Johnny Cash was a man who seemed destined for immortality. A hard-living native of Arkansas whose career spanned five decades and spawned more than 1,000 songs, he was an omnipresent figure on the country music scene, a proudly defiant survivor who used the pressures of fame to fuel his work. Given the scope of his influence and his larger-than-life persona, Cash’s death on September 12, 2003, seemed an impossible thing. His songs were rooted in the South but written for the world. Timeless classics like Big River, I Walk the Line and Folsom Prison Blues achieved international recognition, becoming permanent components of the country music canon. This month, BookPage spotlights a special group of volumes that chronicle Cash’s remarkable career.

The Man in Black Cash: An American Man (CMT/Pocket, $30, 176 pages, ISBN 0743496299) tells the story of the singer through photographs, letters, lyric sheets, album covers and other visual riches. Sanctioned by the Johnny Cash estate and assembled with the help of Cash’s close friend and longtime fan, Bill Miller, the collection of artifacts presented in this colorful volume reflects more than 50 years of country music culture. There are publicity shots of the singer taken for Sun Records in Memphis in the early 1950s; photos of Cash and his wife, singer June Carter; ticket stubs from the Grand Ole Opry; and one-of-a-kind Cash collectibles, including a Slurpee cup from the 1970s emblazoned with the singer’s face. (Our favorite photo: a black-and-white shot of Cash, circa 1953, his face innocent and unlined, his arm around a tuxedoed Elvis.) Edited by Mark Vancil and Jacob Hoye, Cash: An American Man is the first title from CMT Books, a new imprint created by CMT: Country Music Television and Simon ∧ Schuster’s Pocket Books. With lively text provided by Miller, whose friendship with Cash lasted more than 30 years, this must-have scrapbook also contains the singer’s final interview, granted to music journalist Kurt Loder shortly before Cash died, and the lyrics to the last song he composed. Produced by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine, Cash is the ultimate memorial to a man who lived what he wrote and sang what he believed. With tributes from Bob Dylan, Bono, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, the volume provides a complete historical overview of Cash’s music. Highlights include a comprehensive discography, an interview with Rick Rubin, who produced four of Cash’s albums, and pieces of classic Rolling Stone reportage, including Ralph J. Gleason’s account of the performer’s 1969 San Quentin concert. There are also excerpts from Cash’s two autobiographies, as well as chapters on his screen career and his marriage to June, who, as a member of the famous Carter Family, had a recording career of her own. Rare photographs offer a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at Cash’s extended family, including his 13 grandchildren. Singer Rosanne Cash, daughter of the Man in Black, captures the special essence of her father in her foreword to the volume: "He was a poet who worked in the dirt," she says. "He was the stuff of dreams, and the living cornerstone of our lives." Country music’s First Family Fans hankering for more details on the Cash-Carter dynasty should pick up Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? (Simon ∧ Schuster, $15, 432 pages, ISBN 074324382X) by journalist Charles Hirshberg and filmmaker Mark Zwonitzer. Recently released in paperback, the biography, which was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in 2002, takes an in-depth look at the humble beginnings, heavenly harmonies and history-making careers of the Carter Family. A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter (June’s mother) entered the world of country music as a trio starting in the 1920s. This fluid account of their lives, both personal and musical, begins with patriarch A.P.’s birth in southern Virginia in 1891 and continues into the 1970s, creating a context for the folk tunes they made famous ("Wildwood Flower," "Wabash Cannonball"), examining seminal recording sessions and offering a wonderful overview of the cultural forces that influenced American roots music. With their dolorous ballads and gentle instrumentals, their hymns and laments, the Carters helped to shape the sounds of the 20th century. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? explains how and why their delicate melodies endure. Julie Hale writes from Austin, Texas.

Johnny Cash was a man who seemed destined for immortality. A hard-living native of Arkansas whose career spanned five decades and spawned more than 1,000 songs, he was an omnipresent figure on the country music scene, a proudly defiant survivor who used the pressures of fame to fuel his work. Given the scope of his influence and his larger-than-life persona, Cash’s death on September 12, 2003, seemed an impossible thing. His songs were rooted in the South but written for the world. Timeless classics like Big River, I Walk the Line and Folsom Prison Blues achieved international recognition, becoming permanent components of the country music canon. This month, BookPage spotlights a special group of volumes that chronicle Cash’s remarkable career.

The Man in Black Cash: An American Man tells the story of the singer through photographs, letters, lyric sheets, album covers and other visual riches. Sanctioned by the Johnny Cash estate and assembled with the help of Cash’s close friend and longtime fan, Bill Miller, the collection of artifacts presented in this colorful volume reflects more than 50 years of country music culture. There are publicity shots of the singer taken for Sun Records in Memphis in the early 1950s; photos of Cash and his wife, singer June Carter; ticket stubs from the Grand Ole Opry; and one-of-a-kind Cash collectibles, including a Slurpee cup from the 1970s emblazoned with the singer’s face. (Our favorite photo: a black-and-white shot of Cash, circa 1953, his face innocent and unlined, his arm around a tuxedoed Elvis.) Edited by Mark Vancil and Jacob Hoye, Cash: An American Man is the first title from CMT Books, a new imprint created by CMT: Country Music Television and Simon ∧ Schuster’s Pocket Books. With lively text provided by Miller, whose friendship with Cash lasted more than 30 years, this must-have scrapbook also contains the singer’s final interview, granted to music journalist Kurt Loder shortly before Cash died, and the lyrics to the last song he composed. Produced by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine, Cash (Crown, $29.95, 224 pages, ISBN 140005480X) is the ultimate memorial to a man who lived what he wrote and sang what he believed. With tributes from Bob Dylan, Bono, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, the volume provides a complete historical overview of Cash’s music. Highlights include a comprehensive discography, an interview with Rick Rubin, who produced four of Cash’s albums, and pieces of classic Rolling Stone reportage, including Ralph J. Gleason’s account of the performer’s 1969 San Quentin concert. There are also excerpts from Cash’s two autobiographies, as well as chapters on his screen career and his marriage to June, who, as a member of the famous Carter Family, had a recording career of her own. Rare photographs offer a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at Cash’s extended family, including his 13 grandchildren. Singer Rosanne Cash, daughter of the Man in Black, captures the special essence of her father in her foreword to the volume: "He was a poet who worked in the dirt," she says. "He was the stuff of dreams, and the living cornerstone of our lives." Country music’s First Family Fans hankering for more details on the Cash-Carter dynasty should pick up Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? (Simon ∧ Schuster, $15, 432 pages, ISBN 074324382X) by journalist Charles Hirshberg and filmmaker Mark Zwonitzer. Recently released in paperback, the biography, which was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in 2002, takes an in-depth look at the humble beginnings, heavenly harmonies and history-making careers of the Carter Family. A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter (June’s mother) entered the world of country music as a trio starting in the 1920s. This fluid account of their lives, both personal and musical, begins with patriarch A.P.’s birth in southern Virginia in 1891 and continues into the 1970s, creating a context for the folk tunes they made famous ("Wildwood Flower," "Wabash Cannonball"), examining seminal recording sessions and offering a wonderful overview of the cultural forces that influenced American roots music. With their dolorous ballads and gentle instrumentals, their hymns and laments, the Carters helped to shape the sounds of the 20th century. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? explains how and why their delicate melodies endure. Julie Hale writes from Austin, Texas.

Other than George Washington, no other American leader was present at more turning points in the early years of the Republic than Alexander Hamilton. He was a rarity among the founding fathers: an outstanding thinker as well as excellent government visionary and executive. In his well-researched Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow contends that Hamilton was "the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a deeper and more lasting impact than many who did."

Chernow received the National Book Award for The House of Morgan and is also the author of the best-selling Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. In Alexander Hamilton, we follow the subject from his illegitimate birth—which probably took place on the island of Nevis in the West Indies—to his roles as a close aide to General Washington and a military hero during the Revolution. He later became a member of the Constitutional Convention; the force behind the literary and political masterpiece The Federalist; the first secretary of the Treasury; and a fierce political polemicist whose writings helped define the political agenda during the Washington and Adams administrations.

Alexander Hamilton is a balanced portrait of the man and his many contradictions. For example, Chernow describes him as a man whose strong belief in the potential of America stood in stark contrast to his pessimistic views of human nature. Among the founders, it was Hamilton who "probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who could guide them." Influenced by his contact with slaves in the West Indies, he was a staunch abolitionist.

There is much more, including Hamilton’s role in establishing an American foreign policy, his part in the birth of the two-party system and of course, his death at age 49 in his famous duel with Aaron Burr. Admirers of David McCullough’s John Adams or Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin will thoroughly enjoy this excellent book.

On the surface, there appear to be few similarities between Sir Francis Drake (c. 1541-1596) and Oscar Hartzell (1876-1943). One was the swashbuckling confidant of Queen Elizabeth, the other a cigar-chomping farmer’s son from Illinois. But, as Richard Rayner shows in his new book Drake’s Fortune, both men were adventurers with big dreams. Drake realized his dream by plundering and bringing back to England shiploads of riches Spain had extracted from the New World. Hartzell made his fortune by convincing thousands of American dupes most of them in his native Midwest that he held the key to Drake’s supposedly vast estate. All one needed to do to share in this multi-billion-dollar booty, Hartzell told his multitude of marks, was to invest in the minimal costs of settling the estate. Of course, this might take some time.

To the con artist, as Rayner proves, the crucial element of business isn’t simply that a sucker is born every minute, but that the sucker is likely to remain one, even in the face of the most obvious contradictory evidence. Hartzell, who was initially a victim of the Drake scam, soon turned the tables and took over the game. From 1915 until months after he was convicted of the fraud in 1933 in Sioux City, Iowa, he bilked millions from the credulous. Even during the bleak early days of the Depression, he kept the money flowing in.

Because the mythical Drake fortune resided in England, Hartzell spent most of his productive years in London, putting on airs, taking mistresses and generally living the good life. Periodically, he made progress reports to the folks back home, assuring them that they would soon be rich. His pitch was so persuasive that even when he was deported from England and taken back to America to stand trial, crowds of the very people he had cheated continued to believe him and treated him like royalty. Hartzell went to prison in 1935 and died there of cancer in 1943.

While Rayner’s depiction of the roguish Hartzell is fascinating, the book’s greater achievement is showing that gullibility is humanity’s most common and renewable resource.

Eustace Conway is handsome, brilliant, charismatic. He owns his own valley in North Carolina. He’s a trendsetter and a newsmaker. He even has a conscience. So why can’t he keep a girlfriend? You’ll find out in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man, an intriguing profile of the 21st century’s answer to Davy Crockett. Frontiers aren’t for everyone, though they linger in America’s collective imagination. Boys these days are more likely to test their manhood in a mall than in the woods. Into this rather sad picture of diminished horizons enters Eustace Conway. Conway leaves his comfortable suburban home at 17 and disappears into the woods, only to reappear as a sort of eco-Messiah, with a message that yes, there is a better way to live than on the grid prescribed by modern-day America.

Soon Conway is hiking the Appalachian Trail, crossing the United States on horseback and buying up unspoiled land in North Carolina to establish his utopian Turtle Island, a sanctuary where visitors and apprentices can study Conway’s alternative lifestyle one that’s closely based on Native American traditions of hunting, gathering and the resourceful use of natural materials.

The word "biography" has such a dusty sound to it that I hesitate to apply it to this book. Gilbert does, indeed, chronicle Conway’s life from beginning to end, but her account is more than fact; it’s great entertainment. Gilbert is a gifted storyteller. She also has the perfect subject: a 21st century pioneer with the wanderlust of Deerslayer and the shrewdness of Daniel Boone. Through Conway, Gilbert examines the difficulty of coming into an American manhood in a world without frontiers. While she’s at it, she chronicles the history of utopias in America both those that succeeded and those that failed. Gilbert doesn’t mince Conway’s shortcomings a difficult relationship with his father; an inflexibility that makes lasting relationships with women impossible; his phenomenal workaholism; his Messianic complex. Even Conway’s flaws are part of the picture Gilbert’s portrait of an American man of destiny, perhaps the last.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

The last movement in our trio of new books approaches the genius of Mozart most closely. Julian Rushton’s Mozart arrives as the latest entry in the Master Musicians series from Oxford University Press (edited by Stanley Sadie!), but this set of volumes could just as accurately have been named The Master Biographers. Rushton has pulled off something as brilliant as it is implausible: a perfectly judicious account of the life of the composer, informed by the latest historical research, wedded to an array of original insights into Mozart’s music, genre by genre, piece by piece, detail by breathtaking detail and all this in less than 300 pages of scintillating text and spot-on musical examples. Rushton is the ideal cicerone to Mozart’s music, trusting (as Mozart himself does) our intelligence and fellow feeling, moving from one idea to the next with unfailing good sense and humor. In a thrilling chapter called The Land of the Clavier, Rushton asks how the solo piano of a Mozart concerto can impose itself on such a plethora of ideas. The wonder-struck reader of Rushton’s book may well find herself asking the very same question about the author.

As long as music exists, there will always be a company of individuals a sort of Masonic fellowship of Mozart to whom this composer’s works are as nourishing as spring rain, as indispensable as breath, as mysterious as love. To those fortunate Mozartians, a 250th birthday celebration, with all its glamour, is purely redundant, for every day of living with Mozart’s miraculous music is a festival, every note of it an immeasurable gift. Michael Alec Rose is a composer and professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches a course on Mozart.

Author Jane Glover is a conductor who specializes in Mozart, performing his works all over the globe. With her practical and complex grasp of his musical style, she has both the skill and the grace to extend her treatment of Mozart’s Women: The Man, The Music, and The Loves in His Life beyond the strict bounds of biography into the realm of Mozart’s musical imagination. Glover begins her book with a lively account of Mozart’s two families (his own and his wife’s), paying particular attention to the composer’s dependence on and high regard for the women in his life. These real-life sections set the stage for the final act of her book, where Glover, with insinuating (i.e., Mozartian!) high spirits, reveals just how thoroughly Mozart lived with the female characters he created for the operatic stage. An outstanding example is Glover’s extended treatment of Susanna, the heroine of The Marriage of Figaro: these pages of the book flow like an aria in prose, a song of praise to Mozart’s finest dramatic creation, a woman whose wit and joie de vivre present the clearest possible reflection of the composer’s own humaneness.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer and professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches a course on Mozart.

Michael D’Antonio’s new biography, Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams, is more than a rags-to-riches American success tale. D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his Newsday work, does an excellent job of using the story of the 19th-century chocolate magnate’s life to illustrate how business can be combined with visionary altruism, a welcome chronicle in today’s age of corporate scandal and greed. The book goes beyond the dry facts of Hershey’s life to sketch the larger social, political and economic forces that played into his success.

Despite a great deal of luck and hard work, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Hershey. His first job at an ice-cream parlor sowed seeds for a life in sweets, but he soon endured a series of failures, including bankruptcy with two different candy companies, and a botched attempt at making cough drops, before he opened the Lancaster Caramel Company in Pennsylvania in the 1880s. Eventually, his highly successful strategy would be to offer Americans a nickel chocolate bar, a sweet alternative to the expensive European versions on the market.

What sets Hershey’s story apart from other top businessmen is what he chose to do with his wealth. With visions of a utopian community, he founded the town of Hershey in the cornfields of Pennsylvania as well as a residential school for needy children. Today, more than 13,000 residents live in this bucolic small town, where the downtown streetlights are shaped like giant Hershey’s Kisses, and golf course fairways stretch out from the lawn of the chocolate factory. The hook of Hershey is the recent battle over how to manage the town and school 60 years after Hershey’s death. A proposed sale of Hershey to gum giant Wrigley in 2002 was squashed by concerned residents, who feared what would happen to Mr. Hershey’s town if an outsider took charge. Today, questions remain about how to move Hershey company and town forward, without the vision and personal leadership of the great man himself. Lisa Waddle is a writer and pastry baker in Nashville.

Alexander Gerschenkron may not be a household name, but this brilliant Harvard economist left an indelible mark on 20th century intellectual thought with a theory he called Economic Backwardness. You don’t need to know anything about economics, though, to be captivated by this eccentric genius’ eventful life story, beautifully reconstructed by his grandson, Nicholas Dawidoff, in The Fly Swatter. Dawidoff, best-known for The Catcher Was a Spy, a widely acclaimed book about baseball player/OSS operative Moe Berg, clearly has a gift for biography. And in this case, it doesn’t hurt that he actually knew and loved his subject. Still, researching and writing this book couldn’t have been easy, since Gerschenkron, who died in 1978, was deliberately elusive about much of his early life. He rarely spoke of those years, during which he made not one but two dramatic escapes. The first was from revolution-torn Russia, when he and his father fled to Romania under darkness of night. Then, in 1938, he fled Vienna the day after the Anschluss by masquerading as a Swiss day laborer.

Dawidoff’s accounts of both of these escapes are gripping. And if the second half of the book, with Gerschenkron comfortably ensconced in American academia, can’t quite match that level of intensity, it is nonetheless fascinating stuff. Here was a man who played chess with Marcel Duchamp, sparred in print with Vladimir Nabokov, was close friends with John Kenneth Galbraith and Isaiah Berlin. Before landing at Harvard he worked in wartime Washington under FDR. Yet for all his accomplishments, Gerschenkron was also an enigma. He was inclined to tell people, for example, that he lunched regularly with Red Sox great Ted Williams (the two never met), and though he inspired a couple of generations of the nation’s top economic historians, he never produced a major, career-crowning book. The book’s unusual title comes from Dawidoff’s own memory of his grandfather, who would sit on his porch in New Hampshire doing battle with winged insects using an arsenal of seemingly indistinguishable fly swatters, each of which he insisted had its own capabilities. It’s a whimsical moment that captures the elusive charm of this true original. Robert Weibezahl writes from Los Angeles.

The miracle of Marvin Gaye wasn’t his singing, wonderful though it was. What’s most amazing is that he managed to sing at all in a world that offered him more torture than comfort.

This is the picture painted in Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Love ∧ Demons of Marvin Gaye by Michael Eric Dyson, a perceptive observer of issues related to the arts and to the symbiotic interactions between black and white Americans. Race played its role in the growth of young Marvin Gay, but this was only one of the roadblocks thrown into his path. His decision to add a final “e” to the spelling of his last name, for example, hints at the inner turmoil he suppressed throughout his life; he didn’t want his name to cast doubt on his heterosexual virility.

The pace of Dyson’s writing accelerates as it moves forward. Through interviews and his own reflections he makes clear just how innovative Gaye was, and in particular how brilliantly he worked as a collaborator with other creative types. Attention is given to “What’s Goin’ On” and “Let’s Get It On,” songs that trace the twin trajectories of his artistry, which seems in retrospect to be somehow both enduring and tragically fragile.

At first, it is puzzling how briefly the author recounts Gaye’s childhood; it flies by in an instant on the opening pages. But then, in the next-to-last chapter, Dyson takes us back to that time, and for the reader the experience is like remembering a nightmare. In these passages, Reverend Marvin Gay, the singer’s father, rises like a wraith from the awful past, a vengeful Lear who commits murder to atone for all their own sins in the son’s case, drug abuse, violence toward women, and most of all for not being strong enough to survive his search for love.

At the end Dyson ties this story to what he calls a “bigger pathology” in African-American culture. His is a sobering message: the inflictions borne by Marvin Gaye, incredible as they seem, are a part of life to too many unsung brothers even now.

Robert L. Doerschuk is a former editor of Musician magazine.

Journalist Leon Wagener faced the daunting task of chronicling a subject famously shy of the limelight when he took on One Giant Leap: Neil Armstrong’s Stellar American Journey. The book discusses Armstrong’s formative years, his career first as a naval and then test pilot and even includes information about his family life, yet he remains elusive, just beyond reach.

The first man to walk on the moon clearly never intended to spend a lifetime reliving the 21 hours he spent there. Wagener writes: “Each anniversary would inevitably be an opportunity for the world to compare the man he presently was to the man he had been that glorious July of 1969.” Armstrong generally limits his stints in NASA’s so-called publicity “barrel” to appearances at major commemorative events.

After leaving NASA, Armstrong became an engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati, where he co-founded the Institute of Engineering and Medicine. The group, which included Dr. Henry J. Heimlich (of maneuver fame) and Dr. George Rieveschl (discoverer of the first antihistamine), contributed several improvements to heart transplant technology based on space engineering. Armstrong also continued his lifelong interest in aviation, breaking records and narrating a television series documenting aviation firsts for which he flew or rode in significant aircraft.

Obviously, the moon landing must feature into any account of Neil Armstrong’s life. Wagener does an admirable job of covering Apollo 11, describing the carnival atmosphere surrounding the Cape and giving a brief rundown of the world of 1969. His detailed transcript-based passages about things like in-flight meals and the astronauts’ musical preferences put the reader in the capsule.

One has to wonder whether anyone but the most devoted techie or Mars fan will be reading about the twin rovers 35 years from now. The human presence has always made space voyages more compelling. For Armstrong and his fellow Apollo astronauts, part of their mission will always be to keep the moment alive not so much for those who remember, but for those who do not.