Zable. First we hear from Dr Vera Ranki, from The Examined Life Institute, who chaired the event and is the author of The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion.
James Barr on T.E. Lawrence in Arabia
24/04/2007
James Barr graduated from Oxford with a first in Modern History, went on to write leaders for the Daily Telegraph and now works in London. Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-18 is his first book. Here he is speaking at last year's Edinburgh Festival.
Calum's Road: Roger Hutchinson
08/04/2007
Some time in the 1950s (we can't be sure exactly when), a shy, unassuming, but articulate Scotsman called Calum MacLeod left his crofter's cottage early one morning, with a wheelbarrow, a pickaxe, a shovel and a crowbar. He walked some miles south of his home on the wild, beautiful and tiny Hebridean island of Raasay and he started to build a road.
This moment was the beginning of a remarkable achievement by one man, a feat that took more than 10 years to complete, and one that's entered the realm of Scottish, British, even European legend.
But this extraordinary act was not meant as some great theatrical flourish. It was in fact the last gasp of defiance in the face of terrible treatment meted out to many generations of traditional residents of Raasay (and many other remote islands and regions of Scotland). These were acts of forced removal and transportation by wealthy landowners in the 19th century and, more recently, disregard by governments and their agencies resulting in the almost total depopulation of the islands.
Journalist and author Roger Hutchinson first encountered the tough and charming Calum MacLeod during the 1960s. But his book Calum's Road is more than just a tribute to this one man. It's an eloquent telling of the history of Raasay's people, of the cruelties meted out to these crofting communities, and of the road that is now something of a shrine to engineers and land-artists and awe-struck people from all over the world.
Roger Hutchinson spoke to The Book Show's Michael Shirrefs from the BBC studios in the Scottish city of Inverness, and he describes the landscape that produced this story.
Calum's Road: Roger Hutchinson Read Transcript
04/04/2007
Journalist and author Roger Hutchinson first encountered the tough and charming Calum MacLeod during the 1960s. But his book Calum's Road is more than just a tribute to this one man. It's an eloquent telling of the history of Raasay's people, of the cruelties meted out to these crofting communities, and of the road that is now something of a shrine to engineers and land-artists and awe-struck people from all over the world.
Roger Hutchinson spoke to The Book Show's Michael Shirrefs from the BBC studios in the Scottish city of Inverness, and he describes the landscape that produced this story.
Miranda Seymour's memoir of obsession: In My Father's House Read Transcript
01/04/2007
In her new book In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love, Miranda Seymour turns her considerable powers of observation, research and language to a story close to home, indeed the story revolves around her home and the obsessive love of her father, George Fitzroy Seymour, for a house called Thrumpton.
Miranda Seymour's memoir of obsession: In My Father's House Read Transcript
29/03/2007
Miranda Seymour joins us to talk about her memoir, In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love. Miranda Seymour has written novels, children's stories, and several works of non-fiction including literary biographies of Henry James, Robert Graves, Mary Shelley and Ottoline Morrell. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts, and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham Trent.
In her new book In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love, Miranda Seymour turns her considerable powers of observation, research and language to a story close to home, indeed the story revolves around her home and the obsessive love of her father, George Fitzroy Seymour, for a house called Thrumpton.
National Biography Award winner: Jacob Rosenberg Read Transcript
28/03/2007
The National Biography Award 2007 was announced last night, and the winner, Jacob Rosenberg, joins us on the program this morning. Jacob won the prize for his book East of Time, which also won last year's NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
Jacob Rosenberg has written a number of books, both prose and poetry, in English and in Yiddish, his first language. This latest book is a collection of stories he has carried in his head for a long time, stories from his childhood to his early 20s.
Jacob Rosenberg has lived in Australia since 1948. He was born in Poland, the youngest member of a working-class Jewish family. The family lived in Lodz, a city known as the Polish Manchester because of its textile industry. With the German occupation of Poland, Jacob and his family were confined to the Lodz ghetto until they were sent to Auschwitz. Within a few days of arriving there, he was the only one of his family still alive.
Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen
25/03/2007
This year will see the release of no less than seven new film versions of Jane Austen's novels and other stories inspired by her work, including the controversial bio-pic Becoming Jane, which attempts to put to rest the view that Jane Austen was a prim and proper maid who never really experienced love at first hand.
In Becoming Jane, director Julian Jarrold has presented Jane Austen, played by the very becoming Anne Hathaway, as a girl with the same lusts and drives as any young women, but who is restrained by the etiquette of the age.
The film concentrates on a small part of Jane's life, when she was 21 years old and living with her family at Steventon in Hampshire. There she fell in love with handsome Irishman Tom Lefroy (played by James McAvoy), who could not afford to marry. We know through Jane's letters to her sister Cassandra that the pair danced together at balls, flirted, and then parted forever. Because little biographical record survives, that's all we know for sure.
However Jon Spence, American-Australian writer and author of 2003's Becoming Jane Austen—the biography on which the film is heavily based—has turned to the novels for insight. He says that there is no doubt that Tom was the love of Jane's life, and that the passionate heights and quick demise of that love fuelled and inspired all six of Jane's great romantic novels—from the young and lusty Pride and prejudice through to the darker and more mature Persuasion.
He says another figure to loom large in Jane's writerly imagination was her glamorous and flirtatious cousin Eliza de Feuillide, whose hot pursuit of Jane's dandyish brother Henry Austen occupied the writer's thoughts for years.
Jon Spence is speaking today from Sydney to The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Becoming Jane's will be released on 29 March 2007.
Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen Read Transcript
22/03/2007
This year will see the release of no less than seven new film versions of Jane Austen's novels and other stories inspired by her work, including the controversial bio-pic Becoming Jane, which attempts to put to rest the view that Jane Austen was a prim and proper maid who never really experienced love at first hand.
Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley Read Transcript
30/01/2007
The late Australian painter Howard Arkley was as much famous for his death by drug overdose in 1999 as he was for his pop-art take on Australian suburbia. Arts writer and academic Rex Butler surveys a new monograph on Arkley. Titled Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, it's been released on the occasion of a major travelling exhibition.
