When it was announced that the black Givenchy evening gown Audrey Hepburn immortalized as Holly Golightly would be auctioned off this month, many fans mused about owning it. The Audrey Hepburn Treasures: Pictures and Mementos from a Life of Style and Purpose is not a bad consolation prize; in fact, sitting down with the book is like being granted access to Hepburn’s own scrapbooks. The disparate aspects of her life aristocratic forbears, wartime deprivation, professional ambition, devotion to family, iconic glamour and UNICEF missions are well chronicled in this lovely gift book written by Ellen Erwin, executive director of the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, and Jessica Z. Diamond, archivist and curator of both the Fund and the Audrey Hepburn Estate.

There are numerous photographs from Hepburn’s childhood, movie stills and informal photos of her on-set, snapshots of her playing with her sons and hanging out with friends. Of course, part of the allure of Audrey Hepburn Treasures are the facsimiles stored in the book’s glassine envelopes: a contact sheet of photos from Hepburn’s wedding to Mel Ferrer, a shooting schedule from Sabrina, a receipt for her Roman Holiday Best Actress Oscar, marked-up Breakfast at Tiffany’s script pages and other memorabilia. A postcard of Hepburn and Givenchy walking along the Seine sent to the actress by Givenchy himself is a wonderful touch. The book’s introduction was written by Hepburn’s eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, and a portion of the proceeds benefit the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund.

<B>In the poet’s corner</B> Peter Ackroyd is well known on both sides of the Atlantic as a master of both history and biography, for works such as <I>London: The Biography</I> and the novel <I>The Clerkenwell Tales</I>. Ackroyd’s new project is a biography series entitled Ackroyd Brief Lives, appropriately beginning with <B>Chaucer</B>. In this short biography, Ackroyd elucidates Chaucer’s work and times and also reveals how significant a public figure Chaucer was, serving as a diplomat and courtier for a number of monarchs.

<B>Chaucer</B> is a small volume, the perfect size to keep at hand for quick and easy fact checking. This is the book you pick up when you need someone to simply and concisely explain exactly what Chaucer did (or rather, might have been doing) that summer in 1370 when he was sent by the king to Italy with special letters of protection against the Italian government. Chaucer is old-school biography, focusing on the deep religiosity of Chaucer’s works and the years spent in the service of the Crown, only speculating outside the standard and academically approved facts of Chaucer’s life when absolutely necessary to maintain the cherished image of a poet who is worldly yet innocent of the vices and human flaws he lambasted so successfully in his writing.

Nelson Mandela, one of the most interesting men of the 20th century, also has one of the most interesting faces. That makes Mandela: The Authorized Portrait one of the most exciting books to come out this year. The book is a detailed narrative of Mandela’s life, heavily dosed with images that capture his evolution from young man-about-town to honored South African president. Mike Nicol, whose arching narrative unifies the often sprawling effort to hitch photos and captions to story, follows the South African leader closely as he departs to school, the first in his family to do so. Later, Nicol chronicles Mandela’s career in law, his first failed marriage, followed quickly by his wedding to Winnie Mandela, his underground war on apartheid as the Black Pimpernel, his 27 years in prison and so on. Punctuating this riveting narrative are brilliantly assembled photos that capture important moments in Mandela’s rise, fall and resurrection. The book also features first-person commentaries from celebrities like former President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Muhammad Ali, as well as friends and fellow revolutionaries who knew and worked alongside Mandela in the struggle for South African freedom.

Winston Churchill was indisputably one of the great political figures of the 20th century. But as a young man just starting out, he had more than a little help from his mom. With the assistance of her male friends, Jennie Jerome Churchill got her boy Winston into a good cavalry regiment, despite a less than stellar academic performance at the British equivalent of West Point. She got him accredited as a war correspondent. She got him his first book contract. He took it from there.

Jennie smart, loyal, generous was one of the earliest and most remarkable of a bevy of rich American women who married British aristocrats in the late 19th century, injecting cash and energy into families that often had little of either. Her equally charming sisters, Clara and Leonie, took a similar path. The three of them, their husbands and children are the subject of Elisabeth Kehoe’s first book, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the English Aristocratic World into Which They Married, which meshes biography with social and political history to create a beguiling chronicle of a long-gone world.

The Jerome girls’ own mother was a social climber, but they insisted on marrying for love sometimes to their later regret. The aristocrats they chose Lord Randolph Churchill for Jennie, Moreton Frewen for Clara, Jack Leslie for Leonie were disappointing husbands, to various degrees. But all three women remained emotionally loyal, even as they found extramarital romance with assorted European royals.

Though in decline, the aristocrats still ran the British Empire. Kehoe capably describes the Jerome clan’s roles in the struggle over Irish Home Rule, the Boer War, the First World War and the Russian Revolution. But she is most effective in bringing us into an exotic social world where the rich could do pretty much anything they wanted, as long as they did it behind closed doors and kept their mouths shut. The Jeromes didn’t escape the tragedies that afflict all families. But along the way, they had more fun than most and accomplished much still worth knowing about. Winston may have been named Churchill, but he was a Jerome at heart. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

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.

Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code did not single-handedly ignite a resurgence of interest in Leonardo Da Vinci, but it certainly fanned the flames of one already in progress. The evidence is everywhere. Leonardo’s own fascinating and well-written notebooks are available in various editions. There have been numerous documentaries and books about him in recent years, including Sherwin Nuland’s excellent entry in the Penguin Lives series. The Da Vinci Code has done history fans a favor by encouraging publishers to provide more nonfiction about this fascinating and mysterious figure.

Now comes Leonardo by Martin Kemp, an art history professor at Oxford and the esteemed author of The Oxford History of Western Art. He understands Leonardo, his works, his context and his influence. Kemp’s book is relatively short and quite reader-friendly. It includes a helpful chronology and an annotated gallery of Leonardo’s paintings, which comprise perhaps a third of the book’s 60 handsome illustrations. Kemp doesn’t waste time pasting together yet another biography. Instead, he has written a scholarly but passionate essay. He wants to try to understand Leonardo’s mind, the way his imagination united art and science and brought them to bear upon each other. Kemp has an excellent chapter called “Looking” that examines Leonardo’s scientific notions about the eye and vision alongside his conception of the artistic imagination. Other chapters explore his related ideas about the body and machinery and his use of the ancient parallel between the human body and the body of the earth. A final chapter surveys Leonardo’s posthumous fame, from the 16th-century biography by Vasari to, inevitably, The Da Vinci Code. Michael Sims ranges from Leonardo to Louis Armstrong in his most recent book, Adam’s Navel, now in paperback from Penguin.

The grand Western Alliance that won the Cold War now seems inevitable, but it was a chancy thing indeed in the early days after World War II. As diplomatic historian Robert L. Beisner notes, France and Britain could have rejected cooperation with the hated Germans. France could have turned to the Soviet Union for protection from Germany. Italy could have gone communist. Greece and Turkey could have gone to war. All were real possibilities. The fact that NATO instead became the reality was due in no small measure to the skills of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state from 1949 to 1952 and the subject of Beisner’s triumphantly authoritative new biography, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. Beisner, the author of previous books on 19th-century American diplomacy, focuses in his 800-plus pages on Acheson’s State Department career, though he includes a brief introduction and coda on his earlier and later years. Throughout, he emphasizes Acheson’s close relationship with Truman, the odd but genuine friendship between the cerebral son of the Yale establishment and the feisty Midwestern populist. Acheson believed the Soviet Union would ultimately have to cave before such a military-economic force, and he was right. Along with his integration of Japan into what was then called the Free World, this was Acheson’s most stunning achievement. But Beisner also highlights Acheson’s considerably more checkered record everywhere except Europe. Bored by and scornful of non-European cultures, he saw everything through a European prism, often with flawed results. With the benefit of hindsight, Acheson’s most obvious error was his failure to end support for France in Indochina, a consequence of his focus on wooing French participation in European integration. The policy ultimately led his successors to the Vietnam War. And we are still feeling the fallout of his similar weakness for British colonial intransigence in Iran and Egypt today. Although Beisner contends that Acheson was our best secretary of state, he takes the time to describe and answer the arguments of his critics. The bottom line for Beisner is the nature of Acheson’s enemies. He may not have handled Mao, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, or the McCarthyites terribly well, Beisner says, but it’s unlikely anyone else could have done better. As for the Soviet Union, Beisner agrees with Acheson that attempting serious negotiations with Stalin would have been a dangerous waste of time.

The fact is, Beisner writes, Acheson’s personality was so glaring, it is nearly impossible to imagine his being appointed to high office in our own times.” Beisner’s impressive work convinces his readers that it’s our loss. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.