Biography, vol. 32, no. 4 (2009)

EDITORS’ NOTE, iii

ARTICLES

Reagan’s Back: The Dutch Controversy and American Letters
Emily Bauman, 643
“Reagan’s Back” is a study of the reception surrounding Edmund Morris’s controversial biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch. I argue that the hostility that greeted Morris’s experiment indicated a resistance to the image of Reagan presented in the book itself, a “free indirect” portrayal enabled by literary fictional techniques antithetical to Reagan iconography as it has developed over the past two decades.

Serious Play: Transgender, and the Relationship between Performance and Identity in the Life Writing
of RuPaul and Kate Bornstein
Elizabeth Schewe, 670
RuPaul’s and Bornstein’s life writing is influenced not only by their identifications with gay or transsexual traditions, but also their “disidentifications” with the assimilationist queer politics gaining force in the 1990s. Each negotiates identities on the boundaries of multiple categories while struggling to engage mainstream readers as active participants in creating textual meaning and challenging repressive politics.

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2008–2009
Phyllis E. Wachter, 696

REVIEWS

Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory, by Bella Brodzki
Reviewed by Eva Karpinski, 838

Biography in Early Modern France, 1540–1630: Forms and Functions, by Katharine MacDonald
Reviewed by Sarah Nelson, 840

Thinking through the Mothers: Reimagining Women’s Biographies, by Janet Beizer
Reviewed by Lynne Huffer, 843

Constructing the Self, by Valerie Gray Hardcastle
Reviewed by Marya Schechtman, 847

Voltaire’s Tormented Soul: A Psychobiographic Inquiry, by Alexander J. Nemeth
Reviewed by Judith P. Zinsser, 849

The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas, by Kevin J. Hayes
Reviewed by Peter S. Onuf, 854

“Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact”: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow, by Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Reviewed by Will Brantley, 856

Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully
Reviewed by Nadja Durbach, 858

Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens, by Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell
Reviewed by Marcia Landy, 860

Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics, edited by E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget
Reviewed by Tyler Cowen, 864

Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa E. Kirch and Liz Rohan
Reviewed by Linda Ferreira-Buckley, 867

Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times, by Erika Hasebe-Ludt, Cynthia M. Chambers, and Carl Leggo
Reviewed by Margaret Macintyre Latta, 870

The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, by Thomas Larson
Reviewed by E. Nicole Meyer, 874

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 876
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, 934

INDEX: VOLUME 32, 2009, 937