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.

The late Stanley Sadie, the most distinguished musicologist of his generation, completed the first of a projected two-volume biography of Mozart not long before he died. With his comprehensive even startling command of every detail from Mozart’s life and every phrase from his music, Professor Sadie provides a blessed antidote to the accumulation of rank myth and imprudent speculation generally surrounding the early years of Mozart. Such irresponsible biography is not hard to account for, in light of the mystique of the boy prodigy. In Mozart: The Early Years, Sadie deftly shows how needless that sort of tale-spinning is, by uncovering instead the limitless interest of the facts themselves. It is a sad loss that he could not finish his second volume, on Mozart’s final decade in Vienna.

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

From the early 19th century until his death in 1859, Leigh Hunt was a significant and controversial man of letters. He was an essayist, poet, literary and theater critic, playwright, editor, journalist, founder of periodicals and political radical. It was his keen eye for literary talent, however, that enabled him to make his most important contributions. At the height of his career, Hunt’s close friends, whose careers he helped to advance, included the Romantic poets John Keats, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and the esteemed essayists Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Later, Charles Dickens and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were encouraged by him and became his friends.

Anthony Holden, known for his biographies of Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Prince Charles and Laurence Olivier, superbly chronicles Hunt’s ambitions, literary feuds and chronic financial problems in The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable Life and Times of Leigh Hunt Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics. The title comes from Byron, who wrote those words in a verse letter to a friend before the first of his many visits to Hunt during the two years the latter was imprisoned for libeling the Prince of Wales.

Hunt considered personal essays he wrote for his journal Indicator to be his best writing, while his friend Thomas Carlyle praised Hunt’s Autobiography as by far the best book of the autobiographic kind in English. At the other extreme, desperate for money, Hunt wrote a commercially successful book that was notable for its assault on Byron, with whom he had had a falling out. Holden writes, While Hunt was reviled on all sides for ingratitude towards a man who had offered him substantial patronage, his bestseller was as avidly (if guiltily) read as are all such indiscreet memoirs of the famous. Holden’s well-researched and wonderfully readable biography of Hunt shows us the literary life in a very productive period among writers whose works are still widely read and admired today.

Blaine McCormick’s clever book, Ben Franklin: America’s Original Entrepreneur, entices the entrepreneurial muse by mining the good doctor’s autobiography for the business lessons it contains.

McCormick, a Franklin scholar and an associate dean at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, has shaped a unique adaptation of the original work, revising its often abstruse language and syntax, and reorganizing the narrative into a three-part chronology that traces the beginnings, development and maturation of this successful 18th-century entrepreneur.

The result is a solid business primer and intriguing portrait of America’s foremost businessman, statesman, scientist, inventor and diplomat. Franklin’s life story, full of common sense, creative genius and psychological insight, has been distilled into palatable chapters, embellished with McCormick’s trenchant analysis of Franklin’s business acumen and peppered with apt quotes from his incomparable Poor Richard’s Almanac.

McCormick also includes informational tidbits about current business leaders and practices that relate to the lesson at hand: a young Franklin, motivated primarily by thrift, extols vegetarianism. Is it any wonder that Corn Flakes inventor W.K. Kellogg and Apple Computer maven Steve Jobs would follow suit? McCormick views Franklin as the founding father of American business, and notes that the great man clearly intended, as proven by a letter written shortly before his death, that his autobiography will be of more use to young readers; as exemplifying the effect of prudent and imprudent conduct in the commencement of a life of business.

The models are many and all are useful in today’s business vernacular, whether they involve a moral lesson, like the one learned after a youthful indiscretion involving minor theft, or a strategic maneuver, as when Franklin gains community cooperation for public projects by using the power of advertisements and contracts (both, of course, printed for profit by Franklin’s own press).

This book’s streamlined approach holds much for history and business buffs and, in accordance with McCormick’s dearest wish, may sufficiently pique readers’ interest to return to Franklin’s original text to study it with greater appreciation.

Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World, edited by Page Talbott, is a grand volume, a glorious tribute to a man to whom America owes much. Talbott, chief curator of the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary traveling exhibition (to tour across America, eventually arriving like the man in Paris), has compiled a wonderful collection of informative essays and fascinating images, a worthy literary companion to the exhibit in her charge.

Every aspect of Benjamin Franklin’s extraordinary life is explored in 10 probing and beautiful essays, rich with their contributors’ fine historical and social perspective. The text is enhanced with nearly 300 photos and reproductions of artifacts and art (many of which have never before been on public display) from Franklin’s times, his home and his printing press. Memorably moving is a photograph of the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, which bears evidence of Franklin’s legendary edits.

The contributors, all prominent scholars (two of them currently work with the Library Company of Philadelphia, the literary lending institution founded by Franklin), thoughtfully and realistically examine the daily life, travails, business activities and public and private exploits of this often wily, but virtuous man.

Especially intriguing are the writings on Franklin’s domestic life, his sojourn as a diplomat in France, and one essayist’s ruminations on him as slave owner and dubious abolitionist.

Though Franklin is viewed by some historians as a reluctant revolutionary who sought to avoid colonial conflict with Britain, this book reveals the admirable, but not always successful, pragmatic efforts consistently applied by Franklin to his endeavors, and poses the idea that his vision remains unfulfilled, itself a challenge to Americans who still search for a better world.

British biographer Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s first book characterizes the force and influence of motherhood in a literary double biography, Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age. Visiting Blenheim, the grandiose English seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, Stuart became intrigued by a docent’s implication that the 9th Duchess, American-born heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, was a prisoner in her marriage, but that she got out in the end. Then, while exploring the nearby family burial ground, Stuart found an inscription on Consuelo’s gravestone indicating that she had clearly remarried. So why had she come back? Perplexed, Stuart wondered if the innocent, 18-year- old Consuelo was forced into a loveless marriage. Rudimentary research revealed that Consuelo’s strong-willed mother, Alva, though initially infamous for masterminding the most ambitious match of the Gilded Age, later became known for her powerful leadership in the international suffrage movement. Was this eventual social activism Alva’s self-imposed penance for coercing her daughter to marry a virtual stranger? With alacrity and ingenuity, Stuart has probed two lives in a quest to understand the landscapes of one. Her mountainous research has been rendered into an empathic portrait of daughter and mother, social philanthropist and feminist respectively, amid the social and economic flagrancies of the Gilded Age and the eroding aristocratic culture of Britain’s nobility. She opens with a suspenseful, fiction-like prologue chronicling Consuelo’s wedding day: we observe curious crowds lining the route to New York’s St. Thomas Church; we marvel at the opulent floral displays and watch Mrs. Astor escorted to her seat; we hear the strains of the wedding march. But we cannot yet see the bride, for she has not appeared. As the delay lengthened, the guests shuffled and whispered. . . . Five minutes passed . . . then ten . . . then twenty . . . The remaining reportorial narrative primarily follows the life of an American heiress-turned-duchess, but Consuelo and Alva also portrays the often desperately empty ways of 19th-century New York society and of the British aristocracy; the charged symbiosis between mothers and daughters; and the emerging movement for female liberation from suffocating social mores. It is a first-rate first-time effort.

Best remembered as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, shy, retiring Andrei Sakharov was an unlikely Russian dissident. A renowned physicist, Sakharov was also an independent thinker on such issues as intellectual freedom and human rights. The life of this remarkable man who refused to join the Communist Party is examined in Richard Lourie’s fascinating new book Sakharov: A Biography. A scholar who knew Sakharov well, Lourie translated the physicist’s memoirs which were published in the U.S. in 1990. Lourie also spent time with Sakharov after he was exiled for almost seven years to the isolated town of Gorky. The author traces Sakharov’s life from his childhood as the son of a teacher through his career as a brilliant physicist whose central role in developing the H-bomb got him elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific research center and a key part of its administrative structure. Thanks to the work of Sakharov, the Soviet Union became a superpower, but very early on, he was concerned about the human toll of the "terrible weapon" that he had helped to create. Widely regarded as the leader of the dissident movement within the U.S.S.R and universally acknowledged as an important human rights activist throughout the world, Sakharov was instrumental in getting his country and the U.S. to agree to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. He often signed public letters on behalf of dissidents and had privileges taken from him as a result. After the death of his first wife, Klava, and his marriage to Elena Bonner, a long-time activist for dissidents, Sakharov’s commitment to helping political prisoners in his country became even greater.

In 1975, Sakharov received the Nobel Peace Prize. The citation described him as "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind." A poll taken in the 1990s in the former Soviet Union to identify the country’s most influential figures ranked him at number three. Ahead of him on the list were Lenin and Stalin. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Some of the most prominent figures in early jazz and the glory days of pop music make their bows in Richard M. Sudhalter’s Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael and James L. Dickerson’s Just for a Thrill: Lil Hardin Armstrong, First Lady of Jazz. Had Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981) written no other song but Star Dust, his place in music history would be secure. But that tune, which dates back to 1926, was essentially just the beginning of his luminous career. Ahead lay such destined-to-be standards as Georgia on My Mind, Heart and Soul and In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening. Sudhalter, who is a jazz musician himself and a prodigious researcher, presents a sensitive, meticulously documented account of Carmichael’s life as a composer, recording artist, actor and radio and television personality. Central to understanding Carmichael, Sudhalter asserts, is understanding his unwavering affection for his home state of Indiana. To Carmichael, Indiana symbolized the mythic rural home and simple life (both metaphors for youth) that he yearned for. He was born in Bloomington, spent most of his early years there and attended Indiana University. Although he studied law and was finally admitted to practice, it was always jazz that fascinated him. His bands played proms and fraternity parties throughout the region. During this period, he met and began performing with his major musical influence, the brilliant but doomed cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. A procession of gifted lyricists, including Frank Loesser and Johnny Mercer, wrote the words to Carmichael’s melodies. But Sudhalter’s research shows that Carmichael often came up with themes and key phrases and sometimes heavily edited the lyrics provided him. This goes a long way toward explaining why his songs have such a consistent voice and point of view. After Carmichael moved to Hollywood to write songs for the movies, he gradually began to act in them as well. His signature role was Cricket, “the laid-back, laconic, piano-playing sage,” in the 1944 Bogart and Bacall classic To Have and Have Not. Later, he moved into television drama. His big disappointments, Sudhalter says, were that he never wrote a successful Broadway musical nor a long-form “serious” piece, even though he tried both. With the advent of rock n’ roll in the mid-1950s, Carmichael’s run as a popular songwriter came to an end. Just for a Thrill, Jim Dickerson’s biography of Lil Hardin Armstrong, is built more on admiration than information. Except for her songs, documentary remnants of this second wife of Louis Armstrong are scarce. But this doesn’t make Dickerson’s assertion of her musical importance any less valid, and he has performed heroically in tracking down and interpreting the biographical tidbits that do remain.

Lillian Beatrice Hardin was born in Memphis in 1898. She studied piano there and enrolled briefly at Fisk University in Nashville before moving with her mother to Chicago in 1917. After taking a job demonstrating sheet music, she was invited to join a local band. From then on, she worked principally as a performer. Both she and Louis Armstrong were married to other people when they met. But in 1924, they tied the knot, and she became, in fact if not in name, his manager. She also wrote songs for him to record and played on many of his sessions. As Armstrong’s career flowered, however, and his infidelities became more flagrant, the artistic commonality that once held them together slowly vaporized. They divorced in 1938.

Dickerson credits Lil with nagging Armstrong to become a headliner with his own band instead of playing the loyal sideman in someone else’s group. Although he was a supreme trumpet player even as a young man, Dickerson says, Armstrong was too shy and reticent to assert himself. This was where Lil came in. To compensate for a paucity of autobiographical material, Dickerson contextualizes what he has, describing in great detail, for instance, the turn-of-the-century Memphis Lil grew up in. He also chronicles Armstrong’s life. In her later years, Lil Hardin Armstrong saw such stars as Ray Charles, Nancy Wilson and Peggy Lee record her songs. She ran a restaurant, designed clothing (including stage costumes for her ex-husband) and taught music and French. On Aug. 27, 1971, just over a month after Louis Armstrong died, she performed at a concert in his memory. As she finished her opening selection, St. Louis Blues, she collapsed at the piano and died. She was rumored to have been working on her autobiography, but Dickerson says it has never surfaced. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider by Lawrence scholar John Worthen reveals the author of Lady Chatterly’s Lover to be a man estranged from almost everyone around him, including his own family. Nevertheless, this conflicted and difficult man left an important literary legacy still celebrated almost a century later.

Mark Twain: A Life is Ron Powers’ exhaustive portrait of Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ rise from Missouri miscreant to American icon. Powers, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Flags of My Fathers and has studied Twain for more than 20 years, uses the resources of the Twain Project and his own storytelling gift to bring this complex and uniquely American writer to vivid life.

There are more than two million adults in prison today in the United States. Nearly all of them will be released back into society sooner or later, with most of those eventually returning to prison. How will they make it? Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, a powerful new book by Jennifer Gonnerman offers an unvarnished glimpse into the life of one of these former prisoners. It joins a growing list of literature emerging on the issue of prisoner re-entry.

Gonnerman is a staff writer for the Village Voice, and this book grew out of her reporting on the impact of mandatory prison sentencing for drug offenders in New York state. She met Elaine Bartlett in 1998 while interviewing prisoners serving long prison time for first-time drug dealing. Bartlett was 14 years into a 20-year term. Bartlett grew up in the public housing projects of New York. She was one of seven children in a family with no father. Two of her siblings would serve prison time; one would die violently. The others struggled with drug addictions or other urban ills, and most never finished high school. Bartlett would have four children by two men, one of whom was Bartlett’s partner in crime. Upon release from prison, Bartlett struggles to find work, get reacquainted with children she does not know, maintain housing for her and her family and remain free.

Gonnerman’s non-judgmental writing style allows Bartlett’s story to unfold on its own. The story is compelling; the picture created is not pretty. Should drug-sentencing laws be reformed? Probably, but changing those laws provides no solution for individuals participating in a subculture that encourages families without fathers, easy access to drugs and a complete absence of work ethic in short, a purposeless life. Bartlett stays out of prison in part because of her dedication to reform drug sentencing; the tragedy is that most of her former prison compatriots will not. J. Campbell Green has worked with ex-prisoners for more than 20 years and previously managed a halfway house program.