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.

Born in Virginia in 1856 to a Presbyterian minister of modest means, Thomas Woodrow Wilson first flowered as an academic. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1890, became one of the school’s most beloved professors and was elevated to its presidency 12 years later. Throughout this period of intensive teaching and public lecturing, he published a torrent of magazine articles and books on government and history. It did not take long for New Jersey’s power brokers to recognize in Wilson the radiant raw material of a first-rate politician.

Wilson’s aspirations ranged elsewhere, too. He was a romantic. First he fell in love with a cousin who gently rejected him, despite a barrage of pleas, flowers and love letters. Then came his equally passionate courtship of and marriage to Ellen Axson, to whom he remained devoted until her death in 1914. Devastated by her loss, he nonetheless found love again with the widow Edith Bolling Galt, who became his wife, closest confidant and heart’s joy until his death in 1924.

Elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, Wilson had only two years to work his wonders on the Garden State before being snatched away to run for president. Despite his newness to politics, he triumphed over the incumbent William Howard Taft, former president Theodore Roosevelt and the high-profile Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs. Generally progressive in his outlook and a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage, Wilson nonetheless turned his back on black Americans, permitting the Postal Service and Treasury Department to segregate the races.

A. Scott Berg understandably devotes most of his new biography to Wilson’s evolution from the man who “kept us out of war” in his first term of office to his full-fledged engagement in WWI during his second term. Always viewing himself as a peacemaker—and with good reason—he was nonetheless ruthlessly efficient when it came to raising troops, building war industries, turning the country in favor of war and punishing war opponents, including Debs, whose prison term he steadfastly refused to commute after the war. After spending six months in Europe trying to establish the League of Nations and minimize the rancor and disruption caused by the war, Wilson was outraged to discover he couldn’t sell the League or terms of peace to his own Senate.

Wilson is an epic, meticulously documented and immensely readable account of a truly thoughtful and forward-looking president who deserves more from history than he has yet received. This is a marvelous corrective.

It has been 44 years since Charles Manson manipulated members of his so-called Family into murdering pregnant actress Sharon Tate and eight other people in a delusional attempt to spark “Helter Skelter,” the end-of-the-world race war that Manson had convinced his followers would lead to their rise as saviors of the world.

Crazy stuff like this has a long shelf life. In the almost half-century since, rivers of ink have flowed in the attempt to understand how this diminutive ex-con could have lured normal-seeming middle-class youngsters (mostly girls) into savagery. In fact, so much has been written about Manson and his followers that it’s easy to wonder if there’s anything new to say.

It turns out there is. Jeff Guinn managed to track down and interview Manson’s older cousin, with whom a young Charlie Manson had lived when his mother was in prison, and his younger sister, adopted, to Manson’s great dismay, while he was imprisoned at McNeil Island, Washington. Neither of these women can shed light on the ultimate source of Manson’s dysfunction—he apparently was a sociopath from a very young age—but they do clear up much of the misinformation about his childhood and help Guinn offer a richer understanding of Manson’s early life. Guinn also interviewed former cellmates, Manson Family members, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (who wrote the definitive book on the murder trial), and a host of others. The result is that Guinn’s well-researched biography, Manson, offers many new details about Manson’s life and enhances our understanding of him in several ways.

It turns out that Manson, who hated formal schooling, was a serious student of manipulation. Though functionally illiterate, he worked his way through Dale Carnegie’s books about the arts of persuasion, investigated Scientology not for its dogma but for its methods of captivating followers and sat at the feet of pimps to learn techniques for manipulating women, and through them, men. Guinn also shows Manson to have been a guru worried about losing his followers. His need to bind them to him, Guinn suggests plausibly, was part of his path to murder.

Finally, Guinn does an excellent job of placing Manson in the context of the tumultuous 1960s. In some circles, Manson and his followers are thought to be the logical end-product of those wild times. But Guinn offers a more nuanced view: “Charlie Manson is a product of the 1960s—and also of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s,” he writes. In what is probably the fullest biography of Manson to date, Guinn shows that Manson the murderer is not just a creation of the ’60s but the unfortunate sum of all his parts.

Just when you think not another word could be written about the family with which Americans have a seemingly insatiable fascination, biographer Barbara A. Perry makes use of newly released papers to paint a fuller picture of Rose Kennedy than ever before in Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch.

Through letters and diaries, Perry depicts Rose Kennedy as a complicated, influential and—it must be said—not particularly likable woman. The mother of nine, including a future president, took her role seriously. She kept meticulous records of her children’s physical health on index cards, with a particularly obsessive focus on their teeth and weight. She instilled in them her strong Catholic faith and helped ensure they were well versed in everything from current events to geography. “My great ambition was to have my children morally, physically and mentally as perfect as possible,” Kennedy said.

Yet she also carefully cultivated and protected her family’s media image to help ensure political success and a TV-friendly appearance. She kept daughter Rosemary out of the limelight for decades to hide her mental retardation from the world. Kennedy also turned a blind eye to her husband’s many affairs and advised her daughters to do the same in their own marriages.

She thrived in the company of the world’s rich and powerful, especially when her husband Joe served as the United States ambassador to Great Britain in the years leading up to World War II. And while it’s hard to fault her for wanting some respite from such a large brood, it’s surprising to learn that she spent months traveling abroad, leaving her young children in the care of governesses, maids and nurses while she explored the globe and bought the latest Parisian fashions. In 1923, she took a six-week trip to California; she often escaped to Palm Beach during the cold Boston winters. “When I left my children and their problems at home, I wanted to tuck them aside mentally for a while and talk and hear about something new and different in order to refresh my mind,” she said.

A senior fellow in presidential oral history at the University of Virginia, Perry writes with compassion and brings keen insight into what Rose Kennedy’s own words tell us about this complex woman.