British biographer Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s first book characterizes the force and influence of motherhood in a literary double biography, Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age. Visiting Blenheim, the grandiose English seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, Stuart became intrigued by a docent’s implication that the 9th Duchess, American-born heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, was a prisoner in her marriage, but that she got out in the end. Then, while exploring the nearby family burial ground, Stuart found an inscription on Consuelo’s gravestone indicating that she had clearly remarried. So why had she come back? Perplexed, Stuart wondered if the innocent, 18-year- old Consuelo was forced into a loveless marriage. Rudimentary research revealed that Consuelo’s strong-willed mother, Alva, though initially infamous for masterminding the most ambitious match of the Gilded Age, later became known for her powerful leadership in the international suffrage movement. Was this eventual social activism Alva’s self-imposed penance for coercing her daughter to marry a virtual stranger? With alacrity and ingenuity, Stuart has probed two lives in a quest to understand the landscapes of one. Her mountainous research has been rendered into an empathic portrait of daughter and mother, social philanthropist and feminist respectively, amid the social and economic flagrancies of the Gilded Age and the eroding aristocratic culture of Britain’s nobility. She opens with a suspenseful, fiction-like prologue chronicling Consuelo’s wedding day: we observe curious crowds lining the route to New York’s St. Thomas Church; we marvel at the opulent floral displays and watch Mrs. Astor escorted to her seat; we hear the strains of the wedding march. But we cannot yet see the bride, for she has not appeared. As the delay lengthened, the guests shuffled and whispered. . . . Five minutes passed . . . then ten . . . then twenty . . . The remaining reportorial narrative primarily follows the life of an American heiress-turned-duchess, but Consuelo and Alva also portrays the often desperately empty ways of 19th-century New York society and of the British aristocracy; the charged symbiosis between mothers and daughters; and the emerging movement for female liberation from suffocating social mores. It is a first-rate first-time effort.

Best remembered as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, shy, retiring Andrei Sakharov was an unlikely Russian dissident. A renowned physicist, Sakharov was also an independent thinker on such issues as intellectual freedom and human rights. The life of this remarkable man who refused to join the Communist Party is examined in Richard Lourie’s fascinating new book Sakharov: A Biography. A scholar who knew Sakharov well, Lourie translated the physicist’s memoirs which were published in the U.S. in 1990. Lourie also spent time with Sakharov after he was exiled for almost seven years to the isolated town of Gorky. The author traces Sakharov’s life from his childhood as the son of a teacher through his career as a brilliant physicist whose central role in developing the H-bomb got him elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific research center and a key part of its administrative structure. Thanks to the work of Sakharov, the Soviet Union became a superpower, but very early on, he was concerned about the human toll of the "terrible weapon" that he had helped to create. Widely regarded as the leader of the dissident movement within the U.S.S.R and universally acknowledged as an important human rights activist throughout the world, Sakharov was instrumental in getting his country and the U.S. to agree to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. He often signed public letters on behalf of dissidents and had privileges taken from him as a result. After the death of his first wife, Klava, and his marriage to Elena Bonner, a long-time activist for dissidents, Sakharov’s commitment to helping political prisoners in his country became even greater.

In 1975, Sakharov received the Nobel Peace Prize. The citation described him as "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind." A poll taken in the 1990s in the former Soviet Union to identify the country’s most influential figures ranked him at number three. Ahead of him on the list were Lenin and Stalin. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.