A marvelous, chilling account of Douglas Mawson’s death-defying 1913 expedition of Antarctica, illustrated by Frank Hurley's never-before-published photographs of the journey.

When the virtuosic writer David Foster Wallace took his own life in 2008, readers lost a voice that captured their era with an inspiring exuberance and relentless intelligence.  Drawing on a wealth of archival material, D.T. Max gives us a revelatory look at an author whose personal struggles underlay his groundbreaking books.

Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking revolutionized American kitchens. This loving portrait follows Child from her surprising role in WWII, through post-war Paris where she honed her craft, and on to culinary stardom. 

For three extraordinary young women -- Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis -- living abroad in Paris in the years after World War II was a transformative experience. Alice Kaplan offers readers a unique perspective on the hopes and ambitions of these influential figures as their world views were shaped by their time in the City of Light.

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Before he died in 2007, Kurt Vonnegut granted biographer Charles J. Shields (Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee) access to his life and letters. The result is an absorbing, authoritative work on the literary iconoclast whose darkly comic, poignantly profound novels (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, among others) became touchstones for an era and redefined the way we think about our future and ourselves.

If, as Churchill famously said, Russia was "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," then at the dark core of the whole package resided the ever-unknowable Leon Trotsky. But Joshua Rubenstein's new biography goes a long way toward explicating the other Soviet founding father, delving deep into Trotsky's childhood to locate the formative experiences that rendered him a flawed, charismatic leader who had the misfortune to run afoul of Stalin.

In this thrill-a-minute, jaw-dropping biography of Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), female ruler of the province of Forlì, Elizabeth Lev puts us in the shoes of a Renaissance woman wielding unprecedented power. Following Sforza from her youth in the Milanese court through assassination-plagued marriages and a deadly rivalry with the Borgias, Lev charts a bloody, survivalist career for her heroine that will both appall and inspire.

Iconic screen presence Spencer Tracy is the worthy subject of this in-depth, masterful account of his life. A bastion of solidity, simplicity, and competence in his films, Tracy proves to have been rather different away from the lens, a conflicted mix of faithfulness, passion, self-doubt, and bad behavior that James Curtis documents unflinchingly yet with immense empathy.

Was Eisenhower the Leave It to Beaver president of myth? Or did the ex-General and war hero possess surprising depths and prowess? Jim Newton stands firmly in the latter camp, focusing on Eisenhower's years in office and revealing the majestic catalogue of his official accomplishments, from overseeing the creation of a national highway system to shepherding the USA's atomic arsenal to beating down the rancid politics of McCarthyism. 

"And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on," Steve Jobs once said about his coming of age. The news of his death has touched many of us who benefited from that curiosity and intuition for so long. As we remember his astonishing life of innovation, we look forward to Walter Isaacson's new biography of the man whose vision transformed the way we connect to the world, to each other, and to our selves.

You know Diane Arbus's work: Her arresting, often disturbing, black-and-white photographs examine people on the periphery of the "ordinary" world, hinting at dark inner lives and finding the freakish in the normal and the normal in the freakish. This illuminating "psychobiography" by William Todd Schultz puts the focus on Arbus's own life, exploring the idea that her photographs said as much about the enigmatic woman behind the lens (a suicide at age 48) as the subjects in front of it.

She's been a celluloid sex symbol and a serial trophy wife, a protester and a pariah, a feminist and a fitness guru, a daughter and a mother: Jane Fonda has arguably slipped into more roles off-screen than on. Patricia Bosworth examines Fonda's many incarnations in this colorful, clear-eyed biographical page-turner, and brings us closer to the core of this shape-shifting actress than we've ever gotten before.

William Shirer's reporting from Nazi Berlin and his monumentally influential volume of history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, acquainted the world with the true extent of Nazi evil. Steve Wick's new biography places the man and his work in context and reveals how Shirer managed to get the kind of intimate access to the German high command that made his writing so reputable.

Few men have written their signature across our public spaces as vividly, personally, and influentially as Olmsted, designer of New York's Central and Prospect Parks--among many other monumental urban refuges. Justin Martin's first-ever full-scale biography reveals other fascinating sides of the famed landscape designer as well, including reformer and journalist. 

 When most of us hear the name Noah Webster, we think: "dictionary." But did you know that Noah Webster also published New York City's first daily newspaper, played an important role in founding Amherst College, and enjoyed close acquaintance with George Washington and other Founders? Joshua Kendall's biography makes a persuasive case that one of the most important words Webster helped define was "American."

Now in paperback: Michael O'Brien's fascinating chronicle of a first lady's journey across Europe as an escaped Napoleon makes a renewed bid for power. Our reviewer, Max Byrd, called it "an irresistible adventure story and a brilliant portrait of Louisa Adams [wife of John Quincy Adams, our 6th president] that ought to rescue her for good from half exotic obscurity."

The career of the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was marked by personal courage and literary achievement in the shadow of ominous authority and  sociopolitical turmoil. Biographer Loseff, an intimate of the Nobel Laureate, illuminates his extroardinary life and times.

Writing in the Washington Post, BNR columnist Michael Dirda hails this groundbreaking volume as "a lucid, deeply researched biography," and recommends sampling De Quincey's own writings first for best appreciation of his life's tale. In Robert Morrison's portrait, De Quincey emerges, in one aspect, as the forerunner of today's flood of tell-all memoirists.

An interpretive biography of the life of Marie Curie in unconventional graphic novel form, Redniss's tale benefits from her on-the-spot research into the various venues frequented by Curie. Blocks of robustly informative text are bolstered by drawings reminiscent of Egon Schiele's work, in an aptly European style.

Ida Craddock (1857-1902) earned notoriety as an advocate of women's rights, a student of human sexuality, and a proponent of mystical exploration in an era that felt all three territories (to say nothing of belly-dancing, of which she was something of a devotee) were better left unexamined. Her remarkable and bracingly eccentric life, recounted here by Leigh Eric Schmidt, represents the intersection of free speech, psychiatry, sex, spiritualism, and politics, a yeasty nexus still pulsating today.

Few individuals have contributed more to popular culture than the musicologist Alan Lomax, who discovered and popularized such performers as Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Without his efforts, chronicled in John Szwed's welcome biography, the musical landscape of the twenty-first century might well be unrecognizable.

Andrew McConnell Stott's biography of the late-Georgian era's most celebrated clown examines Joseph Grimaldi's revolutionary approach to the jester's role, and his unlikely friendship with such literary celebrities as Lord Byron and Charles Dickens.

Paul David Pope tells the story of his grandfather Generoso, an  immigrant who rose from laborer to New York construction titan and who also wielded political influence as  publisher of the Italian-language newspaper Il Progresso, and his father Gene, who created a tabloid empire with the National Enquirer. Briskly told, it's filled with larger-than-iife characters from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Frank Costello—think Horatio Alger meets The Godfather meets Gawker.

Some historical figures become more fascinating with each passing decade, and Lawrence of Arabia is one. As Middle Eastern issues continue to bedevil international relations, the magnificently stirring life of this English adventurer—brilliantly recounted here by Michael Korda—seems ever more relevant, and ever more mysterious.

A taxidermist action hero? That's the only characterization we can give to the over-stuffed, exotic, dangerous life of Carl Akeley (1864-1926), the Indiana-Jones-style adventurer responsible for such landmark scholarly exhibits as the American Museum of Natural History's Africa dioramas. Jay Kirk's rousing biography follows Akeley across several continents in his pursuit of science—and thrills.

This refreshing dual biography of the third and fourth Presidents of the U.S., by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, depicts these Founders not as plaster saints, but as feisty young idealists—and pals, strivers, and conquerors to boot.

Controversially including accounts of an early incident of rape committed by the author of Lord of the Flies, this biography fills out the lopsided portrait of a writer whose subsequent novels never attained the fame of his first, but still earned him a Nobel Prize. Read more...

A Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a trenchant modern theologian, as his books—Ethics and The Cost of Discipleship, to name two—amply testify. Eric Metaxas's meticulously researched biography reveals that he was also a figure of extraordinary moral courage in Nazi Germany. A riveting story of historical and spiritiual import. Read more...

Eminent hypochondriacs -- Charlotte Brontë, James Boswell, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Alice James, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol -- examined with care by a thoughtful writer. Read more...