He is singular among American heroes: Founding Father, truth-teller, brave but reluctant military leader. In the insightful and entertaining You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe moves past the well-worn tropes we’ve come to associate with George Washington. Her nuanced portrait paints a man torn between service to country and family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Alexis Coe.

Born to Augustine and Mary Washington on a modest farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, George was the oldest of six. Augustine died when George was just 11 years old. With a modest inheritance and no money for education, George learned responsibility at an early age. At 17, he became the surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest ever, and began buying land. A natural leader, he became a major in the Virginia military by 21 and caught the eye of British Governor Dinwiddie, who sent him on a mission to expel French settlers from the Ohio territory. These were his earliest forays into what would become a lifetime of public service. 

Washington’s story is as well documented as anyone’s in American history. Yet Coe, a former research curator for the New York Public Library, finds fresh angles from which to examine him. And she doesn’t shy away from the most troubling aspect of Washington’s legacy: When he died, he owned 123 slaves. The museum at Mount Vernon claims Washington freed all the people he enslaved in his 1799 will. While that is technically true, Coe points out that their emancipation was not automatic upon his death. Even worse, many of the people enslaved by Washington had married those enslaved by Martha, so even when they were emancipated, their loved ones were not.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Coe writes with style and humor (one chapter opens with the line “Great love stories don’t often begin with dysentery”). You Never Forget Your First reminds us of the importance of public service and diplomacy, and Coe makes colonial history not just fascinating but relevant.

A beguiling look at the many women who helped shape the temperament, talents and art of Virginia Woolf

Modernist trailblazer and feminist icon Virginia Woolf not only helped change the course of literature but also significantly altered the way we think about women writers and their work. In Gillian Gill’s captivating and incisive new study, Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World, she refracts Woolf’s life, as the title suggests, through the facets of a distaff prism. Detailing Woolf’s fascinating maternal lineage as well as her intimate relationships with female family and friends, Gill explores the ways that young Virginia Stephen became the formidable Virginia Woolf. 

Woolf’s maternal line (the source of her wealth) was Anglo-Indian, and Gill shares the long-hidden probability that Woolf’s great-great-grandmother was of Bengali descent. Woolf was never aware of this extraordinary fact, but it underscores the unconventionality of her clan. There were seven accomplished women in Woolf’s grandmother’s generation, including her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the Victorian-age photographer whose exquisite images are now preserved and revered—in no small part due to Woolf’s resurrecting efforts. 

All of the women in Woolf’s maternal line were renowned for their grace, beauty and spirit—not least of all Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, who was named after Cameron and became one of the photographer’s favorite models. Woolf’s sometimes-fraught relationship with her Victorian-minded mother, who died when Woolf was 13, would be central to the writer’s emotional development, as much for what it lacked as for what it possessed.

Woolf’s immediate family was complicated, with two brothers, a sister and four half-siblings. Her father, the scholar and writer Leslie Stephen, had been previously married to the daughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and Woolf gained a beloved aunt and a half-sister, Laura, from that earlier union. Laura spent most of her life in an asylum, and other relatives, including Leslie himself, exhibited signs of mental illness, as would Woolf. Her half-sister Stella, from Julia’s first marriage to Herbert Duckworth, was a stabilizing influence after their mother’s premature death. Most significant was Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, who was her closest spiritual confidante. Together they were at the center of the Bloomsbury group that revolutionized the arts and intellectual thought of the day.

Gill persuades us that, for Woolf—who grew up in a male-dominated household and, later, navigated a male-centric world—it was the women in her life who played a consummate role in shaping her revolutionary perceptions and art. This embracing and often sharp-witted study of the peripheries of a great writer’s life makes for compulsive reading.

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.