Cartoonist Al Capp was rich before he turned thirty, published a comic strip that ran for forty-three years, and his fans included luminaries like Charlie Chaplin and John Steinbeck. Not bad for a guy who got his start drawing lewd pictures of a sexy teacher for his classmates.

In their biography Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen illustrate how hard it would be to overstate the popularity of Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip, which spawned a Hollywood movie and a Broadway musical. In a 1947 New Yorker profile of Capp that ran in two parts, E.J. Kahn, Jr. wrote that comics had supplanted motion pictures and radio as the most popular form of American entertainment. Capp was the biggest player on the scene.

Schumacher and Kitchen give crisp context to the near half-century that “Li’l Abner” entertained readers. Their subject, a noted teller of tall tales, lost his leg in a trolley accident as a child, but exactly what happened remains unclear, due to the many versions of the story that Capp told over the years. When he became the country’s most popular doodler, he regularly wrote letters to kids in hospitals who had to face amputations. The book contains a great chapter detailing the hardscrabble life of an aspiring cartoonist, as Capp bums around boardwalks looking to make an occasional buck on caricature work. A gifted storyteller, Capp conned his way into free semesters at a healthy list of art schools.

Just as A Life to the Contrary tells the story of Capp’s ascension to comic strip glory, it chronicles his descent into ignominy. As Capp aged, he used his strip to rail against protesters of the Vietnam War, earning the dubious achievement of approval from Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Later, Capp faced accusations of making sexual advances toward students on his campus speaking tours.

But beyond Capp’s troubled (and disturbing) later years, Schumacher and Kitchen show readers that before “Pogo” or “Doonesbury,” there was “Li’l Abner.” Capp was a pioneer in combining the art of the gag comic with the format of a serial story, crafting long-running arcs in the funny pages aimed at kids and adults alike. He wrote about goofy hicks in a town called Dogpatch, but his comics were topical and sometimes edgy. Within his world of comics, he created Sadie Hawkins Day and many other inventions with lasting impact on little corners of popular culture.

Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Against a contemporary cinematic landscape where major productions masquerade as humble indies, there’s something refreshing and almost quaint about Walter Wanger’s My Life with Cleopatra. His production diary of the 1963 hit film Cleopatra is a witty and no-nonsense look at big-time moviemaking at the end of the studio era. The book is something like a time capsule in its accounts of Wanger intersecting with major Hollywood players and historic details of the production's outdated modes of filmmaking. But it sparkles as much as any contemporary glamour story in Vanity Fair, and for Hollywood lore it’s hard to beat.

When Wanger describes the painted glass that the filmmakers used to create realistic Egyptian backdrops, you can feel the child-like wonder that Old Hollywood inspired in moviegoers and moviemakers. Wanger's recollection of his insistence on Elizabeth Taylor as the title character despite contract complications and a weeks-long illness that interfered with shooting reads like the height of artistic integrity, even though it’s really just a producer gambling on star power. When he declares that Cleopatra was not only the most successful movie ever made to that point, but maybe the best movie ever shot, you can almost smell the cigar smoke wafting off the caricatured Big Shot Movie Producer.

The set of Cleopatra was plagued with trouble from the outset. The studio head who assigned Wanger the job handed him the script to the silent version of Cleopatra from some years earlier and told him to simply add some words and shoot. With something bigger in mind, Wanger went about putting together a team of pros who would make a dynamite picture.

He chronicles everything from the pre-production footwork of hiring a writer to the messy business of shooting a movie take-by-take. He gives us his view of Liz Taylor without pretending that they were pals and induces empathy in chronicling the enviable rich-people problems of movie producing. Whether he’s lunching with Rouben Mamoulian or passing off London as Egypt, his diary writings offer a sharp and lively read.

My Life with Cleopatra. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

It makes sense that a series of literary conversations might tell the story of Jorge Luis Borges’s life. Blind by the time the talks in The Last Interview and Other Conversations take place, Borges was extremely shortsighted from a young age. As a boy the things he could see clearest were illustrations in books like Huckleberry Finn and Encyclopaedia Britannica. He says that he was raised in his father’s library, that his books are in many ways based mostly on other books, and that reading is “no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.”

There’s more going on in these talks than just literary pontificating.The latest in Melville House’s series of Last Interview books, this one is made up of three conversations. A long one from 1968, a shorter one from 1980, and a charming radio interview from 1985, the year before Borges died. He finds special rapport with the host of the titular interview, with whom he discusses what it was like to go blind and the way colors have faded. When the host teases Borges about what he’s got on -- beige shirt, light brown suit, Yves Saint Laurent beige and violet tie -- Borges approves, but is unsure about the violet.

Elsewhere in these pages you meet a Borges who is generous with his time and home with the interviewer. He is in the moment, as he asks suddenly, mid-conversation, whether the photographer has left so he can talk about how annoying she was. He’s self-deprecating, apologizing to readers that yet another of his books is going to be translated and put into print. We even get travel tips: Don’t go to Berlin if you think you love Germany, he says. “Once you get there, you’ll hate it.”

This light touch from a heavyweight of twentieth-century literature infuses every page of the book with Borges’s buoyant personality. Near the end, as his interloper makes efforts to confer sainthood on the accomplished writer, he defers. Shortly thereafter, he tells an anecdote about a stranger approaching him in the street telling him that Borges was responsible for introducing him to the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. For Borges, this is enough. A life of books and reading, and a modest legacy of passing on the passion.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

If you’ve listened to the director’s commentary on The Royal Tenenbaums, you might remember that director Wes Anderson based Bill Murray’s sad sack character on neurologist Oliver Sacks. But if you read Sacks’s Hallucinations, now out in paperback, you might be surprised that such a lively personality could have inspired Dr. Raleigh St. Clair, the Eeyore type that Murray portrays.

Sacks, as his must-listen Hallucinations-related Fresh Air interview illuminates, has a great sense of humor, and his book is run through with charm and verve. He covers a wide variety of sensory perceptions in his book, from the quotidian to the elaborate: There's the man who tried to use the voices in his head to win at the track (it didn’t work), and the blind woman terrified of the people she sees in “Eastern dress” (eventually, they went away).

But his best subject in Hallucinations might be himself. In a straightforward chapter that surprised Fresh Air's host Terry Gross, Sacks writes about his own extensive experiments with hallucinogens. Running down an extensive list of drugs he used regularly in the '60s --amphetamines, mescaline, morning glory seeds, LSD, and more -- Sacks recounts his experiences in exciting detail. He has a sublime experience with the elusive color indigo and a frightening one seeing elephant seals in a sandwich shop. He spends a pleasant morning making breakfast for people who aren’t there and has paranoiac delusions about a visit from a family friend. Once he stared at his robe and saw a war between England and France…for twelve hours.

Sacks’s lucid and engaging descriptions of case studies and strange medical conditions are a great fit for movies: his writing inspired not only Murray’s Raleigh St. Clair, but also the movie Awakenings starring Robin Williams. Maybe it’s time for Hollywood to revisit this fertile ground: thinking about Murray deadpanning his way through surreal scenes like the ones in Hallucinations might have readers wishing for Royal Tenenbaums II: Raleigh St. Clair’s Trip.

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

With Comic-Con International, the largest annual fan convention in the U.S., kicking off in San Diego next week, the comic timing feels right for delving into Sean Howe's exploration of life stories that make up Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. 

As the book explains, Marvel's headquarters once consisted of a corner desk in a shared office with men’s magazines like Male and Stag. Decades later, Marvel heroes rule the box office in monster hits like The Avengers and President Obama graces the cover of titles like Spider-Man. Howe tells you how this growth happened, and how Stan Lee, the kid in that corner desk, facilitated it.

Stan Lee and Marvel made great innovations in comics-world logic, creating one giant canvas where characters could overlap, and spending decades figuring out how to crack the code on big screen success. This kind of thing makes for a good yarn, as we learned more than a decade ago when Michael Chabon won a Pultizer for fictionalizing the origins of one corner of the comics world in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. But Howe sticks to the facts, and while Chabon gave us a dramatized version of the birth of Superman, here we get the creation and evolution of a whole universe of characters. We read the sometimes conflicting versions of the creation of Spider-Man, Captain America, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four, as well as a small continent’s worth of characters who never reached the same level of success.

Howe takes us through Marvel’s first days (as Timely) and the dark period of the “comics scare” that blamed juvenile delinquency on pulpy horror stories. He also explains Marvel’s early identity as a scrappy competitor with DC, the effects of the Vietnam War on Spider-Man story lines, and the death of Captain America. Lee is the indisputable force behind Marvel through almost all of this. The story of Marvel is, in many ways, the story of Lee.

But just because Lee’s voice and creativity guided Marvel for decades, it doesn’t mean that all of its creations are his. The juiciest parts of Howe’s book detail Lee’s clashes with his artists. Comics world legends like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby may have done more to invent key players in the Marvel Universe than Lee but got much less credit and almost none of the cash. While they were doing the real work, some say Lee was always more concerned with big business opportunities than the artistic direction of his titles. But even when he leaves Marvel to found Stan Lee Media in the 1990s, he’s still a big part of Howe’s story, as he gets  “partnerships on the table with Burger King, Fox Kids, the Backstreet Boys, and RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan.” From a cramped corner desk to meetings with fast food titans and rap gods -- the story in between is as fun as it sounds, and in his seminal work on the subject, Howe has told it with a narrative momentum that will engage casual readers and an expert authority that will resonate with super-fans.

Marvel Comics, The Untold Story. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013

For a long time, Jeanne Nolan separated life into harsh divisions. Everything was either real or phony, authentic or materialistic. But when she left her life on a commune after seventeen years, she had to reconsider. Returning home to her well-to-do parents, bringing her toddler daughter with her, Nolan was overwhelmed, she writes, by what she’d previously dismissed as “the relatively grand scale of the materialism” that she saw as her parents’ way of life. But with nowhere else to go, she gradually realizes that life has more to offer than sharp extremes.

From the Ground Up is Nolan’s story of life after the commune. She reinvents herself by bringing her extensive experience with organic farming home to Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, starting a small business helping people plant gardens in their backyards, and working with Green City Market to create a 5,000-square-foot vegetable garden for children at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

Nolan looks back at her time on the commune, which felt increasingly restrictive. She found herself chastised for having too close and exclusive a bond with her newborn daughter, and falling out of favor with the commune’s leaders. While it’s not exactly a Jonestown story, Nolan gives us a voyeur’s look inside a community that has rules for work, interaction with outsiders, and even sex.

But Nolan has an admirably level head about what happened back there. She doesn’t turn her memoir into a cautionary tale, and is even able to joke about her experience. Perhaps having learned from her time on the commune that too authoritative a voice is a turn-off, she also doesn’t let her book devolve into a polemical argument for organic growing. It focuses more on the people she meets as she founds Organic Gardener and Edible Gardens, and the ways in which she helps her clients achieve a healthier lifestyle while healing her own wounds in the process.

From the Ground Up. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Nancy Mitford, described in her 1973 New York Times obituary as “unabashedly snobbish and devastatingly witty,” was an essayist, satirist, and novelist. She was also an historian and author of biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV, and Frederick the Great. All four of these books have been reissued in handsome paperback editions by NYRB Classics -- Frederick the Great, just this week.

You get from Mitford’s book on Frederick II what you want from a biographer who is unabashedly snobbish and devastatingly witty: an account of the Prussian king’s life that is unapologetic about royalty and privilege, and just as interested in amusing detail as the royal record.

Frederick was a military genius, and Mitford details his campaigns against France, Austria, and Russia during the Seven Years’ War as well as a number of skirmishes, boundary disputes, and military strategies. This doesn’t read like a dry account of a real-life game of Risk, as Mitford manages to package all of this in a way tightly bound with human interest.

Even better are the bits about Frederick’s less expected pursuits and interests, like gardening, music, and poetry. He wrote to his good friend Voltaire that as a child he was inspired "with two passions: one was love, the other poetry. The love was a success; the poetry a failure.” Mitford writes that conversation at Frederick’s “supper parties was dazzling; Voltaire, Frederick and the Marquis d’Argens did most of the talking; the others listened and laughed and applauded.” And her book is filled with fine details like those about the king’s flute-playing, to which he often treated his guests after dinner. “He seems to have been a good flautist,” she writes, but was “rather erratic in timing.”

While Frederick found his own idiosyncratic way to occupy the throne, he didn't look forward to life as a ruler. As a teenager, he even attempted to run away altogether but was captured by his father’s soldiers. So disillusioned was Frederick’s father that he considered charging him with treason and having his son executed (he succeeded with young Frederick’s co-conspirator, but not with his own boy). By the time the would-be runaway took over for his dad, he’d grown into a young royal iconoclast, which is perhaps why a satiric-minded, unashamed aristocrat like Mitford is able to make such fine work of his life story.

Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Richard Russo loved his difficult mother. This is evident in grand gestures and small moments, both of which he details in his memoir Elsewhere, released this week in paperback. But his mother wasn’t always grateful. As gifts, he would buy her books that were supposed to be “in the tradition” of one of her favorite authors, like Agatha Christie. After reading a few pages, Jean Russo would declare that these novels were only “in the tradition of trash” and leave them out to be donated to the local library. She’d put them in sealed plastic bags, lest they contaminate the more worthy books in her collection.

These little anecdotes make up the heart of Elsewhere, and they build to a picture of a woman who was funny, sharp-edged, and not a little self-righteous. In this two-person drama, Richard is his mother’s confidante, whipping boy, chauffeur, provider, and, he fears, chief enabler. She suffered from any number of mental illnesses, and raised Richard in a time where we weren’t as quick to diagnose and treat such disorders. Which is not to say they weren’t recognized, if a bit broadly: Richard’s father tells him simply that his mother is nuts.

But Russo sticks with his mom throughout her life, finding her places to live, calling her every day, and driving her everywhere. As she grows old, she doesn’t take advantage of the shuttles provided to residents of her assisted living facility because, as she tells anyone who will listen, her son takes care of her errands. But Richard found his calling as a chauffeur much earlier, when mother and son drove from their home in upstate New York to Arizona in a Ford Galaxie prone to overheating and breakdowns. If any producers are eyeing the rights to Elsewhere, they surely have this chapter in mind as the movie’s centerpiece.

Russo’s clear narrative sense and direct prose have made him a successful novelist, won him a Pulitzer (for his 2001 novel Empire Falls), and now helped him craft a moving memoir. What we see in Elsewhere is that some of his straightforward style surely came from his mother, and so it doesn’t seem a stretch when he says that despite all the trouble she gave him, he owes her everything.

Elsewhere by Richard Russo. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Any great work of art is a portrait of its maker. If you have any doubts about this, you might be persuaded by reading Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel (now out in paperback), which traces the beginnings, process, revisions, and results of Henry James’s masterpiece Portrait of a Lady.

Telling the story behind Portrait of a Lady, Gorra can’t help but tell the story of Henry James, and he does so meticulously and anecdotally. There is hardly a shortage of critical work about the oeuvre of James, but Gorra’s contributes to that rich pile by following in the footsteps James took while writing the story of one of literature’s great characters, American ex-pat Isabel Archer. Gorra visits Paris, London, Florence, Venice and Rome, going not only to the cities themselves, but looking for the exact spots where James wrote. The book is at times a triple tale of Gorra tracing James’s path, James finding his way on the novel, and the narrative of the novel itself.

Gorra is not out to prove that all work is autobiographical and is sure to make readers understand that while there are characters in Portrait of a Lady based on those in James’s life, the work is as much one of imagination and artistry as self-reflection. While Portrait of a Novel is not a work of textual analysis, Gorra is adept at placing the work in literary context, drawing the line from George Eliot’s inspiration to Henry James’s invention, seeing how it stands up next to American heavy hitters like Hawthorne and Russian masters like Turgenev.

He’s also perceptive about Portrait of a Lady’s place in James’s own body of work, as it’s the first great masterpiece of his life, directly preceding a spottier two decades, before he returned to similar themes in three classics: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. After those books, James revisited Portrait of a Lady himself as he revised it for the New York edition of 1906, a process that Gorra examines in detail. As James returns to his own early masterwork, it seems almost inevitable, since returning to Portrait of a Lady is a natural return to his own self. By giving us a "biography" of a novel, Gorra gives us the layered life story of its creator.

"Portrait of Novel" by James Gorra. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

You could blame the disappearance of a large woodland on the amount of paper that’s been printed to cover the subject of who killed John F. Kennedy. Norman Mailer called the assassination the largest mountain of mystery of the twentieth century, James Ellroy wrote a masterful thriller about it in American Tabloid, and Woody Allen used his confusion over the killing to avoid intimacy with Carol Kane in Annie Hall.

But what if the explanation is much simpler, and Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? Priscilla Johnson McMillan takes it as a given and proceeds from there in her exhaustive biography of Oswald and his Russian wife Marina. Originally published in 1977, the same year Allen was wringing his hands instead of jumping into bed, the subject was too hot for the public to find a simpler explanation acceptable. Reissued for the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, McMillan’s version is less tangled with intricate webs of conspiracy than the typical tale about who killed JFK, opting instead for a detailed portrait of the couple and their troubled relationship from their first meeting at a semi-formal dance in Russia to their peripatetic residence in the United States.

Oswald emerges from McMillan’s book as a wounded, confused idealist disappointed by the failings of communism. Marina (née Nikolayevna Prusakova) is practically apolitical, scared away from strong opinions about policy by her upbringing under Communist rule. McMillan relays a priceless detail of the Oswald home when she tells us that Lee tacked up a picture of Fidel Castro when he was inspired by the potential for a new start for communism in Cuba, while Marina hung up a picture of Kennedy because he reminded her of an ex-boyfriend.

Whether or not he was a patsy, as he claimed, there’s no mistaking Oswald for a likeable guy. Too cheap to buy their baby a crib, he made her sleep on two chairs pushed together. He abused Marina verbally and physically, was secretive about his tenuous employment at a series of low-level jobs that he had trouble retaining, and refused to even wash himself for days at a time. We’ve been asking ourselves for half a century now who killed JFK, and the simple answer of one lunatic acting alone has never matched the enormity of the event. But in McMillan’s book, we are faced with stacked levels of detail confirming that the story of one person -- or, in the case of Marina and Lee, one marriage -- is never simple.

Marina and Lee. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Within a single scene, MK Asante’s memoir Buck moves easily from a specific, action-packed narrative to a brush-stroked picture of Asante’s life as a whole. He quotes his mother’s letters to her former self (which function as a diary) and drops in verses from 90s hip-hop tracks throughout his story. Whenever it starts to feel scattered, it falls back into the beat, capturing the complicated rhythms of childhood and memory. This story of Asante’s childhood growing up in a tough Philadelphia neighborhood is at once personal, getting at the particulars and dangers of his own experience, while also nailing the universal feeling of the formative events of childhood, how we all look back, clear-eyed, seeing every memory packed into a bigger one.

A simple, familiar anecdote about idolizing his big brother, who leaves him behind to play with kids his own age, opens the book. Young Asante, Malo in the book, wishes not only to run with his brother Uzi, but to be him, imitating his every move. Then, in one of the quick tonal shifts that steer the book, this scene gives way to an image of Uzi as a bad influence and a criminal, returning from a night that Malo is probably lucky to have missed out on.

Soon, Uzi is being sent away by his parents and then writing to his little brother from prison. Malo’s family breaks up further, and he rejects authority at school. A well-drawn scene in the principal’s office shows Malo as both a hopeless case and a sympathetic, confused kid. Navigating the risks of growing up in “Killadelphia” and facing the dangerous allure of the ‘hood down the block makes up a lot of Malo’s day-to-day life, before an alternative high school, a creative writing class, and the grace of good timing allowed Asante to come into his own.

The US Open started on Monday, and while in these first few days there are more matches than a fan can track, there will be segments of upcoming days when tennis is not on, and you need something to do.

You could pick up a copy of High Strung, Stephen Tignor’s snappy and informative dual biography of John McEnroe and Björn Borg. Before Federer-Nadal or Agassi-Sampras, there was Borg-McEnroe. Their on-court demeanors couldn't have been more different. Borg was icy cool, his emotions barely detectable from the front row with binoculars, but passengers on planes flying out of LaGuardia could hear McEnroe’s impassioned pleas to court officials.

Tignor penetrates the torment beneath Borg’s cool and the genius within McEnroe’s madness, but like the best biographies, he also captures the era and the history that comes with his subject. He sets much of the scene in London and New York during the tournaments and situates his central figures in the culture. While Borg was mobbed by teenage girls like a pop star, McEnroe was the Johnny Rotten of tennis, even though he probably couldn't have picked a Sex Pistol out of a lineup.

High Strung is not only an entertaining ride through the Borg-McEnroe era, but it scores points as a tennis primer, too. Tignor offers quick histories of rackets (Borg and McEnroe were the last men to win Wimbledon with wooden ones), tells us why tennis players historically wear white, locates when commercial logos started showing up on outfits, and educates us as to what exactly is so “open” about the U.S. Open.

David Foster Wallace, whose tennis essays are among his finest work, wrote that "watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad." So if you’re suffering through a rain delay during this week’s US Open, you’re anxious to get back in touch with a wilder time in the sport, or you simply can’t get enough tennis, look no further than High Strung. If you find you can’t look away from the book, just remember to set your DVR.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published an influential bestseller that received mention by President Kennedy in an otherwise routine press conference. As relayed in On a Farther Shore, William Souder’s biography of Carson published in hardcover last year on the fiftieth anniversary of that book Silent Spring (and now out in paperback), Kennedy didn’t even need to mention the title. Asked out of nowhere whether government authorities were looking into the side effects of pesticides, Kennedy responded that they were “particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.”

Silent Spring was a warning to the world about the harmful effects of pesticides, particularly DDT, which was being overused with little to no consideration of its effects on animals and people who’d get the stuff on their skin and in their lungs. Silent Spring is credited with helping to launch the environmentalist movement, as Carson proved that humans needed protection from themselves and inspired government regulations limiting the use of harmful chemicals. The book is Carson’s great legacy.

When Silent Spring hit shelves, Carson was already a bestselling author. She’d written three well-researched, poetic books about marine life that were bestsellers, excerpted in The New Yorker and distributed by the Book-of-the-Month Club. On a Farther Shore provides a thoughtful portrait of a writer devoted to her subject, from the time she discovered a love for the sea (inspired perhaps by her misreading of a Tennyson poem) to her shakeup of the world with Silent Spring and its aftershocks.

On a Farther Shore is a transfixing book because Souder highlights Carson’s passion with such clarity and affection, and because he knows how to turn the story of her writing process into compelling narrative. Her correspondence with editors and publishers contributes to some of the book’s most illuminating chapters.

Souder also knows how to surprise, at one point going on a dramatic tangent about a fishing vessel which we won't spoil here. This unexpected turn emphasizes the need for a voice like Carson’s in a world at risk. In his biography, Souder honors Carson by capturing the spirit of urgency that motivated her most important work.

On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, Author of Silent Spring. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

If Roald Dahl were still alive, he would turn 97 this Friday. When you stop and think about it, it seems that the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Fantastic Mr. Fox might be the most influential writer in the English language. Dahl’s hold on us is immeasurable. His totally unique, twisted stories for kids -- dark enough to frighten but never so scary to discourage going back for more -- long ago entered the collective consciousness. Whether or not you’re fully aware of it, Dahl probably had some influence on you in your formative years. He not only inspired other writers, but shaped the way people think and feel about the world.

In Donald Sturrock’s Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, we discover that we may have the Royal Air Force to thank for the work of the mythmaker whose words float around in the darker corners of our imaginations. As a young pilot, Dahl crashed his plane and later claimed that the accident's ensuing brain damage shaped who he was and led him to writing.

Reading about Dahl the pilot (he would sometimes exaggerate the extent of his adventures), we learn that Dahl led a full life before he achieved great success and fame in his mid-forties. He was also was an oilman for Shell and a member of the British diplomatic corps. He even worked as a spy, which his daughter Lucy finds hard to believe because “Dad never could keep his mouth shut. He gossiped like a girl.”

Before all that, Dahl was a troublesome kid, participating in some of the mischief his characters would later embody. He remained something of a pain in the side into adulthood, as he’d throw dinner parties where he was his own worst guest, picking little arguments with people and overstepping every boundary of British propriety. To channel that inner child for his fiction, he retreated to a writing hut which he said helped him think like a youngster. In Sturrock’s Storyteller readers get an authoritative view of both Dahl the boy and the man. Lucky for us, it’s not always clear where one begins and the other ends.

Storyteller. The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl. Illustrated by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has devoted his life to very complicated subjects, but that hasn’t infringed on his ability to write a concise, clear sentence. In his new memoir My Brief History, Hawking’s life story converges with insight into black holes and time travel. Accomplished biographers could learn from his upholding of the brevity promised by its title.

Hawking is especially good when relaying the way he fell into his field, describing the coincidences and circumstances that opened the path for his life of discovery and innovation. As is so often the case with success stories, his path seems both arbitrary and pre-destined. Before discovering his love of physics, he almost became a civil servant, but forgot to take the exam. They told him he could try again in a year, but by then he was on a different journey.

Hawking tells readers that he was born on January 8, 1942, exactly 300 years to the day after the death of Galileo, the physicist-astronomer known as the father of modern science. Not many thinkers could make such a statement without seeming grandiose, but Hawking has earned it with his relative modesty throughout the memoir.

My Brief History also provides a nice little primer on the British education system, from the differences between public and private schools (clarifying that what Americans would call a private school is called a public school in England) to the surprisingly weak work ethic at Oxford. As Hawking tells it, he only learned to really study when he met his future wife Jane. The prospect of marrying her provided the motivation he needed to finish his Ph.D.

He became involved with Jane shortly after he was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease A.L.S., which could have permanently sidelined him. Whether it was love for Jane, a love for physics, or a lot of both that got him through his initial struggles, in My Brief History we meet a scientist who is passionate, humble, and practically fearless -- and an excellent writer, too.

My Brief History by Stephen Hawking. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Julian Barnes begins his new memoir Levels of Life, about the loss of his wife, with talk of hot air balloons and Sarah Bernhardt. The book’s first two sections are narrated with calm omniscience, relaying a condensed history of Anglo-French ballooning and a mostly imagined story about a love affair between Bernhardt and traveler Fred Burnaby. It’s absorbing and surprising stuff, filled with precise detail. Bernhardt was slim enough not to need an umbrella (she ran between raindrops). Pioneers of hot air ballooning were called balloonatics. Photography taken from balloons was perception-altering stuff, as people saw the world from above.

But what exactly are we reading here? Barnes, a Booker Prize-winning novelist and essayist, doesn’t do much of anything to explicitly connect his first two sections to the book’s most substantial chapter, in which he examines his grief over the loss of his wife. But the connections are there, and part of the fun of the book is sensing them: the exciting lift of leaving the ground for the first time and the thrill of new love and the risks inherent in both of them.

Barnes remembers his wife, deals with his pain, and walks us through what it was like for him. He lost her devastatingly quickly -- “37 days from diagnosis to death.” Would it be too much to say he fell out of the balloon? Either way, he plummets. He talks himself out of suicide, if only because he is the one with the most memories of her. He relates the misguided responses of friends, and forgives them. He talks about the pain of telling casual acquaintances, people with whom he shares no mutual network of friends to spread the word without his help.

In precision is universality, and a reader feels that this sort of loss could befall anyone. And, of course, it does, all the time. When it happens to Barnes, he’s introspective, occasionally angry, and skeptical about his own responses. A book that starts out about a famous actress and a crazy pastime doesn’t seem at first like it could be a way of working through loss, but you get the feeling that for Barnes, this is the chief function of Levels of Life. Fortunately for us, it’s an unconventional and deeply felt memoir that exceeds its requirements.

To purchase the originals of Nathan Gelgud's Biographile drawings, visit his Etsy page.

In Brian Jay Jones’s exhaustive new biography Jim Henson, the author builds to an explosion of Henson’s universe into an array of filmed content that would shape countless childhoods and change the way we watch television.

One of Henson’s first breakthroughs was the creation of a series of pithy, off-kilter coffee commercials featuring early iterations of his hand puppet characters. Jones gives a detailed account of how the spots were thought up, created, and marketed. The coffee commercial characters would evolve into icons, of course, and each of the book’s chapters keeps you on the edge of your seat in building toward the debut of The Muppet Show.

Reading about Henson’s system of elevated stages and strategically placed monitors, you get a look behind the curtain that doesn’t break the spell of his shows, but enhances it. We see Henson and his co-creator Frank Oz twisting around each other to do their Ernie and Bert act, find out why Rowlf the Dog didn’t get more screen time, and learn the science of Muppet eye placement.

Watching the evolution of the crude puppet that would become Kermit is to watch the magic of invention slowed down into a careful narrative of hard work, persistence, and artistic breakthroughs. Seeing the results, it’s clear that Henson was brilliant -- probably a genius beamed down from another planet.

Through Jones’s rendering, Henson’s inventiveness feels real, tangible, and somehow possible in a way that makes it required reading for anyone interested in puppets, kids, entertainment, television, art … actually, this story should just be required reading for everybody.

Jim Henson, The Biography. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

By some diabolical equation beyond the psychological grasp of most New Yorkers, the Major League Baseball playoffs have started, and the Yankees are watching from home. The Pirates are in the post-season for the first time since Saved by the Bell was on the air, the Dodgers have the best pitcher since Sandy Koufax, and soon there will be a World Series that will excite plenty of fans. But the absence of pinstripes is troublesome.

If you’re skipping the games because of this abysmal situation -- or if you just need something to read between games -- pick up Reggie Jackson’s new memoir Becoming Mr. October. With anecdotes that might soothe this year's wounds, the Hall of Famer looks back at the time he joined the Yanks in the 1976 off-season and helped carry them to a championship in 1977. Devoted Yankee fans can close their eyes and pretend it’s happening now. The nip in the air, the crack of the bat. The Yankees win it all!

In Mr. October, Jackson looks back at signing his big contract with the Yankees, tension with fan favorites like Thurman Munson, and a contentious working relationship with manager Billy Martin, whom Jackson accuses of racism. At a well-paced clip, he takes readers through the ups and downs of the seemingly endless regular season, before breaking out into the post-season, where every inning counts. It’s a breezy companion to Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Jonathan Mahler’s gritty chronicle of New York City’s troubled year and the Yankees blessed ‘77 season. That book takes a close look at Jackson; this one is a look from the dugout. It’s a fun read, but be sure to glance up occasionally to check the score. The 2013 playoffs are looking pretty good, even without Reggie or the pinstripes.

Becoming Mr. October by Reggie Jackson and Kevin Baker. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across a continent when he was eighteen, dated a princess, and kidnapped a German general. He published eight books about his adventures during his lifetime, and there might be more on the way. He was an irascible bon vivant and an excellent writer.

Fermor is a national treasure and a legend on the other side of the Atlantic, and for the past few years NYRB Classics has been reissuing his memoirs (A Time of Gifts, Mani, A Time to Keep Silence) in handsome paperbacks for readers in the United States. This all makes it almost hard to believe that reading words about Fermor that weren’t written by Fermor himself could be anything but a letdown.

Artemis Cooper’s new Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure not only acquits itself quite nicely, it occasionally surpasses Fermor’s work in excitement and clarity. One of Fermor’s best qualities was his casual self-mythologizing, which cast his books in a beautiful nimbus of legend. Cooper celebrates the life, but cuts through the haze a bit, offering correctives and giving the big picture of the grand life with a forward-moving narrative that captures the man, his times, and the many lands he traveled.

In Cooper’s book we're treated to Fermor's prismatic life, including the reckless schoolboy, tireless traveler, iconoclast, professional freeloader, and the unlikely soldier. A reader would be tempted to disbelieve some of it if Cooper weren’t such a strong and level-headed writer herself. Fermor may have had no shortage of things to say about himself, but in Cooper’s book we see that he was probably justified.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, An Adventure. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

The jazzy rock band Steely Dan went platinum several times, achieving popular success while somehow simultaneously gathering a cult-like following usually inspired by less prominent acts. They’re also familiar to a legion of hip-hop fans from the catchy way they’ve been sampled by acts like De La Soul and Notorious B.I.G.

Looking at the variety of influences and inspirations that inspired Donald Fagen, it’s no surprise that the band he created would straddle multiple worlds, appealing to a variety of audiences. Half of the brain trust (with Walter Becker) that founded Steely Dan, Fagen has penned a memoir made up of little essays about his influences and a travel journal from the nineties.

In Eminent Hipsters, released this week, he writes about inspirations ranging from Ike Turner to Henry Mancini, from humorist Jean Shepherd to the cryptic sci-fi author A.E. van Vogt. He covers formative musical experiences, like saving his allowance for trips to New York so he could see Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, or John Coltrane play at places like the Village Vanguard. He even treats us to the transcript of his 1989 interview with Ennio Morricone, creator of iconic spaghetti westerns scores. Morricone may have been a kindred spirit, as he drew on various influences, an “eerie catalog of genres -- Hollywood western, Japanese samurai, American pop, and Italian opera.”

These artists and thinkers are just as much a part of his biography as are the times and places in which he discovered them, whether he was a suburban kid retreating to his room to read, or a self-described jazz snob at Bard College, where he’d chase numerous ill-fated relationships, maybe because he “felt more comfortable with girls who made me feel like my own degree of lunacy was less severe.” Fagen has always had trouble fitting in, but he found some close friends at Bard, and theorizes that “the class of ‘68 was the last bunch of kids not seriously despoiled in their youth by television (with its insidious brainworm commercials) and drugs.” Bard was also where he started playing in bands and met Walter Becker and Chevy Chase (yes, that Chevy Chase), with whom he’d form Steely Dan. Chase didn’t stick around.

This all gives way to the last third of the book, which is made up of Fagen’s grouchy journal from touring with the Duke of September Rhythm Revue last year. His wry sense of humor, familiar to fans of Steely Dan, implies that all of this inspiration and innovation outlined in the front of the book has resulted in a grumpy introvert holed up in his hotel room between playing dusty classics for people too old to dance.

Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen of the band Steely Dan. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.