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Deborah Baker is an American biographer and essayist. She is the author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India , a biography of Allen Ginsberg that focuses on his time in India [1] and of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1994. [2]
"Deborah Baker combines a novelistic alertness to the inner life with an anthropologist's understanding of multiple cultures and a historian's eye for major events. The result, yet again, is a continuously absorbing and stimulating book, which enlarges the cultural and political history of the mid-20th century even as it grippingly relates the adventures of a few men and women." Pankaj Mishra . OTHER BOOKS BY DEBORAH BAKER. Biographer / Essayist. Home; Books. The Last Englishmen.
Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England. She attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University. Her first biography, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, published by Beacon Press in 1982. After working a number of years as a book editor and publisher, in 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding. Published by Grove Press and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, it was ...
Jan 1, 2008 · Deborah Baker's A Blue Hand is the wonderful story of Ginsberg's sixteen months spent in India in 1961-2. Told in non-linear fashion, the story shifts often, like a moth zigzagging towards a light source, jumping between Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky's rendezvous with Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder (Jack's hero Jahpy Rhyder in The Dharma Bums), Allen's camaraderie with Calcutta's coffeehouse poets, his desperate search for a guru in Benares, and being stoned out of his mind at the funeral pyres ...
Jun 3, 2011 · Deborah Baker, who based her account of Jameelah's life largely on troves of correspondence (which Jameelah gave her permission to use), calls her story a parable of Islam and America.
Born in Charlottesville, Deborah Baker grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England. In 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis, a biography of the American modernist poet, Laura Riding which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in biography.
Deborah Baker is the author of Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1994, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India and The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, which was a finalist for the […]
Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England. She attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University.
“Deborah Baker’s astonishing book reads like a detective story but is also a work of enormous beauty and understanding. She has explored the most difficult of subjects in an evocative and original way, powerfully conjuring a bygone, albeit simpler era when the so-called clash of civilizations between . Islam and the West first arose fifty years ago. The Convert is the most brilliant and moving book written about Islam and the West since 9/11.”
“The Convert is the most brilliant and moving book written about Islam and the West since 9/11.” ― Ahmed Rashid “[Deborah] Baker's captivating account conveys the instability, faith, politics, and improbable cultural migration that make [Maryam] Jameelah's life story so difficult to sum up yet impossible to dismiss.”The New York Times Book Review
