Mohandas K. Gandhi was born and raised in India and is best known for his work there as a world-renowned social reformer, political thinker, religious pluralist and prophet. If his life had followed the traditional path for someone of his family and caste, he would have remained in India, served in a prominent position and been unknown to most of the world. But as the noted scholar Ramachandra Guha demonstrates in his eminently readable and exhaustively researched Gandhi Before India, the 20 years that Gandhi spent in South Africa before his return to his home country in 1914 were fundamental to his success.

It was in South Africa that Gandhi invented what he named “satyagraha” or the “force of truth in a good cause,” the techniques of mass civil disobedience in which those in authority are shamed by nonviolent protesters willing to suffer beatings and imprisonment to attain justice. As he was about to leave South Africa for good, Gandhi called satyagraha “perhaps the mightiest instrument on earth.”

Nothing in Gandhi’s life had prepared him for the intensity of racial prejudice in South Africa. He went there, for what he thought would be a short time, to represent a prominent businessman in a lawsuit. He won the case and was asked to stay longer to help defeat a bill that would keep Indians, who were coming to South Africa in increasing numbers, from registering to vote. In his autobiography, Gandhi writes: “Thus God laid the foundations of my life in South Africa and sowed the seed of the fight for national self-respect.” His biographer speculates that it may have had more to do with the actions of the ruling class of white men.

Guha’s research took him to archives around the world, where he found many previously unknown or unused documents, including private papers of Gandhi’s friends and co-workers. As a result, Gandhi Before India presents the most complete portrait we have of a very human Gandhi during this period. Perhaps most importantly, we learn that Gandhi had a real gift for friendship. His closest friends in South Africa were two Hindus, two Jews and two Christian clergymen. Each was courageous and impressive, no one more than Gandhi’s devoted Jewish secretary, Sonja Schlesin, a steadfast supporter of his work.

Guha takes us through the negotiations Gandhi conducted with government officials, and we see how skilled he was in this arena. A strategist of slow reform, he proceeded incrementally, protesting by stages, preparing himself and his followers systematically rather than spontaneously rushing into confrontation. It was only when petitions, letters and meetings with authorities had failed that he chose to demonstrate.

This is an engrossing look at a major figure of the 20th century during a pivotal period in the development of his influential philosophy.

On a humid night in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, 24-year-old Stokely Carmichael exhorted his audience of 600 to start proclaiming “Black Power.”

“All we’ve been doing is begging the federal government. The only thing we can do is take over,” he told the crowd. After several years of organizing sit-ins, demonstrations and voter registration drives, Carmichael had come to believe that African Americans would never achieve justice until they had the capacity to rule their own lives. His speech and the reaction to it significantly changed the course of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Between 1966 and 1968, Carmichael was more vilified than Malcolm X (who was killed in 1965) had been. The FBI trailed him; politicians accused him of treason; and the Justice Department came close to charging him with sedition.

Carmichael’s complex life and legacy are the subject of Civil Rights historian Peniel E. Joseph’s engrossing and enlightening biography Stokely: A Life. The author makes a strong case that his controversial subject, more than any other activist of his generation, shaped the contours of Civil Rights and Black Power activism. Carmichael’s extraordinary journey took him from involvement in early nonviolent sit-ins to serving as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from which he was eventually expelled, to his role as honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party, from which he resigned.

Carmichael also became an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and in 1969, he left America for permanent residence in Guinea. There, he changed his name to Kwame Ture and became an ideologue for a revolutionary pan-Africanist movement.

Joseph makes us keenly aware that despite his historic successes, Carmichael made serious errors in judgment and had numerous large and small political failures. He admired both Malcolm X, with whose ideas he identified, and Martin Luther King Jr., who became a good friend. The morning after Carmichael’s Black Power speech, King urged the younger man to stop using that slogan, but was rebuffed.

This nuanced biography helps us understand a key player in the Civil Rights movement and illuminates the different approaches to social justice within the movement.

The 1920s were a decade of profound social change, nowhere more visible than in the rise of the so-called flapper. These rebellious young women shingled their hair and shortened their skirts, used makeup and drugs and stayed out dancing until dawn. They chose to live experimental, emotional lives—with mixed results—as Judith Mackrell reveals in her fascinating and compulsively readable new group biography, Flappers.

The book focuses on six women—Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Tamara de Lempicka—whose lives offer countless intersecting points of entry into the flapper phenomena. Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard were upper class Brits, stunned into independence by the World War I and the opportunities it gave young women to live and work outside the stifling family home. Cooper’s brief stint as an actress overlapped with American Tallulah Bankhead’s London stage career; while fellow American Josephine Baker found lasting fame dancing on the Parisian stage. Zelda Fitzgerald—the patron saint of flappers—was the muse for her husband Scott’s literary portrayal of the modern woman. And Polish-born Tamara de Lempicka captured the flapper’s hectic glamour in her stunning art deco paintings.

Each of these women experimented with love and art, rebellion and freedom. As thrilling and dynamic as their young lives were, each struggled with the shadow side of independence. They were a first generation of women seeking lives outside the home—there were no roadmaps for their life-journeys. Baker’s dancing and de Lempicka’s painting brought these two women lifelong financial and creative independence, while Bankhead’s career as the theatrical face of the flapper gave her a meteoric success in the 1920s that failed to age well. Cunard’s and Fitzgerald’s stories are perhaps the saddest, a testament to how the flashy evanescent 1920s faded into the long slow depression of the 1930s. While Cunard’s activism against racism and fascism embodied the political spirit of the 1930s, she (like Fitzgerald) struggled with mental illness for the rest of her life.

Lady Diana Cooper had the happiest after-life as a former flapper, and she particularly appreciated the 1960s: the next decade when young women put on short skirts and sought sexual and artistic freedom.

Mackrell’s fabulous Flappers lovingly captures the manic glitzy dream girls of the 1920s, paving the way for their feminist granddaughters.

Anyone who feels a bit sorry for Prince Charles because he has been opening flower shows for decades while his mother reigns as queen should consider the case of his ancestor: Britain was very lucky indeed that Albert Edward, eldest son of Queen Victoria, inherited the throne when he was nearly 60 instead of, say, when he was 30.

As a young man, King Edward VII, known to family and friends as “Bertie,” was a gambler, glutton and womanizer. He was hardly a saint when he became king in 1901, but he had matured into a better man by then, and was a surprisingly good monarch.

Historian Jane Ridley was given unrestricted access to Bertie’s papers and has used them to produce a marvelously comprehensive and witty biography, The Heir Apparent.

Ridley acknowledges that she found it “hard to warm” to the young Bertie. His bad behavior was explicable enough: His royal parents were brutally hard on him, always carping and disappointed. His subsequent rebellion was almost a given. But the details of his scandals still make for shocking reading.

At his best, Bertie was affable, cosmopolitan and had an unerring instinct for saying the right thing. He was a generous and loyal friend to his former girlfriends—as long as they kept their mouths shut. But when they threatened public scandal, he sent in the heavies to intimidate and smear them. Ridley recounts episode after ugly episode.

Then, against all odds, he became a responsible king, usually more sensible than his prime ministers. Those prime ministers subsequently badmouthed him, downplaying his contributions. Ridley cuts through the politicians’ betrayals to show that the king was a moving force behind the Entente Cordiale with France and Russia, and did his best to deter his volatile nephew Kaiser Wilhelm from belligerence.

Even more importantly, Ridley argues, King Edward came to terms with the modern constitutional monarchy in a way Queen Victoria never did. He influenced but did not take sides. He put on a unifying public pageant without ever pretending that the Royal Family epitomized middle-class values. Some of his descendants might take note.

History has not been kind to China’s Empress Dowager Cixi. Credit for her numerous achievements is generally given to the men who served her. She’s been called a ruthless tyrant and murderer, and those in power after her claimed to be cleaning up yet another of her unforgivable messes. Were any of this true, the criticism might be forgivable. However, author Jung Chang (Wild Swans) has uncovered new research and debunked the myth-makers to bring us Empress Dowager Cixi in all her complexity.

To call this a rags-to-riches story would be a gross understatement. At age 16, Cixi was chosen as one of the Emperor’s concubines, albeit a low-ranking one. By remaining friends with the Empress, avoiding competition with the other women in the harem and, most significantly, producing the first male heir to the throne, she secured a foothold from which she climbed steadily into power. When the Emperor died in 1861, Cixi’s 5-year-old son succeeded him, and Cixi orchestrated a palace coup (at age 25!) that made her the true leader of the country. She led from behind the throne—behind a screen, in fact, to separate her from male officials.

Cixi steered the country toward modernity and greater prosperity. The railroad, electricity, telegraph and telephone lines, Western medicine, foreign trade and a modern military were all brought about under her reign. She slowly ended the brutal practice of female foot-binding and vastly expanded opportunities for women. And while her legacy is not without significant missteps and errors, she notably made public apologies upon seeing the error of her ways, and ruled in a relatively bloodless manner.

This biography is engaging especially for the contrasts Chang finds between old and new ways: Cixi pushed for China to accept a degree of Westernization as necessary to its prosperity, but took her tea with human breast milk on the advice of a doctor. She built the railroads, but ensured work was begun on an astrologically “auspicious” day and sent envoys out to assure the locals that the remains of their buried ancestors would not be disturbed by the noise.

Empress Dowager Cixi corrects a longstanding misconception about a woman whose impact on China can’t be overstated. It’s a fascinating look at power, politics and the gender divide.

When he died in 2005—his body weakened by years of freebasing cocaine, as well as heart disease, multiple sclerosis and a freak accident with a cigarette lighter that had set him ablaze in 1990—Richard Pryor had already won one Emmy and five Grammys. Yet his position at number one on Comedy Central’s list of the all-time greatest comedians defines his enduring legacy more than any other award.

In this set of fans’ notes to Pryor, David Henry and Joe Henry—who talked with Pryor several times before his death—draw on conversations with his inner circle as well as their own and others’ memories of Pryor’s stand-up routines, his film roles and his television parts. The result is Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him, an intimate and riveting tribute.

One Friday night in 1973, the Henry brothers learned that Pryor would be hosting ABC’s “The Midnight Special,” so they taped his performance on a reel-to-reel player. Looking back, they wonder why two white teenagers raised in the South were so intent on listening to a black comedian who would have been making fun of them and their race. That night they discovered that Pryor was a “beacon that said, Take heart. Stay human. You are not alone.”

Following Pryor’s death, the Henrys set out to make sense of his contributions to comedy and our culture. With energetic storytelling, they chronicle Pryor’s life from his early childhood, when he was abandoned at 10 by his mother and raised by his grandmother, to his discovery of his talent after he dropped out of high school, to his difficult stint in the Army, the development of his gift on the Chitlin’ Circuit and his meteoric rise and tragic fall.

Because of his upbringing, Pryor remained emotionally distant and insecure all his life, often pushing away those who loved him most, even his children. While the Henrys celebrate Pryor’s comic genius in their page-turning tribute, they also reveal a sad and lonely clown always looking for his next routine and never happy with his success or his place in the world.

While Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo are embedded far more solidly in American folklore, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin contend that Red Cloud, the relatively obscure Oglala Sioux chief, was the most cunning and effective Indian general to confront the U.S. Army during the stampede of Western expansion that followed the Civil War. Prolonged war, with specific territorial aims, had not been an Indian concept until Red Cloud united the tribes with the goal of driving out the white invaders and reclaiming native hunting grounds and sacred sites, particularly the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota.

Born in 1821, Red Cloud was the son of an alcoholic who died young, which perhaps led him to become something of an overachiever, both in the hunt for game and later on the battlefield. He learned early that America’s treaties with the Indians were empty promises, and armed resistance seemed to him the only sane recourse. The resistance was widespread, fierce and bloody. Although both sides engaged in torture and mutilation, the Indians elevated these practices to an excruciating art—in part to ensure that their luckless victims never made it into the afterlife with their bodies intact.

The authors contend that Red Cloud was the most cunning and effective Indian general to confront the U.S. Army.

In The Heart of Everything That Is, the authors focus on the series of Sioux victories between 1866 and 1868 that culminated in a treaty that closed the heavily traveled Bozeman Trail, allowed for the destruction of Army forts and ceded vast swaths of territory—including the cherished Black Hills—to Red Cloud and his people. These triumphs were pitifully short-lived, of course, but they were resounding enough to earn Red Cloud the respect of his adversaries. President Grant received him at the White House; he spoke at the Cooper Institute in Manhattan after parading down Fifth Avenue; and the New York Times lauded his intelligence and eloquence.

These virtues notwithstanding, Red Cloud’s forays into the “civilized” East effectively sapped his warring spirit. Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills a few years later ended any Indian hopes of sovereignty. Red Cloud died in his sleep at the age of 88—on a reservation.

It’s hard to see Jim Henson’s name in print without immediately thinking of the Muppets, those deceptively simple-looking puppets who seemed to bring forth a full range of human emotions. Two things we learn quickly in Jim Henson: The ­Biography are that the effort involved in bringing the Muppets to life was astronomical, and that Henson chafed at being forever associated with them. Who knew?

Author Brian Jay Jones spoke to Henson’s surviving family, along with most of his coworkers and business partners, and the result is a book that offers a multifaceted view of Henson’s home and work lives. His childhood in rural Mississippi revolved around trips to the local movie theater and driving any car he could get his hands on, both interests he would indulge for life. The soft-spoken youth made himself heard when television was invented, insisting the family buy one and realizing immediately it was what he wanted to do with his life. From his very first job at a TV station all the way through fame, fortune and an untimely death at 53, he never stopped studying the medium and expanding its possibilities.

There are so many enjoyable aspects to this book that it’s hard to know where to start. Henson himself is a study in contrasts: a devoted family man who was serially unfaithful to his wife; so soft-spoken he often went unheard, but steadfast in pursuit of his vision (he was described as having a “whim of steel”); unfocused on money when it came to work, yet an extravagant shopper with top-dollar taste. Then there are the Muppets themselves. Henson’s creations were innovative due to their soft, flexible design, which allowed subtle hand movements to offer emotive facial expressions. But finding the character inside the puppet was a challenge for the performers. Miss Piggy started off as essentially a chorus girl, used in background scenes and bit parts, until one day puppeteer Frank Oz deviated from the script: Instead of slapping Kermit the Frog, he had her karate-chop him with an emphatic “Haii-YA!” . . . and a star was born.

Henson’s career was about to take off in new directions via a planned sale of his company to Disney when he died of an aggressive staph infection. After reading about his life and creative passion, we can only imagine what that collaboration might have led to, and hope that some readers are inspired to dream just as big. Jim Henson: The Biography is a fantastic story of a brilliant life cut short, but it can also be read as a blueprint for following your bliss.