Surely everyone knows who John James Audubon is innovative painter, Frenchman turned American, pioneer explorer, doting but often absent husband. And surely Richard Rhodes is one of those authors who needs no introduction. Even if you have never read his work, you’ve encountered his name and his many prize-winning books The Making of the Atomic Bomb, The Inland Ground and A Hole in the World.

So the two names on the cover of John James Audubon: The Making of an American, are something of a narrative dream team: magnificent historical adventurer meets seasoned and polished biographer. This book lives up to its promise: Rhodes has written what reads like an irresistible historical novel that happens to be true.

Audubon immigrated to the New World in 1803, at the age of 18. He faced all the terrors of the age: rampant diseases with no cures, unmapped and dangerous wilderness, a shaky economy in which banks could call in loans destroying their customers. With talent, chutzpah and passion, he triumphed over everything and became the single most famous name in ornithology not to mention art. Even with cameras and binoculars to back them up, contemporary painters can’t surpass Audubon’s sheer talent for drawing and painting.

The advance promotion for Rhodes’s book claims that it is the first major biography of Audubon in 40 years. This needlessly dismisses Shirley Streshinsky’s strong (if admittedly lesser) biography of a decade or so ago, and Alice Ford’s of the late 1980s. But this new book is unquestionably the best written and the most vivid and compelling to take up the story of this talented and original man.

It was common in the 19th century for a woman to adopt a male nom de plume in order to be taken more seriously as a writer or to preserve her privacy. By the 20th century, though, women had come into their own in literary terms, and a practice that had well served such writers as George Eliot, George Sand and the Bront‘s became passŽ. So it was surprising in the late 1970s when acclaimed science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., was outed as a woman, not least of all because Tiptree had been heralded as a notably masculine writer, albeit one who played fast and lose with gender issues in his stories.

Tiptree, the world learned, was really Alice Bradley Sheldon, a then 60-something woman living a quiet life in the rural exurbs of Washington, D.C. But as Julie Phillips demonstrates in her impressively detailed and engaging biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, much of Sheldon’s earlier life had been anything but quiet. Before becoming a science fiction writer when she was in her 50s, this gifted woman had been a painter, a WAAC officer during World War II, a CIA agent, a research psychologist and even a chicken farmer. Extraordinarily bright and beautiful, Allie Sheldon did many things well, but spent much of her life struggling with identity issues, a struggle that kept her from leaving her mark in any one field until she rediscovered science fiction in middle age.

Reading Phillips’ incisive and sympathetic account of Sheldon’s life, it seems inevitable that this woman would have an unconventional life. She was born to a world of privilege, her father a Chicago lawyer and her mother, Mary Bradley, an extremely successful writer of popular fiction and adventure travel. The Bradleys were atypical by any measure, leading numerous expeditions to the African interior and taking young Alice along with them from the time she was six. A childhood spent hunting elephants and learning Swahili left the girl with a restless sense of adventure that she would never tame, saddling her with aspirations that pushed beyond the circumscribed parameters for women of her generation. More often than not, these unfulfilled aspirations led to frustration and unhappiness.

Sheldon dabbled in colleges Sarah Lawrence, Berkeley, NYU never quite finishing what she began, and at painting, even studying with Ashcan School painter John Sloan. She weathered an impulsive and disastrous early marriage and had strong emotional and casual sexual attachments to a number of women (Phillips suggests that Sheldon’s true sexual disposition was lesbian, but she never had the courage to embrace that life). Twenty-six when America entered World War II, Sheldon enlisted, enjoying her work in the photo intelligence division, and ultimately marrying her boss, Col. Huntington Ting Sheldon. After the war, the Sheldons tried their hands at running a chicken hatchery in New Jersey before returning to Washington where they both took positions with the nascent CIA.

Ting stayed with the Agency, though Allie left after just three years, frustrated by its glass ceiling. She tried a bit of freelance writing, then finally knuckled down academically, earning a Ph.D. in psychology. She ultimately applied her fascination with theories of perception to her fiction, and that fiction, Phillips shows, would borrow heavily from Sheldon’s extraordinary experiences and her lifelong personal conflicts about sexuality and gender roles. In 1987, Sheldon shot Ting while he slept, then turned the gun on herself, carrying out a suicide pact the two had made.

The limited output of James Tiptree, Jr., is not well known outside the world of science fiction, but Phillips’ appealing, authoritative biography is meant for readers well beyond the limits of the genre. Sheldon’s secret identity and the issues she explored in her fiction are interesting, true, but her life story proves fascinating in its own right, unique in its particulars, and emblematic of the constricting reality that intelligent, accomplished women routinely faced before the women’s movement made it possible for them to be masters of their own destiny. Robert Weibezahl is the author of the novel The Wicked and the Dead.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, published in 1859, is arguably one of the best known and most influential books ever written. How Darwin arrived at his ideas of natural selection accepted, rejected and debated then and even now and what Darwin was really like makes for a fascinating story in David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. Quammen, author of Song of the Dodo and three-time winner of the National Magazine Award, sheds light on the more private Darwin, and the effects of social, familial, religious and scientific influences on the man and his times. He focuses on Darwin after his years on the HMS Beagle collecting marine specimens as the ship charted the South American coastline.

In fact, after that voyage, Darwin never again left Great Britain. It took him more than 20 years to write his theory about evolution of the species. He had notebooks full of observations, yet there was always more to learn and more to think about. With his retiring personality and his tendency to be ill with anxiety and delicate digestion, Darwin was cautious about publishing a book that was guaranteed to be controversial.

But then there was Alfred Wallace, a field naturalist whose independently developed ideas Darwin found alarmingly similar to his own. Unlike Darwin, Wallace was eager to publish, impelling Darwin to finish his book and be recognized for his many years of work.

Quammen also offers an exploration of Darwin’s personal life, including his marriage to his cousin Emma Wedgwood of Wedgwood china fame. Emma was a devout Christian in contrast to Darwin’s intensifying agnosticism. Despite differing views on creation, life and the afterlife, the two had a very loving and respectful bond.

There is much to know and appreciate about Charles Darwin, and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin is replete with detail and insight. Ellen R. Marsden writes from Mason, Ohio.

Few authors or journalists probe with more specificity and irony the dynamic of race and class than Lawrence Otis Graham (Member of the Club), who has devoted the bulk of his 13 books to this subject. His newest volume, The Senator and the Socialite, explores the issue in a different time and place, profiling the emergence of the Bruce family, whom Graham correctly touts as the nation’s first black dynasty. Indeed, it’s hard not to imagine a forthcoming Hollywood treatment for this 19th-century family whose social gatherings, international trips and even family births appeared in the society columns of such prominent newspapers as The New York Times and Washington Post during an era when these publications usually didn’t even have black janitorial staff, let alone writers and editors.

Graham crafts an entertaining, intriguing and sometimes amazing story of personal mobility and ambition as he traces Blanche Kelso Bruce’s rise from former Mississippi slave to a career serving under four Republican presidents. Bruce not only married well (his bride was the daughter of a wealthy black doctor), but also befriended the right people, from President Grant and Frederick Douglass to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Booker T. Washington. The impressive rise of the couple leads to enormous wealth and status, with Bruce even having his name printed on U.S. currency through his appointment to a top Treasury Department post.

In the book’s later sections Graham documents a fall that is as staggering and unprecedented as the family’s initial climb to power and fame. The Bruces eventually not only lose material clout, but their reputation as well. Bruce’s grandson gets imprisoned for embezzlement in a trial whose proceedings make the O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and Robert Blake cases seem fair and orderly by comparison. His granddaughter makes a horrible, embarrassing personal decision, marrying an untalented black actor trying to pass as white.

Though he doesn’t ignore or tone down his descriptions of the devastating changes that affected the Bruce family during the 20th century, Graham takes care to fully evaluate their impact as social movers and shakers for decades. The author clearly views the Bruce family as an inspiration despite their later failings.

Unlike some other Graham books that occasionally veer into tabloid waters, The Senator and the Socialite provides thorough and solid historical detail, political analysis and cultural discussion. Without diluting the prose, downplaying the negatives or weakening the story, Graham presents a vital, previously underreported tale of glory, achievement and eventual disappointment. Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.

Long before crossover and eclectic became part of the journalistic vernacular, Dinah Washington defied categorization and embraced any and every type of song. Her delivery was instantly identifiable, and she prided herself on crystal-clear diction, precise pitch and spontaneity. Washington made brilliant recordings, beginning with her days as a pianist accompanying gospel pioneer Sallie Martin, through swing and R&andB sessions with Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, on to modern jazz ventures with Clifford Brown, Max Roach and Cannonball Adderley and later pop hits with Brook Benton.

Author Nadine Cohodas, whose previous book on Chess Records marvelously outlined that historic company, now gives the same exacting treatment to Washington in Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington. Cohodas also selected the songs on a companion CD, released on Verve Records.

Queen is the first truly comprehensive volume on the late singer. Cohodas conducted numerous interviews with insiders and family members and discovered documents and letters that reaffirm her assessments. Cohodas ably illuminates the quirks and contradictions of Washington’s personality. Washington could be extremely kind and appallingly crude. She complained about her inability to find happiness in relationships, yet married seven times. A smart, extremely knowledgeable artist who had definite ideas about her music, Washington frequently clashed with bandmates, despite often being accompanied by the greatest jazz musicians on earth. Thankfully, Cohodas also presents Washington’s upbeat, joyous and celebratory side, thus not totally resigning her to tragic victim status.

Sadly, Washington’s ongoing conflicts and struggles with lovers, relatives and executives in many ways prevented her from achieving the fame she deserved, along with the fact that black female singers had extremely limited options during the ’50s and early ’60s. But Washington influenced numerous vocalists who followed her, most notably Esther Phillips and Nancy Wilson, while creating an exceptional body of work that’s still captivating almost 41 years after her death at 39. Songs like Unforgettable, This Bitter Earth, What a Diff’rence a Day Makes and Baby You Got What It Takes remain as documents of her excellence. Queen is a wonderful and invaluable addition to music biography and cultural history. Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and several other publications.

Through his sermons, public addresses and writings, Henry Ward Beecher was an immensely influential and often revered public intellectual in 19th-century America. He is probably best remembered as the brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and as the son of Lyman Beecher, the last great Puritan minister in America. From Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, Henry had a profound effect on American Christian thought when he broke away from his father’s strict Rule of Law and God’s wrath teachings and emphasized instead God’s unconditional love and forgiveness.

As for public policy, perhaps the best example of the extent of his influence was an opinion shared by Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Both men believed that five speeches Beecher gave in England and Scotland in 1863 kept the Confederacy from gaining diplomatic recognition in England and France at a time when material help from those countries could have made a crucial difference in the outcome of the war.

In her exhaustively researched and endlessly fascinating The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, Debby Applegate brings the charismatic Beecher and his times vividly to life. She skillfully weaves the intense personal life of her subject with the dynamic religious, social and political history of the period, and shows how Beecher, with his amiable personality and oratorical and writing talents, was able to gain a large audience for his views. He was concerned with the general reform of society, including universal suffrage and opposition to slavery. Beecher, Applegate writes, was considered a great, if erratic, intellect, whose talents were eagerly sought out in the fiercely competitive newspaper business.

Beecher’s friends and acquaintances included Ralph Waldo Emerson, who once described him as one of the four most powerful men in the virtuous class in this country, and Mark Twain, who took Beecher’s counsel on publishing and made a small fortune when his Innocents Abroad, or, the New Pilgrims became a bestseller.

However, the career of this prominent preacher, lecturer and writer suffered a serious setback when charges of adultery were brought against him in a trial widely covered by the press. Applegate masterfully guides us through the six months of testimony, eight days of debate and 52 jury ballots, after which the jury could not reach a verdict. Beecher was able to recover somewhat from this ordeal, but many still watched [his] public pronouncements for clues to his guilt or innocence, according to Applegate. This is a major biography of an important, if seriously flawed, figure who made significant contributions to public and religious life in his time. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

In 1932, 11-year-old Margaret Werner arrived in the Soviet Union with her parents Carl and Elisabeth. Faced with the choice of eking out a living in Depression-era Detroit or taking a temporary one-year assignment to work for Ford Motor Company’s new manufacturing plant in Gorky, outside of Moscow, Carl had chosen the latter. The decision proved to be disastrous. Carl was arrested in 1936 by the secret police and never heard from again, leaving his wife and daughter impoverished and struggling to survive. Seven years later, Margaret was arrested for espionage and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. It would be three painful decades before she was able to come home to the United States.

Margaret’s son Karl Tobien tells her improbable story in Dancing Under the Red Star, maintaining his mother’s 17-year-old voice throughout the book. Tobien describes the unimaginable deprivations, malnutrition and cruelty suffered in Siberian labor camps; the larger context of World War II and the Cold War are hinted at only broadly. (Curiously absent is any discussion of what if anything Ford or the U.S. government did to secure the return of the Werner family.) At its crux, this is Margaret’s story, a prison memoir of survival and faith and undiminished optimism. During her years in the Gulag, Margaret becomes a member of a prison dance troop and finds miracles in the everyday ability to carry on. After her release, Margaret marries a German POW she had met during her internment. Finally allowed to leave for East Germany, the pair, along with their baby son and Elisabeth, takes the opportunity to make an inspired escape to West Germany, and ultimately back to America. Margaret Werner is the only American woman to survive Stalin’s Gulag. Her life, randomly caught in the brutal Soviet regime, is at turns bleak and horrifying. However, it is also a testament to one woman’s unshakable courage and faith. Stacy Perman is a journalist in New York and the author of Spies Inc.: Business Innovation from Israel’s Masters of Espionage (Financial Times/Prentice Hall).

Ernest Hemingway enjoyed fame and fortune during most of his lifetime, achieving notoriety as much for his adventurous lifestyle as for his groundbreaking literature. Whether covering foreign wars, fighting bulls or simply hanging out with other members of the so-called “Lost Generation,” Hemingway lived life to the fullest. In 1933 and again in 1953, he traveled through Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda hunting big game on safari. These two African excursions inspired some of his best work and are the focus of a new book by best-selling author and East Africa exploration expert Christopher Ondaatje.

Ondaatje, a retired businessman, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and brother of acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje, retraces Hemingway’s treks in Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari. Ondaatje’s previous books include Sindh Revisited and Journey to the Source of the Nile, both travelogues following the trail of 19th-century British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton.

In Hemingway in Africa, Ondaatje crosses hundreds of miles of rugged terrain to look out on the same landscapes Hemingway saw. He experiences firsthand the pink lakes and flapping flamingos Hemingway so masterfully described in Green Hills of Africa, and sees the connections between works like “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and True at First Light and their African settings. Staring down from an airplane at the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Ondaatje redefines the extreme landscape that made the leopard in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” such a powerful symbol of artistic courage.

As Ondaatje encounters wild animals and real danger of his own, he can also appreciate the ethical dilemma Hemingway faced over killing big game. Hemingway explored such themes in the posthumously published True at First Light (based on his 1953 safari). Perhaps most importantly, as Ondaatje travels through poached lands and almost-extinct tribal villages, it is easy to envision and understand the tragic differences between today’s Africa and the one that dominated Hemingway’s imagination. Hemingway in Africa wonderfully combines Ondaatje’s extensive knowledge of East Africa with his passion for delving into Hemingway’s enigmatic personality and exposing the roots of the writer’s love affair with the continent. Coy Martin is a writer in Nashville.