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William James (1842-1910) was a seminal thinker and author whose life and work as a philosopher, psychologist and teacher with a deep interest in both science and religion put him in the vanguard of the intellectual currents of his time. Though he taught at Harvard, his influence extended far beyond academia, through his public lectures and books especially The Varieties of Religious Experience, Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe and Pragmatism. James’ books sold well to the general public in his day and continue to be read today. In his luminous new biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert D. Richardson superbly captures both the fascinating life and groundbreaking thought of the man described by A.N. Whitehead as an adorable genius. James grew up as part of a remarkable family and once wrote that his famous younger brother, the novelist Henry James, was a native of the James family and has no other country. Dominated by Henry Sr., his religion-obsessed father, the family also included Alice, his perceptive and gifted invalid sister. Richardson shows how close the family bond remained throughout their lives. For example, although Henry lived abroad for much of his life, the brothers corresponded frequently and Henry was in the main William’s closest confidant, with the important exception of his wife. Though William James enjoyed socializing and was keenly interested in other people, he had numerous health problems and suffered from crippling depression. Richardson identifies resilience as a key factor in James’ life, a quality apparent when he abandoned plans to be an artist and decided to earn a medical degree, after which he began a long teaching career. Among former students who remembered him fondly were Gertrude Stein and W.E.B. DuBois.

Richardson writes that James’ life was exhausting; just tracing it is exhausting. But his life was so rich and his biographer so skilled that reading about it is exhilarating.

If it can be said that an artist evokes images of a place or time, then surely the work of Charles Addams should bring to mind New York City in the 20th century. While his name is immediately associated with his ghoulishly delightful Addams Family cartoons, Linda H. Davis shows us in Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life that his impact on popular culture stretched far beyond the fame the 1960s television show brought him.

Charles Addams was born in 1912 to a middle-class New Jersey family, raised by humorous and affectionate parents, got into the normal amount of childhood mischief, and grew from a smiling child to a smiling adult. He was a bright, normal boy with a talent for art and an eye for the absurd some would say the macabre in life. As a young man he was in the right place at the right time when he sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker, beginning a relationship that lasted half a century. As his sly, wicked cartoons graced the pages and covers of that magazine as well as others, he became friends with a who’s who of American literature, from Thurber to Hemingway to Capote.

While Addams might be pictured as a connoisseur of the gruesome an autopsy platform turned into a coffee table he was charming and personable. Tall, dark, but not exactly handsome (he was often mistaken for a friend of his, the actor Walter Matthau) he had a bevy of female companions, his harem as he sometimes called them, for most of his adult life. His conquests were legion and legend; he squired everyone from Greta Garbo to Jacqueline Kennedy, and in some sense was defined, and haunted, by his three marriages.

Davis has written a loving, meticulously detailed account of the life of a man whose cartoons juxtaposed the absurd with everyday life, and were as ironic as they were affectionate. Addams had his share of minor travails usually about women and money but he was loved by most people that knew him, and had a happy, productive life. We should all be so lucky.

On matters of right and wrong, Earl Warren was not a man noticeably plagued by doubts, either in his nearly 11 years as governor of California or in his close to 16 years as chief justice of the United States. He was not a profound thinker, but he was bright, hard working and inordinately gifted in applying compassion and common sense to social issues. While it is true that he supported the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, his political arc was steadily to the left. Today, when people denounce activist judges, Earl Warren remains Exhibit A. In Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, Jim Newton narrates Warren’s story within a broad and illuminating historical context. He clearly admires his subject yet never underplays his excesses. Both early and late in his career, Warren could be petty, puritanical and politically inconsistent. Still, Newton argues, the lapses were minuscule compared to the social good the justice fostered.

Born into a blue-collar family in Los Angeles in 1891 and reared in Bakersfield, Warren worked his way through law school at the University of California at Berkeley. He was an indifferent student but a first-rate networker and a genius at remembering names and faces. With those gifts and inclinations, it was inevitable that he would enter politics. As a county prosecutor, he occasionally employed or countenanced tactics that would have made Chief Justice Warren cringe. But he was incorruptible. In the mid-1940s, he began clashing with flinty upstart Richard Nixon. They would remain adversaries until the end. Warren came to national prominence in 1948 as Thomas Dewey’s vice-presidential running mate in the close contest with Harry Truman. Four years later, he lost again when Dwight Eisenhower beat him out for the Republican presidential nomination. When Chief Justice Fred Vinson died in 1953, Eisenhower tapped Warren for the post. The new chief justice’s geniality, deference and diplomatic skills charmed his fellow justices ultimately to the point that he was able to achieve a unanimous decision when the court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Eisenhower deplored the burdens this ruling put on his administration and did all he could to thwart it.

Guided more by his sense of fairness than rigorous legal interpretations, Warren went on to lead the court in landmark decisions against unwarranted police searches, malicious prosecutions, government-mandated prayer in public schools, invasions of privacy and prohibition of interracial marriages. His court also ruled that states have to provide poor defendants with lawyers and that police must inform people they’ve arrested of their legal rights. Warren adored John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower’s successor, and was devastated when the young president was assassinated. With reluctance, he accepted the painful and controversial responsibility of leading the commission to investigate Kennedy’s death.

Warren announced his retirement during the waning days of Lyndon Johnson’s administration, hoping to prevent Nixon from naming his successor. But Johnson blundered, and the ploy failed. Warren died July 9, 1974, just as the tide of Watergate was starting to wash over Nixon. It was a sight he relished.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.