Earlier this month, FSG published two books on twentieth-century American political figures: William H. Chafe’s Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal and Joseph Crespino’s Strom Thurmond’s America. Neither one is a straightforward biography. Bill and Hillary, which tracks the Clintons’ lives but is focused on the dynamic of their relationship, almost resists classification. Meanwhile, Strom Thurmond’s America is a political biography that out of necessity highlights its subject’s greatest personal failure. We asked the authors to read each other’s book and then discuss, over email, the art of biography. Joe Crespino: One of the things that struck me in reading your book, Bill, was the challenge of writing about people who are so articulate and skilled about shaping their own personal and political narratives. And it’s not only that the Clintons are articulate; they are baby boomers who came of age in a culture of self-exploration and therapeutic analysis. Bill Clinton’s explanations of his own actions and motivations are often self-serving and full of rationalizations, but they are never uninteresting, and in many cases, hold genuine insights. Bill Chafe: Both Bill and Hillary were very self-conscious. They thought a lot about their choices in life. And, of course, both wrote memoirs. Bill, in particular, devotes the first sixty pages or so of his book My Life to his insight into his “parallel lives,” the “secrets” that underlay so much of his troubled journey. He goes to great lengths to get us to accept his rationalizations. But that generates suspicion. What has he not told us? And how does someone writing a biography get at the other side? Both Bill and Hillary—Bill especially—rarely shared the most personal and important sides of their lives. Hillary spoke of growing up in a household that was like “Life with Father,” even though her father, in reality, was a very difficult figure. And through all the years of trauma Bill experienced with a stepfather who was both alcoholic and abusive, he never told his closest friends anything about what he was going through. At Georgetown, he went steady for three years with a woman named Denise Hyland, and in his memoir talks constantly about how they sat on the steps of the Capitol talking all night long about their past and what they planned to do in the future. He even brought her home to meet his folks. But at no point did he ever mention to her the most central reality of his childhood, or how he had to physically intervene to stop his father from beating his mother.

This week, Hill and Wang, an imprint of FSG specializing in books on American history, published Brown historian Robert O. Self’s All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. Self sees the civil rights, gay rights, feminist, and antiwar movements, as well as evangelical Christianity and neoliberal economics, as threads in a single grand narrative. Rethinking the past fifty years of American political life, he is the first to argue that competing ideas of the family fractured liberalism and paved the way for the rise of the conservative right. All in the Family has been seven years in the making. We asked Self to write about the process, from the first spark of inspiration to the submission of the final draft. What follows is a year by year account of how a historian conceptualizes, researches, and writes a book. Year 1 Los Angeles. I want to write a book about this amazing city, where I find myself in 2005 with a fellowship at the Huntington Library, near Pasadena. My first book was about race in postwar Oakland, and my new idea seems simple enough: what would the urban crisis of the 1960s look like in one city—a city that famously exploded in the 1965 Watts riot—if I paid as much attention to gender as to race?

by Iza Wojciechowska Whether or not you’ve known it, or whether or not you’ve wanted to, you’ve heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. You’ve certainly heard him on the radio or on CD if you listen to even a bit of classical music; but if you steer clear, you’ve still heard him. You’ve seen a commercial for American Express or iTunes, or you’ve heard old Nokia ringtones, or you’ve simply been around music during Christmas. Bach, arguably more than any other composer, is ubiquitous, even now, more than 250 years after his compositions were written. But how did he get that way? One answer is: technology. Paul Elie, a former editor at FSG and a creative writing professor (mine, in fact), has written an astounding book that traces the evolution of Bach’s music through the evolution of technology. From the creation of wax cylinder recordings, through LPs, CDs and MP3s, each stage in technology’s progress coincided with a major breakthrough for Bach’s music. In Reinventing Bach, Elie presents this history, interweaving the story of Bach with those of the musicians who played his music, as well as with his own.