Why am I passionate about this?

Elesha Coffman writes about religion and ideas in twentieth century America. A journalist before she trained as a historian, she’s especially interested in the circulation of ideas—how they were communicated, how they were received, why some ideas gained traction and others did not. Her first book examined how a magazine, The Christian Century, helped define the religious tradition known as the Protestant mainline. She didn’t realize that Margaret Mead belonged to that tradition until she was invited to write about Mead for the Oxford Spiritual Lives series, billed as spiritual biographies of people who are famous for something other than being spiritual. Elesha lives in Texas, but she’d rather be at the beach in North Carolina.


I wrote

Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith

By Elesha Coffman,

Book cover of Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith

What is my book about?

The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) made no secret of her Christianity, but most people are surprised to learn that…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of With a Daughter's Eye: Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Elesha Coffman Why did I love this book?

The reader gets a three-for-one deal in this incredibly thoughtful book: an intimate look at two towering anthropologists by their daughter, a distinguished anthropologist herself. Mary Catherine Bateson understood her difficult parents and their groundbreaking work as well as anyone could.

Talking to her father, she wrote, was “a form of argument that was also a dance.” Her mother was “a one-person conference.” The reader gets to know each member of this remarkable family through insightful anecdotes, rare family photos, conceptual diagrams, and lucid prose.

By Mary Catherine Bateson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked With a Daughter's Eye as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In "With a Daughter's Eye," writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson looks back on her extraordinary childhood with two of the world's legendary anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. This deeply human and illuminating portrait sheds new light on her parents' prodigious achievements and stands alone as an important contribution for scholars of Mead and Bateson. But for readers everywhere, this engaging, poignant, and powerful book is first and foremost a singularly candid memoir of a unique family by the only person who could have written it.


Book cover of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

Elesha Coffman Why did I love this book?

Margaret Mead belonged to a rambunctious generation of anthropologists who were trained by Franz Boas at Columbia. His star students were unconventional women—Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neal Hurston—who asked different questions and told different stories than any scholars before them. Were gender and race merely cultural constructions, and what would it take to overhaul them? How did Native Americans and Black Americans understand themselves, without the distortion of the white gaze? Could humans learn to live with their differences, or would the fascists win?

King unpacks the human drama in which these scholars participated on both the interpersonal and the global scale.

By Charles King,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Gods of the Upper Air as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world.

A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages…


Book cover of The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy

Elesha Coffman Why did I love this book?

In her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead argued that Americans could un-learn a lot of bad ideas about gender and sexuality by studying faraway cultures. She was alternately thanked and blamed for setting in motion the sexual revolution of the 1960s. A few years after her death, a rival anthropologist, Derek Freeman, claimed that her original research was wrong, because she was too naïve to realize that the Samoans were lying to her. People who knew nothing about anthropology but disdained the sexual revolution jumped in on Freeman’s side, blowing up a scholarly debate (that was rooted in a deep, personal grudge) into a cultural firestorm. Anthropologist Paul Shankman waded through the mess to determine that Mead was mostly correct, and Freeman was mostly just bitter. Shankman’s definitive book on the controversy demonstrates how the scientific process works, eventually.

By Paul Shankman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Trashing of Margaret Mead as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1928 Margaret Mead published ""Coming of Age in Samoa"", a fascinating study of the lives of adolescent girls that transformed Mead herself into an academic celebrity. In 1983 anthropologist Derek Freeman published a scathing critique of Mead's Samoan research, badly damaging her reputation. Resonating beyond academic circles, his case against Mead tapped into important public concerns of the 1980s, including sexual permissiveness, cultural relativism, and the nature/nurture debate. In venues from the ""New York Times"" to the TV show ""Donahue"", Freeman argued that Mead had been 'hoaxed' by Samoans whose innocent lies she took at face value. In ""The…


Book cover of Euphoria

Elesha Coffman Why did I love this book?

Euphoria is a novel based on the love triangle that developed between Margaret Mead; her second husband, Reo Fortune; and the man who would become her third husband, Gregory Bateson. King did not attempt to recount the actual events that transpired in New Guinea in the early 1930s, but her research (she lists dozens of books in her acknowledgments, led by Jane Howard’s comprehensive 1984 biography, Margaret Mead: A Life) enabled her to recreate the personalities involved and the feverish atmosphere of remote fieldwork. Some of the details in the novel are invented, but the overwhelming, disjointed intensity of the story rings true.

By Lily King,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked Euphoria as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The New York Times Top Ten Bestseller

From the author of Writers & Lovers, Euphoria is Lily King's gripping novel inspired by the true story of a woman who changed the way we understand our world.

'Pretty much perfect' - Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Rodham

In 1933 three young, gifted anthropologists are thrown together in the jungle of New Guinea. They are Nell Stone, fascinating, magnetic and famous for her controversial work studying South Pacific tribes, her intelligent and aggressive husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson, who stumbles into the lives of this strange couple and becomes totally enthralled. Within months…


Book cover of To Cherish the Life of the World: The Selected Letters of Margaret Mead

Elesha Coffman Why did I love this book?

Mead wrote thousands of letters, a reflection of her era, her many travels, and her astonishing ability to make new connections constantly without dropping any of her old friends. She became who she was and processed what she observed of the world through relationships. In these letters, the reader gains a multifaceted sense of her personality and gets a taste of what it is like to delve into her archive—the largest personal collection in the Library of Congress, with more than 530,000 items. The editors’ headings for the sections indicate how well they knew what the various relationships meant to Mead: Husbands: Starved for Likemindedness; Lovers: Continuingly Meaningful; Friends: A Genius for Friendship; Colleagues: What Is Important Is the Work.

By Margaret M. Caffrey (editor), Patricia A. Francis (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked To Cherish the Life of the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Often far from home and loved ones, famed anthropologist Margaret Mead was a prolific letterwriter, always honing her writing skills and her ideas. To Cherish the Life of the World presents, for the first time, her personal and professional correspondence, which spanned sixty years. These letters lend insights into Mead's relationships with interconnected circles of family, friends, and colleagues, and reveal her thoughts on the nature of these relationships. In these letters- drawn primarily from her papers at the Library of Congress- Mead ruminates on family, friendships, sexuality, marriage, children, and career. In midlife, at a low point, she wrote…


Explore my book 😀

Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith

By Elesha Coffman,

Book cover of Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith

What is my book about?

The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) made no secret of her Christianity, but most people are surprised to learn that this thrice-divorced, bisexual scholar was also a nearly lifelong Episcopalian who wrote theological essays, preached sermons, and served on countless church committees. She once wrote in a letter, “Shorn of all the things in which I can’t believe—and don’t want to—an omnipotent God, immortality, and original sin—Christianity is still the most beautiful thing I know, and the fact that Jesus lived the most satisfactory justification of life.” My book traces the thread of her spirituality through her many adventures, discoveries, breakthroughs, and heartaches.

Book cover of With a Daughter's Eye: Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson
Book cover of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Book cover of The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy

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Book cover of Me and The Times: My wild ride from elevator operator to New York Times editor, columnist, and change agent (1967-97)

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Me and The Times offers a fresh perspective on those pre-internet days when the Sunday sections of The New York Times shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Starting in 1967, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections over 30 years, innovating and troublemaking all the way.

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Me and The Times: My wild ride from elevator operator to New York Times editor, columnist, and change agent (1967-97)

By Robert W. Stock,

What is this book about?

An intimate, unvarnished look at the making of the Sunday sections of The New York Times in their pre-internet heyday, back when they shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation.

Over 30 years, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections, innovating, and troublemaking all the way – getting the paper sued for $1 million, locking horns with legendary editors Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel, and publishing articles that sent the publisher Punch Sulzberger up the wall.

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