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Best biographies of 2012

T he outstanding achievement in literary biography this year was Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor (Murray £25). Like Dickens (whose life as told by Claire Tomalin was a highlight of 2011), Paddy Leigh Fermor lived life to the limit. Before he was 30, he had not only walked from London to Constantinople, but had fallen in love with a Romanian princess and, famously, abducted a German general in the battle for Crete. Leigh Fermor is a colourful and romantic proposition, but how do you write about a man who has already been mythologised in bestsellers such as Ill Met By Moonlight ? Cooper's answer is to find the man behind the myth in a sharp, absorbing portrait of the scholar-gypsy. I was particularly grateful for the news that, until well into old age, Leigh Fermor was able to translate PG Wodehouse ("The Great Sermon Handicap") into classical Greek.

For Leigh Fermor, literature was one strand in a colourful braid of experience. For the late David Foster Wallace, it was life (and death) itself. But both loved Wodehouse, apparently. DT Max's painful and painstaking biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (Granta £20), of the cult American writer of the 1990s reports that the author of Infinite Jest had a dog named Jeeves. Eventually, perhaps, there will be a less dazzled portrait of DFW (as he was known). For the moment, Max has made the indispensable first sketch.

Moving on to memoir, the big beast in this year's catalogue is Jack Straw's tale of "a political survivor", Last Man Standing (Macmillan £20). The former foreign secretary and lord chancellor is at pains to tell his readers that his memoirs were not ghosted. "I wrote every word of this book," he says, and it shows. This is an acerbic, plain-spoken, often self-mocking account of Straw's progress up the greasy pole. If there was a price to pay for outlasting almost all his New Labour contemporaries, he does not really address it. Last Man Standing gives a full and entertaining account of the generation whose obsessions morphed from CND to WMD.

Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape £25), Salman Rushdie's account of his life during and after the fatwa, reads like a thriller. I came to this literary doorstop with the added frisson that I was a witness at several of the events he describes. Say what you like about Rushdie – predictably, the critics have given him an uneven ride – his account of himself is painfully true, despite the contrivance of adopting a third person identity from the names of his two favourite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. By contrast, as an essay in the troublesome question of "I", but much quieter, and more meditative, Winter Journal (Faber £17.99), Paul Auster's second-person narrative addressed to himself, aka "you", takes up the investigation he began with The Invention of Solitude in the 1980s.

Philip Norman's barnstorming Mick Jagger (Harper Collins £20) is a mash-up of "me", "him", "us" and "them". It's an unauthorised life (Sir Mick is too much of a rock god to co-operate with any independent-minded writer), and is probably the better for being untethered. Norman has ploughed this terrain for much of his career, and brings to his subject both a deep fascination with the ecology of rock'n'roll plus a sharp eye for its absurdities.

Where Jagger has prowled the jungle of Hello! and Hollywood like a predator, Rupert Everett has survived, sort of, with an odd combination of sharp teeth, bright eyes, and amazing plumage. Five years ago, he published Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins , a deliciously irreverent account of his adventures in La-La land, one of the best recent theatrical memoirs. Now, he's done it again. At the outset, Vanished Years (Little Brown £20) might have a secret ambition to be sadder and wiser, but Everett's eye for hilarious detail turns any elegy into a riot.

I have saved the best for last, Country Girl (Faber £20), the memoir that Edna O'Brien says "I swore I would never write", begun in her 78th year. As a Celt, O'Brien holds a secret communion with the mystery of things. She believes she "saw things before I actually saw them" – ie that her words were always within her. Certainly, hers is one of the most natural and lyrical voices to have come out of Ireland. Her literary DNA is both magical and forensic. No one can nail a scene, or a character, with quite the same perfect brevity. She has lived many lives and known many loves (including Robert Mitchum), but unlike Everett she wants to celebrate and cherish her experience. But this is not a saccharine read. It's a book to crack open on the first day of Christmas, the ideal gift.

• Best books of 2012
• Observer New Review: writers' books of 2012
• Biography books
• Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Paul Auster
• Mick Jagger
• David Foster Wallace

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Best art books of 2012 – review

Best photography books of 2012

Best science books of 2012

Best graphic novels of 2012

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Best Books Of 2012

True originals: biographies that defy expectations.

Michael Schaub

It's probably not true that truth is stranger than fiction, but in the hands of a great biographer, it can be just as compelling. Novelists can create unique and unforgettable characters — there's never been anyone quite like Jane Eyre or Ignatius J. Reilly — but there's no shortage of fascinating literary protagonists who just happened to exist in real life.

This year brought us some brilliant biographies of world-famous leaders like Lyndon B. Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, but this list focuses on books that chronicle the lives of some true originals from many different walks of life. From a spy turned chef to the highest-ranking black military leader in European history, the subjects of these biographies spent most of their lives well off the beaten path and gained fame for their stubborn refusal to conform to other people's expectations. You could say the same thing about the biographers. These books are written with extraordinary style and originality, by masters of the craft who can spin a tale as adroitly and memorably as any novelist out there.

Best Biographies of 2012

by Bob Spitz

If Julia Child didn't exist, not even the most imaginative novelist could have invented her. America's most famous culinary celebrity started her career working for the Office of Strategic Services (the country's spy agency before the advent of the CIA) during World War II, before discovering that her true passion was not espionage but French cuisine. And in an era when a 50-year-old, 6-foot-2-inch woman with a funny voice wasn't supposed to become a television star, Child revolutionized the medium with The French Chef, probably the most influential cooking show in world history. Journalist Bob Spitz treats Child with an infectious mix of affection and something like awe, tracking her life from childhood in California to death at the age of 91. Dearie significantly expands the portrait of Child that many Americans saw in the 2009 film Julie & Julia (based both on Julie Powell's memoir of the same name and on Child's own autobiography, My Life in France ). It's a fitting tribute to a singular personality who taught the world that cooking didn't have to be intimidating, and that it's perfectly OK to make mistakes, as long as you have fun. "[Fun] was the axis on which Julia's world turned," Spitz writes, "the pivotal component in a groundswell of social change that would not only reshape the way Americans ate but the way they lived, as well."

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I'm Your Man

by Sylvie Simmons

"Like a bird on the wire," sings Leonard Cohen in one of his most famous songs, "like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried, in my way, to be free." It's a bit of an understatement. The legendary writer and musician has done everything his own way — Cohen began his career as an obscure, somewhat transgressive poet, and eventually became Canada's greatest, most original singer-songwriter. In I'm Your Man, music journalist Sylvie Simmons does a wonderful job explaining how the scion of "one of the most prominent Jewish families in Montreal" became the world's unofficial poet laureate of "survival ... sex, God and depression." It's a startlingly effective biography — Simmons seems to understand her subject almost instinctively, and she shares his somber outlook tempered with a wry, but playful sense of humor. Cohen's life wasn't always easy, Simmons writes, but his darkest moments made him who he is now. Or as Cohen himself once sang: "Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."

Barack Obama

by David Maraniss

When David Maraniss' biography of the president of the United States was released this summer, political journalists pounced on the most salacious parts: Barack Obama's relationships with his college girlfriends, and his (apparently frequent) use of marijuana as a young man. But there's much more to Barack Obama: A Life . Maraniss does a fine job chronicling the early years of the first African-American to become leader of the free world, vividly describing his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his intellectually nomadic college career and his days as a Chicago community organizer. The book is a story of a young man looking for his identity, for his place in the world, "moving not only from culture to culture but also from political group to political group ... never staking a home, never grabbing hold of something and making it his." Maraniss keeps an appropriate distance from his subject, but by the end of the book the reader feels he or she knows at least a little more about a man who is famously hard to get to know. Barack Obama: A Life is both a compelling story and a fine biography of a notoriously enigmatic subject.

A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

It's possible to read the title of Alice Kessler-Harris' biography of American playwright Lillian Hellman as a kind of a bitter joke — for decades, any female who dared express an opinion was dismissed as "a difficult woman." (Unfortunately, the loaded phrase still persists today.) But Hellman, who was indisputably subjected to undisguised sexism over the course of her career, was never exactly easy to understand — she was a Stalinist, except she wasn't; an intellectual, but one who seemed to despise other intellectuals. Her plays The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes endure despite the best efforts of McCarthyists to wipe her off the cultural map. Kessler-Harris does an admirable job of defending Hellman's places in the literary and political canons, while still acknowledging the playwright's faults — specifically, her tendencies toward self-aggrandizement and angry moralism. In the end, Kessler-Harris writes, Hellman fell prey to her own "politically naive" idealism: "[S]he invented a world in which she did not live. That invention brought her castle tumbling down." In the process, though, she built something far greater: a literary legacy that still stands today.

The Black Count

by Tom Reiss

Even the most imaginative novelists have their limits, and it would take an incredibly fertile mind to invent a character as compelling, exciting and unlikely as Gen. Alexandre (Alex) Dumas. The father of the famous novelist with the same name, the elder Dumas was born in Haiti in 1762; his father was a French aristocrat, his mother, a black slave. Dumas joined the French army at a young age, and it didn't take him very long to become one of the highest-ranking commanders in that country's military. You might forget, while reading, that The Black Count is a work of nonfiction; author Tom Reiss writes with such narrative urgency and vivid description, you'd think you were reading a novel — the swashbuckling, action-packed kind of story for which the younger Dumas was famous. Indeed, as Reiss points out, Alex Dumas was the inspiration for his son's most famous novel, The Count of Monte Cristo . "The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary ... that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it," Reiss writes, "that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century." The Black Count reminds us of how essential stories, whether true or invented, can be.

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100 Notable Books of 2012

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The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

FICTION & POETRY

ALIF THE UNSEEN . By G. Willow Wilson. (Grove, $25.) A young hacker on the run in the Mideast is the protagonist of this imaginative first novel.

ALMOST NEVER . By Daniel Sada. Translated by Katherine Silver. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In this glorious satire of machismo, a Mexican agronomist simultaneously pursues a prostitute and an upright woman.

AN AMERICAN SPY . By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) In a novel vividly evoking the multilayered world of espionage, Steinhauer’s hero fights back when his C.I.A. unit is nearly destroyed.

ARCADIA . By Lauren Groff. (Voice/Hyperion, $25.99.) Groff’s lush and visual second novel begins at a rural commune, and links that utopian past to a dystopian, post-global-warming future.

AT LAST . By Edward St. Aubyn. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The final and most meditative of St. Aubyn’s brilliant Patrick Melrose novels is full of precise observations and glistening turns of phrase.

BEAUTIFUL RUINS . By Jess Walter. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Walter’s witty sixth novel, set largely in Hollywood, reveals an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and disappointed hopes.

BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK . By Ben Fountain. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99.) The survivors of a fierce firefight in Iraq are whisked stateside for a brief victory tour in this satirical novel.

BLASPHEMY . By Sherman Alexie. (Grove, $27.) The best stories in Alexie’s collection of new and selected works are moving and funny, bringing together the embittered critic and the yearning dreamer.

THE BOOK OF MISCHIEF: New and Selected Stories . By Steve Stern. (Graywolf, $26.) Jewish immigrant lives observed with effusive nostalgia.

BRING UP THE BODIES . By Hilary Mantel. (Macrae/Holt, $28.) Mantel’s sequel to “Wolf Hall” traces the fall of Anne Boleyn, and makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.

BUILDING STORIES . By Chris Ware. (Pantheon, $50.) A big, sturdy box containing hard-bound volumes, pamphlets and a tabloid houses Ware’s demanding, melancholy and magnificent graphic novel about the inhabitants of a Chicago building.

BY BLOOD . By Ellen Ullman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) This smart, slippery novel is a narrative striptease, as a professor listens in on the sessions between the therapist next door and her patients.

CANADA . By Richard Ford. (Ecco/Har­perCollins, $27.99.) A boy whose parents rob a bank in North Dakota in 1960 takes refuge across the border in this mesmerizing novel, driven by fully realized characters and an accomplished prose style.

CARRY THE ONE . By Carol Anshaw. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Anshaw pays close attention to the lives of a group of friends bound together by a fatal accident in this wry, humane novel, her fourth.

CITY OF BOHANE . By Kevin Barry. (Graywolf, $25.) Somewhere in Ireland in 2053, people are haunted by a “lost time,” when something calamitous happened, and hope to reclaim the past. Barry’s extraordinary, exuberant first novel is full of inventive language.

COLLECTED POEMS . By Jack Gilbert. (Knopf, $35.) In orderly free verse constructions, Gilbert deals plainly with grief, love, marriage, betrayal and lust.

DEAR LIFE: Stories . By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $26.95.) This volume offers further proof of Munro’s mastery, and shows her striking out in the direction of a new, late style that sums up her whole career.

THE DEVIL IN SILVER . By Victor LaValle. (Spiegel & Grau, $27.) LaValle’s culturally observant third novel is set in a shabby urban mental hospital.

ENCHANTMENTS . By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $27.) Harrison’s splendid and surprising novel of late imperial Russia centers on Rasputin’s daughter Masha and the hemophiliac ­czarevitch Alyosha.

FLIGHT BEHAVIOR . By Barbara Kingsolver. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) An Appalachian woman becomes involved in an effort to save monarch butterflies in this brave and majestic novel.

FOBBIT . By David Abrams. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $15.) Clerks, cooks and lawyers at a forward operating base in Iraq populate this first novel.

THE FORGETTING TREE . By Tatjana Soli. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.) In Soli’s haunting second novel, a mysterious Caribbean woman cares for a cancer patient on an isolated California ranch.

GATHERING OF WATERS . By Bernice L. McFadden. (Akashic, $24.95.) Three generations of black women confront floods and murder in Mississippi.

GODS WITHOUT MEN . By Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.) Related stories, spanning centuries and continents, and all tethered to a desert rock formation, emphasize interconnectivity across time and space in Kunzru’s relentlessly modern fourth novel.

HHhH . By Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) This gripping novel examines both the killing of an SS general in Prague in 1942 and Binet’s experience in writing about it.

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING . By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $25.) Eg­gers’s novel is a haunting and supremely readable parable of America in the global economy, a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands.

HOME . By Toni Morrison. (Knopf, $24.) A black Korean War veteran, discharged from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland, makes a reluctant journey back to Georgia in a novel engaged with themes that have long haunted Morrison.

HOPE: A TRAGEDY . By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $26.95.) Hilarity alternates with pain in this novel about a Jewish man seeking peace in upstate New York who discovers Anne Frank in his ­attic.

HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? By Sheila Heti. (Holt, $25.) The narrator (also named Sheila) and her friends try to answer the question in this novel’s title.

IN ONE PERSON . By John Irving. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) Irving’s funny, risky new novel about an aspiring writer struggling with his sexuality examines what happens when we face our desires honestly.

A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME . By Wiley Cash. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99.) An evil pastor dominates Cash’s mesmerizing first novel.

MARRIED LOVE: And Other Stories . By Tessa Hadley. (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Hadley’s understatedly beautiful collection is filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class.

NW . By Zadie Smith. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The lives of two friends who grew up in a northwest London housing project diverge, illuminating questions of race, class, sexual identity and personal choice, in Smith’s energetic modernist novel.

ON THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE DEATHS . By Lucia Perillo. (Copper Canyon, $22.) Taut, lucid poems filled with complex emotional reflection.

PURE . By Julianna Baggott. (Grand Central, $25.99.) Children battle for the planet’s redemption in this precisely written postapocalyptic adventure story.

THE RIGHT-HAND SHORE . By Christopher Tilghman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A dark, magisterial novel set on a Chesapeake Bay estate.

THE ROUND HOUSE . By Louise Erdrich. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) In this novel, an American Indian family faces the ramifications of a vicious crime.

SALVAGE THE BONES . By Jesmyn Ward. (Bloomsbury, $24.) A pregnant 15-year-old and her family await Hurricane Katrina in this lushly written novel.

SAN MIGUEL . By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $27.95.) Two utopians from different eras establish private idylls on California’s desolate Channel Islands; this novel preserves their tantalizing dreams.

SHINE SHINE SHINE . By Lydia Netzer. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) This thought-provoking debut novel presents a geeky astronaut and his pregnant wife.

SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME . By Natalie Serber. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.) The stories in Serber’s first collection are smart and nuanced.

SILENT HOUSE . By Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Robert Finn. (Knopf, $26.95.) A family is a microcosm of a country on the verge of a coup in this intense, foreboding novel, first published in Turkey in 1983.

THE STARBOARD SEA . By Amber Dermont. (St. Martin’s, $24.99.) Dermont’s captivating debut novel, whose narrator is a boarding school student and a sailor, takes pleasure in the sea and in the exhilarating freedom of being young.

SWEET TOOTH . By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) The true subject of this smart and tricky novel, set inside a cold war espionage operation, is the border between make-believe and reality.

SWIMMING HOME . By Deborah Levy. (Bloomsbury, paper, $14.) In this spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, a troubled young woman tests the marriages of two couples.

TELEGRAPH AVENUE . By Michael Chabon. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Chabon’s rich comic novel about fathers and sons in Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., juggles multiple plots and mounds of pop culture references in astonishing prose.

THE TESTAMENT OF MARY . By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $19.99.) This beautiful work takes power from the surprises of its language and its almost shocking characterization of Mary, mother of Jesus.

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER . By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $26.95.) The stories in this collection are about love, but they’re also about the undertow of family history and cultural mores, presented in Díaz’s exciting, irresistible and entertaining prose.

THREE STRONG WOMEN . By Marie NDiaye. Translated by John Fletcher. (Knopf, $25.95.) In loosely linked narratives, three women from Senegal struggle with fathers and husbands in France. This subtle, hypnotic novel won the Prix Goncourt in 2009.

TOBY’S ROOM . By Pat Barker. (Doubleday, $25.95.) This novel, a sequel to “Life Class,” delves further into the lives of an English family torn apart by World War I.

WATERGATE . By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $26.95.) This novelistic re­imagining of the “third-rate burglary” proposes surprising motives for the break-in and the 18-minute gap, and has a sympathetic Nixon.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK: Stories . By Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $24.95.) Englander tackles large questions of morality and history in a masterly collection that manages to be both insightful and ­uproarious.

THE YELLOW BIRDS . By Kevin Powers. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) A young private and his platoon struggle through the war in Iraq but find no peace at home in this powerful and moving first novel about the frailty of man and the brutality of war.

ALL WE KNOW: Three Lives . By Lisa Cohen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) The vanished world of midcentury upper-class lesbians is portrayed as beguiling, its inhabitants members of a stylish club.

AMERICAN TAPESTRY: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama . By Rachel L. Swarns. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $27.99.) A Times reporter’s deeply researched chronicle of several generations of Mrs. Obama’s family.

AMERICAN TRIUMVIRATE: Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf . By James Dodson. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author evokes an era when the game was more vivid and less corporate than it seems now.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? A Comic Drama . By Alison Bechdel. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $22.) Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.

BARACK OBAMA: The Story . By David Maraniss. (Simon & Schuster, $32.50.) This huge and absorbing new biography, full of previously unexplored detail, shows that Obama’s saga is more surprising and gripping than the version we’re familiar with.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity . By Katherine Boo. (Random House, $27.) This extraordinary moral inquiry into life in an Indian slum shows the human costs exacted by a brutal social Darwinism.

BELZONI: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate . By Ivor Noël Hume. (University of Virginia, $34.95.) The fascinating tale of the 19th-century Italian monk, a “notorious tomb robber,” who gathered archaeological treasures in Egypt while crunching bones underfoot.

THE BLACK COUNT: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo . By Tom Reiss. (Crown, $27.) The first Alexandre Dumas, a mixed-race general of the French Revolution, is the subject of this imaginative biography.

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History . By Florence Williams. (Norton, $25.95.) Williams’s environmental call to arms deplores chemicals in breast milk and the vogue for silicone implants.

COMING APART: The State of White America, 1960-2010 . By Charles Murray. (Crown Forum, $27.) The author of “The Bell Curve” warns that the white working class has abandoned the “founding virtues.”

DARWIN’S GHOSTS: The Secret History of Evolution . By Rebecca Stott. (Spiegel & Grau, $27.) Stott’s lively, original history of evolutionary ideas flows easily across continents and centuries.

A DISPOSITION TO BE RICH: How a Small-Town Preacher’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States . By Geoffrey C. Ward. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author’s ancestor was the bane of Ulysses S. Grant.

FAR FROM THE TREE: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity . By Andrew Solomon. (Scribner, $37.50.) This passionate and affecting work about what it means to be a parent is based on interviews with families of “exceptional” children.

FLAGRANT CONDUCT. The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans . By Dale Carpenter. (Norton, $29.95.) Carpenter stirringly describes the 2003 Supreme Court decision that overturned the Texas sodomy law.

THE FOLLY OF FOOLS: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life . By Robert Trivers. (Basic Books, $28.) An intriguing argument that deceit is a beneficial evolutionary “deep feature” of life.

THE GREY ALBUM: On the Blackness of Blackness . By Kevin Young. (Graywolf, paper, $25.) A poet’s lively account of the central place of the trickster figure in black American culture could have been called “How Blacks Invented America.”

HAITI: The Aftershocks of History . By Laurent Dubois. (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.) Foreign meddling, the lack of a democratic tradition, a humiliating American occupation and cold-war support of a brutal dictator all figure in a scholar’s well-written analysis.

HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character . By Paul Tough. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) Noncognitive skills like persistence and self-control are more crucial to success than sheer brainpower, Tough maintains.

HOW MUSIC WORKS . By David Byrne. (McSweeney’s, $32.) This guidebook also explores the eccentric rock star’s personal and professional experience.

IRON CURTAIN: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 . By Anne Applebaum. (Doubleday, $35.) An overwhelming and convincing account of the Soviet push to colonize Eastern Europe after World War II.

KAYAK MORNING: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats . By Roger Rosenblatt. (Ecco/HarperCollins, paper, $13.99.) This thoughtful meditation on the evolution of grief over time asks the big questions.

LINCOLN’S CODE: The Laws of War in American History . By John Fabian Witt. (Free Press, $32.) A tension between humanitarianism and righteousness has shaped America’s rules of warfare.

LITTLE AMERICA: The War Within the War for Afghanistan . By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $27.95.) A beautifully written and deeply reported account of America’s troubled involvement in ­Afghanistan.

MEMOIR OF A DEBULKED WOMAN: Enduring Ovarian Cancer . By Susan Gubar. (Norton, $24.95.) A feminist scholar recounts her experience and criticizes the medical treatment of a frightening disease in a voice that is straightforward and incredibly brave.

MY POETS . By Maureen N. McLane. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Part memoir and part criticism, this friendly book includes essays on poets canonical and contemporary, as well as lineated poem-games.

THE OBAMAS . By Jodi Kantor. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) Michelle Obama sets the tone and tempo of the current White House, Kantor argues in this admiring account, full of colorful insider anecdotes.

ODDLY NORMAL: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality . By John Schwartz. (Gotham, $26.) A Times reporter’s deeply affecting account of his son’s coming out also reviews research on the experience of LGBT kids.

ON A FARTHER SHORE: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson . By William Souder. (Crown, $30.) An absorbing biography of the pioneering environmental writer on the 50th anniversary of “Silent Spring.”

ON SAUDI ARABIA: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future . By Karen Elliott House. (Knopf, $28.95.) A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist unveils this inscrutable country, comparing its calcified regime to the Soviet Union in its final days.

THE ONE: The Life and Music of James Brown . By RJ Smith. (Gotham, $27.50.) Smith argues that Brown was the most significant modern American musician in terms of style, messaging, rhythm and originality.

THE PASSAGE OF POWER: The Years of Lyndon Johnson . By Robert A. Caro. (Knopf, $35.) The fourth volume of Caro’s magisterial work spans the five years that end shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, as Johnson prepares to push for a civil rights act.

THE PATRIARCH: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy . By David Nasaw. (Penguin Press, $40.) This riveting history captures the sweep of Kennedy’s life — as Wall Street speculator, moviemaker, ambassador and dynastic founder.

PEOPLE WHO EAT DARKNESS: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo — and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up . By Richard Lloyd Parry. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) An evenhanded investigation of a murder.

RED BRICK, BLACK MOUNTAIN, WHITE CLAY: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival . By Christopher Benfey. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Mixing memoir, family saga, travelogue and cultural ­history.

RULE AND RUIN. The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party . By Geoffrey Kabaservice. (Oxford University, $29.95.) Pragmatic Republicanism was hardier than we remember, Kabaservice argues.

SAUL STEINBERG: A Biography . By Deirdre Bair. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $40.) A gripping and revelatory biography of the eminent cartoonist.

SHOOTING VICTORIA: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy . By Paul Thomas Murphy. (Pegasus, $35.) An uninhibited and learned account of the attempts on the life of Queen Victoria, which only increased her popularity.

SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis . By Timothy Egan. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) A deft portrait of the man who made memorable photographs of American ­Indians.

THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH . By Edward O. Wilson. (Norton, $27.95.) The evolutionary biologist explores the strange kinship between humans and some insects.

SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: Memoirs of an Outsider . By Zakes Mda. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) The South African novelist and playwright absorbingly illuminates his wide, worldly life.

SPILLOVER: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic . By David Quammen. (Norton, $28.95.) Quammen’s meaty, sprawling book chronicles his globe-trotting scientific adventures and warns against animal microbes spilling over into people.

THE TASTE OF WAR: World War II and the Battle for Food . By Lizzie Colling­ham. (Penguin Press, $36.) Collingham argues that food needs contributed to the war’s origins, strategy, outcome and aftermath.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power . By Jon Meacham. (Random House, $35.) This readable and well-researched life celebrates Jefferson’s skills as a practical politician, unafraid to wield power even when it conflicted with his small-government views.

VICTORY: The Triumphant Gay Revolution . By Linda Hirshman. (Harper/Har­perCollins, $27.99.) Written with knowing finesse, this expansive history of gay rights from the early 20th century to the present draws on archives and interviews.

WHEN GOD TALKS BACK: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God . By T. M. Luhrmann. (Knopf, $28.95.) Evangelicals believe that God speaks to them personally because they hone the skill of prayer, this insightful study argues.

WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? By Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $25.) Winterson’s unconventional and winning memoir wrings humor from adversity as it describes her upbringing by a wildly deranged mother.

WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST? An Existential Detective Story . By Jim Holt. (Liveright/Norton, $27.95.) An elegant and witty writer converses with philosophers and cosmologists who ponder why there is something rather than nothing.

The list of 100 Notable Books on Dec. 2 misidentified the state in which the parents of the narrator of Richard Ford’s novel “Canada” rob a bank. It is North Dakota — not Montana, which is where they reside at the time. (The error also appeared in the Editors’ Choice column on June 17.)

The list of 100 Notable Books of 2012 last Sunday misstated the publisher and price of “Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider,” by Zakes Mda. The book is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux at the price of $35, not by Penguin Press at $26.95. (The same error appeared in the Editors’ Choice column on Feb. 5.)

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