Past Programs
Books - Biography - 2008
Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography Read Transcript
20/11/2008
Professor Jill Roe has produced a substantial biography of Stella Miles Franklin, the author of My Brilliant Career, who left a legacy that's remembered every year in the Miles Franklin Award for Australian Writing. It's the story of a feisty and smart young woman who had early literary success and who made a career out of agitating for women's and workers' rights and in journalism. It's also a story of amazing application to the task of writing, whether the work was published or not, and it's a portait of the times in which she lived.
Public figures, private lives
28/10/2008
Is the private life of a public figure a proper subject for biography? And how does a biographer decide what to reveal and what to screen from public gaze? Historian David Day has written biographies of three public figures: Ben Chifley, John Curtin and Andrew Fisher. He discusses balancing the need to explore the private landscape of subjects with a duty to be discreet about other people's lives.
House of Exile by Evelyn Juers Read Transcript
17/10/2008
In Evelyn Juers' book House of Exile we meet Heinrich Mann and his wife -- 24 years his junior -- Nelly Kroeger.
Heinrich was Nobel-prize-winner Thomas Mann's less famous brother. He was a writer too, and a political activist, and his wife was a bar hostess. It was a marriage that was not exactly approved of by the wealthy, middle-class Mann family. But that was the least of their worries -- Heinrich was a critic of the National Socialists and they fled Germany in 1933, ending up in sunny California, USA, with other expat European intellectuals.
This is a book that challenges traditional understandings of biography.
Simon Winchester on Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China Read Transcript
03/10/2008
Joseph Needham was a scientist, polyglot, traveller, diplomat, a socialist and a Christian, an exponent of free love, a nudist, a morris dancer and most of all he was passionate about China. As editor and co-author of Science and Civilisation in China, a massive, multi-volume study, he spent more than half a century collecting and compiling evidence that China was the birthplace of everything from chess to cartography, from the stirrup to the suspension bridge. Simon Winchester tells the story of Needham's life and work in Bomb, Book and Compass.
Richard Holmes: The Age of Wonder Read Transcript
16/09/2008
The Age of Wonder is the title of literary biographer Richard Holmes' new book, subtitled How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Starting when the young Joseph Banks arrived in Tahiti in 1796 Richard Holmes tells us of the grand explorations and discoveries of the age, including a new planet, a new way of travelling and seeing the world by air, and a new way of looking at the make-up of matter itself. It was an age of wonder not only to those who worked in science but to the great writers and poets of the time such as Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.
The end of the golden age of biography Read Transcript
23/07/2008
Biographer Kathryn Hughes asks whether it is the end of the golden age of biography because all the most interesting subjects have already been written into the history books.
Robert Silvers, editor, New York Review of Books
25/06/2008
Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, joins The Book Show again to discuss highlights from the latest issue.
First of all, with the presidential election looming (as it seems to have been for years now), we look at someone who could well emerge as a major figure in a future Democrat government, but who few people in Australia will have heard of—Jim Webb. This is a man who's being touted as a serious contender for vice-presidential running mate, alongside Barack Obama. But he's also a remarkable character in his own right, with a public profile that's equal parts 'war hero' and writer. His first book Fields of Fire, written in 1978, has been called the best book about the Vietnam war. And his writing, along with a passion for boxing, has had him compared to the late Norman Mailer. He's also a screenwriter (Rules of Engagement) and a documentary producer, but so much of Jim Webb revolves around his experiences and attitudes to war. So Robert and Ramona discuss Jim Webb's latest book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, which reads as something of a manifesto—a pitch for high office.
Then Robert and Ramona move on to Italy, and the rather epic figure of Giuseppe Garibaldi. According to reviewer Dave Gilmour, while other heroic Italians such as Mazzini, Cavour and Victor Emmanuel have become tarnished as clear historical facts start to eclipse pure nationalistic sentiment, Garibaldi remains 'an authentic Italian hero', one of 'the generation of giants' who helped to create modern Italy between 1848 and 1870. They discuss a new book which looks at this revolutionary life—Alfonso Scirocco's Garibaldi: Citizen of the World.
And finally, a look at Edmund White's review of three new translations of work from French writer Marguerite Duras. And in the process he paints an extraordinary image of her post-war years and her intemperate lurchings from alcoholic deathbed to social centre of attention.
Queen of the Wits Read Transcript
19/06/2008
Who was Laetitia Pilkington? The 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift called her 'the most profligate whore in either Kingdom'. This was after he had once treated her as his protege. After such a public dumping, Mrs Pilkington had nothing to lose, and turned her own savage pen on her erstwhile mentor -- her memoir provides insights into Swift's strange behaviour. Norma Clarke has written a biography of the fascinating Mrs Pilkington called Queen of the Wits.
Kieran Tapsell - a passion for translating Read Transcript
10/06/2008
Translating literature is not something for the faint-hearted. It's time consuming, painstaking work and it throws up dilemmas about the use of language that can tax the most highly developed literary skills. Retired Australian commercial lawyer Kieran Tapsell began teaching himself Spanish in his early fifties and, driven by intellectual curiosity, a love of language, and a desire to share good books with friends who don't speak Spanish, he's now translating the work of major Latin American authors.
Editing poet Gwen Harwood
16/04/2008
Gwen Harwood expressed strong views about editors, especially those 'who couldn't tell poetry from a bunyip's arse'. However, she was friends with one of her editors, Allison Hoddinott, for 40 years. Poet and letter-writer, Gwen Harwood died in 1995, and Allison Hoddinott writes about her relationship with the acclaimed writer in the Island magazine.
Paula Fox Read Transcript
24/03/2008
On the Book Show today, we meet 84-year-old American novelist, memoirist and children's writer Paula Fox. And this is an extraordinary story about an extraordinary writer who's just been rediscovered after 30 years of obscurity.
Paula Fox had a turbulent childhood after she was rejected by her mother and then handed to a variety of carers. At 20 she gave up her own daughter for adoption. This she reveals in her memoir, Borrowed Finery, in which her cool observations of her early life were published last year. She went on to write controversial but award-winning children's books as well as autobiographical novels.
Now she's enjoying a revival, as her adult fiction is championed by a new generation of American writers like Jonathan Franzen, who read her 1970 novel, Desperate Characters, in passing and then realised that he ranked her above Roth, Bellow and Updike. Others have compared her with Kafka, Chekhov and Flaubert. Yet, until they were recently reissued in the United States with specially commissioned introductions and much fanfare, the last of her adult novels had been out of print since 1992, and most of her earlier books had been unavailable for decades. So when we tracked Paula Fox down to her home in Brooklyn and convinced her to come to a Manhattan studio in 2004, we were keen to speak to this woman whose work shows a remarkable ability for observing the important moments, or at least making seemingly unimportant moments full of portent. She arrived in the heat of the afternoon describing the journey uptown, and especially a rather bad-tempered woman holding a fan in the stuffy subway. It seemed almost like the beginning of another short story. Here's Ramona Koval's conversation with Paula Fox, recorded in 2004 and originally broadcast on the Radio National program Books & Writing.
The mystery of Agatha Christie Read Transcript
02/03/2008
The world's best known mystery writer is still, over 30 years after her death, English writer Agatha Christie. As a writer she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Today, Ramona Koval speaks with the writer of a new biography of Christie, Laura Thompson, whose book is called Agatha Christie: An English Mystery.
The mystery of Agatha Christie Read Transcript
28/01/2008
The world's best known mystery writer is still, over 30 years after her death, English writer Agatha Christie. As a writer she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Today, Ramona Koval speaks with the writer of a new biography of Christie, Laura Thompson, whose book is called Agatha Christie: An English Mystery.
Germaine Greer: Edinburgh International Book Festival
25/01/2008
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 latest 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.
Calum's Road: Roger Hutchinson Read Transcript
02/01/2008
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.
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
01/01/2008
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.
