My seventh panel discussion was titled "Biography: The Famous and the Infamous." There were three panelists.
The following short biographies were taken from the LA Times Festival of Books website:
Terry Alford is an author, historian and professor emeritus at Northern Virginia Community College. He is a founding board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute of Washington, D.C., and is an internationally recognized authority on John Wilkes Booth and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. His latest book is “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth,” a finalist for the 2015 L.A. Times Book Prize in Biography.
Kirstin Downey is the author of two widely acclaimed books, “The Woman Behind the New Deal” and “Isabella the Warrior Queen,” both of which were finalists for the L.A. Times Book Prize for Biography. A longtime Washington Post reporter, Downey was a Nieman fellow and a finalist for the Livingston Prize for Outstanding Young Journalist in the U.S.
Charlotte Decroes Jacobs is a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Her first biography, “Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease,” was called one of the best five books on doctors’ lives by The Wall Street Journal. Her second, “Jonas Salk: A Life” was named one of the 100 notable books of 2015 by the New York Times Book Review and is a finalist for the 2015 L.A. Times Book Prize in Biography.
The following are my notes from the panel discussion. There are potential misinterpretations to what I heard so take that into consideration.
Downey. Queen Isabella fascinated her as a little girl. Here was a woman who sent Christopher Columbus to the Americas. Queen Isabella made Spanish the second most spoken language.
Downey's book isn't just about Queen Isabella, but about what was happening around the globe during her reign. Queen Isabella grew up during a time when Europe was in opposition to the Ottoman Empire.
Downey looked at Queen Isabella from various perspectives. She went to Venice and looked at documents in Italian. The Catholic Pope at the time was Spanish so she looked at documents that were in Latin.
After Queen Isabella, the game of chess included a queen.
Jacobs. Jacobs' town was selected as a polio vaccine test city. She herself was an original pioneer of the polio vaccine. Jonas Salk became a hero. She decided to write a biography on Salk. What did he do as an encore? She found that he was enigmatic. He was loved by public, but shunned by the scientific community that saw him as conniving. He was controversial in the scientific community, because many felt that he was seeking all the glory for himself.
Jacobs had a hard time getting access to the archives. Salk's three sons made it difficult for her. She was given six months to review documents and then she had to ask again. The sons were protective of his image. They didn't want a People Magazine style biography. She did over one hundred interviews.
She found out near the end that Salk was a skirt chaser.
Alford. He always liked stories of unusual individuals, which drove him to write a book about John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln had actually seen Booth in a play. Booth was not a born loser. He actually had something to lose in his assassination of Lincoln. He was a successful actor. And by definition he was a great actor. His mother convinced him to stay out of the Confederate army.
Alford gained more respect for Lincoln, because his research showed how many extreme forces he had to deal with.
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