Already a profound chronicler of South America’s political and social reality, Mario Vargas Llosa took an unusual step for a writer in the 1980s: he immersed himself in the political life of his native Peru rather than simply standing outside it as an observer. In the widest sense, Vargas Llosa has been a champion of freedom, a writer who spoke out against abuses of military and government power, who defied literary conventions, and who stood up for the cause of freedom of expression for writers worldwide. His more than 15 novels and numerous other writings have gained him international acclaim as one of Latin America’s most significant writers of the 20th century.

After countless  man-hours (and woman-hours), Biography In Context has finally emerged from the nest and taken to the information resource skies.  We hope you enjoy the new experience of putting all of our great content into context with one-stop views for reference, periodical, multimedia, primary source content and more. Some notable new additions now that we have a new interface on a new, more versatile platform:

• Search occupations, nationalities, birthplaces and deathplaces right from the homepage — not just names
• Sharing tools for any social media app you can think of
• Citation generation in MLA and APA format
• Print or email as PDF
• Search assist for person topic pages
• ReadSpeaker text-to-speech on every document
• Translation for Chinese (simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish..and back to English again
• Thousands more photos than ever before
• Embedded videos
• Podcasts and audio files
• Citation generation
• Advanced search by document type, content type
• Factboxes on person topic pages

And to top it all off, as a thank-you to all of our customers for sticking with us during these challenging times, we have rolled all 160,000 biographies from Lives & Perspectives Collection into the  Biography In Context base content set — free of charge. That gives users access to more than 600,000 biographies, all full-text, all the time.

It goes without saying that we’re more excited than Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch to be going on this journey with you as Biography moves into the next phase of its life. We hope you are, too.

We’ll have more to say next week. For now, just sit back, relax, and ease on into the wonderful world of Biography In Context.

The results were impressive: 152 individuals, including Lillian Adams, Rory Calhoun, Denholm Elliott, Redd Foxx, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Jo Van Fleet, Kim Hunter, Richard Kiley, Jack Klugman, Christopher Lee, Patrick Macnee, Dick Martin, Darren McGavin, Juanita Moore, Donna Reed, Jason Robards, Esther Rolle, Dan Rowan, Paul Scofield, Gale Storm, and Paul Winchell. And, of course, Betty White and her delicious muffins.

As always, more information to come.

On a related note, if you search for plain old “god,” you’ll find Sheppard and 11 others, including Attila (“Scourge of God”), Ghostface Killah (“Sun God”), Abraham (“Friend of God”) and, of course, legendary basketball player God Shammgod (“God Shammgod”).

But that’s not all!  July as a whole is a very dangerous month for Presidents. Zachary Taylor (July 9; three biographies), Ulysses S. Grant (July 23; three biographies), Martin Van Buren (July 24; three biographies), and Andrew Johnson (July 31; two biographies).

On a happier note, Calvin Coolidge was born on the Fourth of July.  We have three biographies (plus three more from Lives & Perspectives) available.

Be safe, Barry O’Bams. Be safe.

It’s been a rough week-plus for high-profile deaths — you can see previous recent Spotlights for Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper in the Spotlight Archive in the database. Here’s hoping we have a quiet next few months. The trick is to keep breathing.