At the close of 2019, three years will have passed since we lost Carrie Fisher. Planetarily (in more than one sense), we have yet to stop reeling from it. After her death, one friend referred to Fisher on social media as her “space mom,” and I thought how beautifully that encapsulated what she meant to so many of us: a daring, gutsy, wondrously flawed woman we had all grown up with.

Sheila Weller, who is no stranger to writing intricately about the complicated lives of women (she has previously written about Carly Simon, Diane Sawyer, Christiane Amanpour and Joni Mitchell, among others), neither neglects nor glosses over any part of Fisher’s life in Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge. To do so would fly in the face of everything Fisher held to be important. In life, Fisher was brutally honest about her weaknesses, her addictions, about mental illness, about relationships. That honesty was a gift—a handing-down of wisdom. As Weller illustrates so well in her biography, Fisher gave, and gave, and gave in this way, mentoring generations of people around the world just by living large with irrepressible honesty and wit.

Pulling from extensive research and interviews done with everyone from the neighborhood children Fisher grew up with to her extensive group of cherished friends, Weller knits these pieces together into an engrossing and meaningful look at the inner life of a woman who described herself as “a writer who acts.” The result is a project that is breathtaking in its size and scope—Fisher lived a lot, and that is felt in page after page.

But like Fisher’s life itself, A Life on the Edge runs deep. It is less a long book than a very full one. It’s moving, truthful and a fitting tribute to its subject and to her unflappable courage and transparency. Reading Weller’s portrait of Fisher, you will miss her, deeply.

To anyone who believes Supreme Court justices speak only in pronouncements handed down like chiseled tablets from Mount Sinai, Jeffrey Rosen’s Conversations With RBG will come as a revelation. Drawn from eight public and private interviews conducted over the past decade, these candid and often deeply personal conversations provide insight into the life of a woman who has gracefully navigated the roles of passionate advocate, discerning judge and loving wife and mother.

Rosen, who’s been writing about the Supreme Court since 1992, and who currently serves as president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, is a friendly interlocutor. When Ginsburg sat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Rosen served as a law clerk, they bonded over their mutual love of opera. His questions in this book are well-informed but friendly, designed to draw out the naturally diffident Ginsburg rather than to provoke controversy.

Each of the book’s chapters is structured around a theme, such as Roe v. Wade—a decision whose outcome Ginsburg welcomed but whose reasoning she criticized, almost costing her a seat on the Court—or her 56-year marriage to Martin Ginsburg, a prominent tax lawyer. Rosen provides a brief introduction in each chapter and then proceeds in a question and answer format to explore the pertinent topic.

Though most of the book deals with Ginsburg’s 26-year career on the Supreme Court, where she has evolved from a “judicial minimalist” to the vigorous dissenter lionized as “The Notorious RBG,” Rosen also devotes a chapter to her work as an advocate for women’s rights for the ACLU in the 1970s. In those cases, portrayed in the 2018 film On the Basis of Sex, she successfully pursued a seemingly paradoxical strategy. By pointing out how challenged laws discriminated against men, Ginsburg eventually undermined gender-based discrimination against women.

As she approaches her 87th birthday in 2020, having dealt with several episodes of cancer, Ginsburg maintains her vigorous work schedule. Facing life in the minority in a Court that’s currently divided 5-4 along ideological lines, she nevertheless remains “skeptically hopeful” that a pragmatic Chief Justice John Roberts will act as a check on his fellow conservatives’ more ideologically driven impulses. Ginsburg, ever the optimist, believes we’re “constantly forming a more perfect Union, which is what the Founders intended.” Conversations With RBG is an enlightening look at her vital contribution to that process.

Eighteen years have passed since “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” completed its 31-season run. Sixteen years have passed since the show’s namesake died. But Fred Rogers remains as relevant in 2019 as he was in 1953, when he developed “The Children’s Corner” for a local television station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Culture writer Gavin Edwards’ Kindness and Wonder examines why Mister Rogers remains a phenomenon nearly two decades after he left television. Part one of the book, “Let’s Make the Most of This Beautiful Day,” recounts how Fred McFeely Rogers became an icon of children’s television. Edwards retraces Mister Rogers’ youth as a shy, overweight child from a wealthy family in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Even as he grew and found people with whom he connected, Mister Rogers never lost touch with that child. He spent the rest of his life helping children see that they were special and loved, just the way they were.

Elements of Mister Rogers’ biography may be familiar to his fans, but Edwards’ careful research is sure to introduce new facts to most readers. Though the section, which spans half the book, would benefit from chapter breaks, it effectively sets up part two, “Ten Ways to Live More Like Mister Rogers Right Now.”

The second half of the book moves quickly, in part because of how deftly Edwards identifies why Mister Rogers remains a legend. Through chapters such as “Accept the Changing Seasons,” Edwards shares some of the challenges Mister Rogers encountered in his personal life—and what we can learn from his responses. The lessons Edwards shares are simple, just like so many of the messages on Mister Rogers’ PBS program. For example, when Mister Rogers found a dead fish in his fish tank, he used it as an opportunity to explain one of life’s biggest, scariest moments. He never hid the truth or talked down to children.

Edwards is well versed in popular culture as the author of The Tao of Bill Murray, The World According to Tom Hanks and nine other books. In Kindness and Wonder, he helps readers see how the lessons from a children’s television legend remain relevant, no matter one’s age.

Mercurial, feline, charismatic, sullen, progressive, brutal: actor Marlon Brando was a knot of contradictions. Passionate about social justice and civil rights, Brando could also treat the many women in his life as disposable. Hailed as a genius for his intense performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, Brando struggled to retain his interest in acting and refused to play the Hollywood game. Prizewinning Hollywood biographer William J. Mann masterfully captures Brando’s allure, his psychological complexity and the epic arc of his career in The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando. 

Mann interweaves narrative strands from Brando’s traumatic childhood through his professional ascent to build a layered portrait of his ambivalences, rages and sexuality. Why did Brando punch a fellow actor backstage in his early years at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop? A flashback to Brando’s turbulent time in military school suggests possible answers. Similarly, Brando’s fluid sexuality and active sex life (he called himself a “sex addict” long before the term was common currency) is interwoven against childhood scenes with his beloved but neglectful, alcoholic mother. 

The portrait of 1940s New York and Brando’s time at the Dramatic Workshop is particularly fascinating. Mann punctures the myth that Brando was a Method actor (someone trained in the Strasberg method) by showing how pivotal the acting teacher (and Stanislavski disciple) Stella Adler was in Brando’s life and work. Adler not only trained Brando in her technique but also took him into her culturally and intellectually progressive home, opening his eyes to art and politics. Adler’s milieu was the source for Brando’s lifelong political activism.

Subsequent chapters in Brando’s life and work are as carefully and fairly handled. Extensive interviews (with Ellen Adler, Rita Moreno, Elaine Stritch and many others) reveal Brando’s complex and often ambivalent relationships with women, his children and Hollywood. 

From Mann, Brando receives a biography every bit as compelling and powerful as his own stage presence. 

Perhaps no writer of the late 20th century has been more mythologized, or lionized, than Susan Sontag. Beautifully written and moving, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work reveals with illuminating clarity Sontag’s ceaseless quest to understand and be understood; her often arrogant and condescending manner, even to those closest to her; and her attempts to use art to fashion herself into the iconic figure she became in life and death.

Drawing deeply on hundreds of interviews with Sontag’s family and friends, as well as on materials in Sontag’s restricted archives and her published and unpublished writings, Moser traces her life from her childhood and youth, to her years at the University of Chicago, and throughout her attempts to distance herself from reality by aestheticizing it in her critical essays and fiction. Sontag’s father died when she was 5, and her mother remained distant, so she retreated into books. “Reading gave Susan a way to recast reality. . . . When she needed to escape, books let her close the door,” Moser writes. Looking back on her childhood, Sontag revealed a theme in her journals that defined her entire work and life: “I grew up trying both to see and not to see.”

Moser’s close readings of Sontag’s writings—from her earliest essays (“Notes on Camp,” “Against Interpretation”) to her failed novels (The Benefactor) and her successful ones (The Volcano Lover, In America)—reveal the theme of language’s relationship to reality. For Sontag, “language could console, and how it could destroy.” Alongside his elegant readings, Moser delves into the rocky relationships that resulted from Sontag’s inability to be alone—from her son, David, to her lover, Annie Leibovitz, to artists such as Jasper Johns and Joseph Brodsky. 

Sontag may have been our last public intellectual. She cast her intense gaze over art, literature, film and politics, boring into her subjects with a steely vision that revealed the many facets not only of those subjects but also of herself. Moser’s monumental achievement captures the woman who, among other things, “demonstrated endless admiration for art and beauty—and endless contempt for intellectual and spiritual vulgarity.” This brilliant book matches Sontag’s own brilliance and finally gives her the biography she deserves.

Sidney Gottlieb was an odd fit for the CIA in 1951. Among the Company’s aristocratic Ivy Leaguers, he was a left-wing scientist and the Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants. But he and CIA chief Allen Dulles had at least one thing in common: Each had been born with deformed feet, though Dulles’ condition was less serious. Did that shared remembrance of early physical struggle form a bond? Whatever the reason, Dulles hired Gottlieb, and so began his astonishing career of killing, torture and lies.

The outlines of Gottlieb’s CIA tenure, as head of the MK-ULTRA mind-control research project and director of the spy-tools department, are well known. But renowned journalist Stephen Kinzer’s new biography of Gottlieb, Poisoner in Chief, is still shocking in its vivid detail.

Throughout the 1950s, under Gottlieb’s imaginative leadership, MK-ULTRA experimented with LSD and other dangerous drugs on unwitting or coerced subjects—mental patients, prisoners and just plain old everyday folks. Many were left mentally disabled for life; some were even killed. One fellow CIA scientist was likely thrown out of a window when he was deemed unreliable. And it was all done in a completely fruitless search for the ability to “brainwash” human minds. Nothing worked—ever.

In this masterful book, Kinzer demonstrates that the “research” done by Gottlieb’s team was as horrifically unethical as anything done by Nazi doctors later tried for war crimes. And yet, as Kinzer carefully documents, Gottlieb was a “nice guy” who loved his family and lived a proto-hippie lifestyle in rural Virginia. He spent his post-CIA years quietly, as a speech therapist who treated children—when he wasn’t destroying documents or stonewalling congressional committees.

During the years of investigations and lawsuits that began in the 1970s, Gottlieb never publicly repented; indeed, he believed himself to be a true patriot who had fought a justified war against communism. Kinzer’s chilling book reveals what can happen when morality is jettisoned in the name of national security—then and now.

A veteran of New York Magazine, Esquire and Elle, author Lisa Taddeo opens Three Women, her compelling debut, with stories about her mother: the beginnings of her mother’s life as a woman, with all the complexities that accompany the teenage years, when society views women as reaching the height of their sexual power. She closes with her mother as well, this time describing the end of her life as Taddeo cared for her in the hospital. While this may seem like a strange decision for a book that concerns itself with female desire, it’s quickly apparent to even the casual reader that Taddeo doesn’t shy away from the unspoken, the uncomfortable and the shadow sides of sexuality. This is by necessity a ruthless book as it explores the half-concealed aspects of not only the female sex life but also the inner and secret lives of women.

The three women in question cut across lines of class, age and experience. Maggie’s story begins as a teen-ager in a working-class family in North Dakota, receiving provocative and confusing texts from an English teacher that build alarmingly and irresistibly. Lina is an Indiana housewife, firmly middle-class, unfulfilled and anxiety-ridden amid toddlers and a sexless marriage, when she reconnects with an old boyfriend over Facebook. Enigmatic Sloane is comfortably upper-class and considers herself highly in control of her sexual agency, until difficult memories surface, consequences arise, and she begins to question the line between male desire and her own—whether she is subject or object.

Three Women is merciless, impossible to put down and so revealing as to be uncomfortable. As the women share themselves, you find yourself reflected. It’s a multifaceted work that changes as you turn it, casting light in unexpected corners that you never before considered—and had perhaps even been guarding against. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women.

The American dream has always been conditional for this country’s marginalized peoples. For young, undocumented Mexican mother Aida Hernandez (not her real name, for reasons of protective anonymity), the U.S. immigration system exposed the cruelties and complexities of what it really means to be free.

Aida was born and raised in Agua Prieta, Mexico. After her mother endured years of physical abuse, she left her husband, Aida’s father, and set out for the border town of Douglas, Arizona, with 9-year-old Aida and her two other daughters in tow. But Aida’s mother’s next partner echoed the patterns of abuse. As Aida grew up, the turbulent and unpredictable nature of her mother’s relationships added to the micro and macro challenges that accompanied living as an undocumented citizen. As a result, Aida’s inner world reflected the chaos of her unstable adolescence.

Author Aaron Bobrow-Strain, a professor of politics at Whitman College and the founding member of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition in Washington state, presents Aida’s narrative in The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez as “somewhere between journalistic nonfiction and ethnography.” Bobrow-Strain’s genre-bending book isn’t so much an example of immigrant “exceptionalism”—the idea that Aida is deserving of citizenship because she’s “not like the others”—as it is an example of how American cultural and societal norms frame immigration as a meritocracy. 

In the book’s extensive back matter, Bobrow-Strain writes, “By framing support for undocumented immigrants in the language of virtue and achievement—‘hardworking,’ ‘family values,’ ‘not criminals,’ and ‘success stories’—I, and some parts of the immigrant rights movement, had tacitly condemned people like Aida who could not fit their lives into our narrow windows of approval.”

The author’s tone, coupled with the overall narrative execution, shakes off the objective lens typically required of straightforward journalism. Bobrow-Strain is equal parts sympathetic and unabashedly honest in his re-creation of Aida’s life, seamlessly blending the intimate details of memoir into the historical and political context of U.S. immigration policies. Her journey to young adulthood is marked both by its universality (dancing to Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, the anxieties of trying to fit in at school) and by the adversities specific to being “other” in America (dealing with undocumented citizenship status, Border Patrol).

While Aida’s story is not meant to serve as the sole representation of life as an undocumented immigrant, it’s a sharp portrait of a country where equality is designed only for those deemed worthy. 

Sonia Purnell, the bestselling author of Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill, captures the thrilling story of a female spy in A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, a groundbreaking biography that reads like a spy thriller. 

Purnell’s subject is Virginia Hall, the daughter of a proper Maryland family, who sought to elude her mother’s social control and embrace her own desire for an adventurous life by applying with the U.S. State Department. But despite superior language skills and test results, Hall found herself stuck in low-level clerical jobs as result of the era’s ingrained sexism.

Hall was stationed as a clerk in Turkey when a hunting accident resulted in the loss of her left leg. Despite near-fatal blood infections and the pain of walking with a prosthetic, Hall later volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French army in 1939. Her bravery and passion for France made her an attractive recruit for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the secretive spy organization given the nod by Winston Churchill to fight the Nazis through James Bond-style espionage. Embedded in Nazi-occupied France, Hall helped organize the French Resistance in ways so ingenious and suspenseful that her previously untold story has recently been optioned for film. 

Although documentation of the French Resistance movement exists only in fragments, Purnell ably draws on a variety of sources to create a suspenseful, heartbreaking and ultimately triumphant tale of heroism and sacrifice.