Biography

What does it mean to be a woman who had a boyhood? That's the question LGBTQ activist Jennifer Finney Boylan set out to explore her new memoir, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs.

When TV critic Emily Nussbaum was growing up in the '70s, she says television wasn't something to be analyzed, criticized and picked apart.

"Even people who loved to watch TV would put it down," she recalls. "It was considered, at best, a kind of delicious-but-bad-for-you treat, and, at worst, more like chain-smoking, like something you did by yourself that messed up your brain."

Writer John Szwed is the author of the new biography, So What: The Life of Miles Davis about the influential jazz trumpeter. Szwed is the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Music and American Studies at Yale University. He is also the author of the biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, about another innovative musician.

Danielle Allen's memoir centers on her cousin Michael, who was sentenced to a long prison term for carjacking when he was 15. Three years after his release, he was found shot to death in a parked car.

After defying her country's ban on woman drivers, Manal al Sharif was arrested. The outcry by people all over the world led to her release. She tells her story from growing up in Mecca, and adhering to the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to being a security engineer at Aramco, the Saudi national oil company.

Illustrator Marjane Satrapi is the author of the memoir, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. The book is in the form of an illustrated comic. Satrapi was born in 1969 in Iran, and grew up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. One reviewer writes, "A triumph... Like Maus, Persepolis is one of those comic books capable of seducing even those most allergic to the genre."

Buck's new memoir details his experiences in sports and life, including his addiction to hair-plug transplants. When it comes to announcing, he says, "I don't have a rooting interest for either side."

For the composer, life is how the past and the future connect. Glass' memoir, Words Without Music, looks back on his childhood, travels and music. Originally broadcast April 6, 2015.

Charles and David Koch have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring their libertarian views into the mainstream. In a new book, Daniel Schulman looks at the roots of their ideology.