During his 24 years as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harry Blackmun wrote many landmark opinions on an array of controversial issues. Although probably best known as the author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade in 1973, his legacy also includes notable opinions on sex discrimination, bankruptcy and the death penalty. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse traces the extraordinary life and career of this influential associate justice in considerable detail in her consistently engaging and enlightening, very readable Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey. Greenhouse was given access to Blackmun’s extensive archive and papers at the Library of Congress. And although her focus is on Blackmun, we also get a sense of how the court functions and the interaction among justices.

The direction taken by Blackmun’s career on the Court could not have been predicted either by Richard Nixon, who appointed him, or his longtime friend and fellow Minnesotan, Chief Justice Warren Burger. William Rehnquist, then an assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration, had this to say about Blackmun’s record as a federal judge: He does not uniformly come out on one side or the other, though his tendencies are certainly more in the conservative direction than the liberal. His opinions are all carefully reasoned, and give no indication of a preconceived bias in one direction or the other. No one could possibly accuse him of lack of scholarship, since his opinions are replete with citations and discussion. For most observers only one part of this judgment would change: by the time he retired from the Supreme Court, Blackmun was generally considered to be its most liberal member.

This authoritative and insightful book succeeds as both legal history and as a compelling personal story. Greenhouse masterfully explains major opinions in terms that can be understood by non-specialists.

The prolific Larry McMurtry has written essays, screenplays, memoirs and 27 novels, including the fabulous Lonesome Dove. In all that work McMurtry has probably written no more than a dozen or so bad paragraphs, and his writing about the American West usually offers a compelling blend of insight and humor. So even a relatively minor work like The Colonel and Little Missie, McMurtry’s study of the celebrity of Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley, gives reason to sit up and pay attention.

Buffalo Bill Cody was an extraordinary figure who, in McMurtry’s view, was America’s first superstar. Annie Oakley, who shared the stage with Cody in his Wild West Show, was the second. Of the two, Cody was the more outgoing and flamboyant. As an Indian scout he knew George Armstrong Custer, won and then lost a Congressional Medal of Honor (turns out he wasn’t actually in the U.S. military at the time, which is a requirement), and, McMurtry writes, received major fame for the minor role he played in the Indian wars. To the end of his life, Cody cut a smashing figure on horseback. His adventures, real and imagined, were the subject of an incredible 1,700 dime novels. Many of the signature exploits of his life what McMurtry calls the "tropes" formed the centerpiece of Cody’s 32-year career as a showman. Casting a friendly but skeptical eye on these legends, McMurtry presents with great economy a fascinating portrait of a rather complex man.

Annie Oakley occupies a much smaller part of McMurtry’s narrative, mainly because she was less knowable. She was reserved, modest to the point of requiring a female embalmer, and so frugal that many [Wild West] troopers believed that she lived off the lemonade Cody . . . served for free. She grew up in grinding poverty in Darke County, Ohio, but rarely spoke of her past, devoting herself instead to becoming a consummate performer.

Good novelist that he is, McMurtry leaves the mysteries of these two engaging personalities intact. He suggests rather than defines how it was they seized the public’s imagination and love in their day, and why they should remain of interest today.

Most stars twinkle benignly from the heavens, enchanting us with their magical shine. But in the fevered firmament of haute cuisine, there are stars of a different sort that beam their powerful, far-reaching light from the pages of Le Guide Michelin, the hallowed culinary guidebook upon which a chef’s reputation can, like the proverbial souffle, rise or fall. In The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine, journalist Rudolph Chelminski chronicles the ill-fated career of celebrated three-star French chef Bernard Loiseau. A longtime friend of Loiseau, Chelminski renders a compassionate, though objective, portrait, including a succinct history and expose of the French food scene. Bernard Loiseau, like most of his famous culinary colleagues, began his cook’s life at the very bottom. From his grueling apprenticeship in the kitchens of Les Freres Troisgros (Chefs Jean and Pierre Troisgros’ famed three-star establishment), to his first day as head chef in a small Paris bistro, Loiseau had a single goal: to earn three Michelin stars. Thus, he lived a manic life of relentless toil, a punishing schedule of 16-hour days filled with the endless perfecting of his cuisine, constant public relations efforts and little-to-no time off. Eventually acquiring a once-legendary hotel and restaurant, La Cote d’Or, in the small town of Saulieu, Loiseau worked himself and his dedicated staff obsessively, finally garnering Michelin’s highest honor. The cost, though, was dear: on the afternoon of February 24, 2003, exhausted and worried about rumors that Michelin intended to rescind one of his coveted stars, the 52-year-old chef shot himself. Inevitable sorrow and industry outrage followed in the wake of this tragedy. Like a cathartic, Bernard’s desperate act released a torrent of feelings . . . that had been bottled up within the profession for decades, writes Chelminski.

Shortly before he died, fearing his fall from culinary stardom, Loiseau admitted to Chelminski, I pass my time trembling. Anyone who has ever dined in a Michelin-starred Gallic temple of gastronomy and even those of us for whom that experience awaits will find this revealing foray into the draconian, uber-competitive echelons of high cuisine fascinating if a bit repelling. Alison Hood trained as a chef, but left her toque behind for the writing life.

So much has been written about the controversial African-American author Richard Wright, who penned Black Boy and Native Son. There are four biographies, including the adoring 1973 book by Frenchman Michel Fabre and the scathing, no-holds-barred 1988 work by black poet Margaret Walker. Of the books written on Wright to date, the new biography by Hazel Rowley is more informative, comprehensive and insightful than any of the earlier efforts. Scouring the 136 boxes of Wright’s memorabilia at Yale University and hunting down letters written by the author to people around the world, Rowley has constructed a more complex, detailed view of Wright than previously seen. She explores his early impoverished beginnings in Mississippi, his time as a struggling writer in Chicago, his flirtation with the Communist Party, his critical and popular successes with his early novels and the later, more complicated works of his European years. His fascination with French philosophy and his harassment by the American government also receive fascinating treatment.

For Rowley, the artistic Wright and the political Wright are one. Always searching for a deeper understanding of himself and a truer writing voice, Wright hated compromise. Whether he was protesting the crushing discrimination of Jim Crow in his brilliant short story collections or speaking out against the global repercussions of colonialism in his later nonfiction books, his was a voice to be reckoned with.

It is to Rowley’s credit that she pulls no punches in showing how Wright’s work met with intense resistance from editors and publishers, who forced him to rewrite large sections of his narratives because of their frank content about racism. Her disclosures about Wright as a lover, social animal, father and husband are particularly revealing, especially those concerning his interracial marriage a bond that was both unlawful and taboo at the time.

In the closing chapters, Rowley chronicles the decline of Wright’s skills and health as he worked even harder to analyze a world in total political and cultural flux. He was a man who never stopped writing, and many of his works remain unpublished. Overall, Rowley’s is a definitive, well-written biography of a major author, an African American who helped change how this country discussed issues of race, sex and culture. This is a superb book from start to finish.

Robert Fleming is the author of The African American Writer’s Handbook (Ballantine).

el Johnson (1709-1784) was the literary lion of his era. An essayist on many subjects, he was a moralist, lexicographer, biographer, editor and poet. In one of his best known essays, he expressed the opinion that “No species of writing is more worthy of cultivation” than biography. He felt that “every man’s life may be best written by himself,” but that if a biographer did the writing, it should be as close to the truth as possible. “If we owe respect to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth,” he once said.

Johnson’s good friend James Boswell followed this approach as he wrote his Life of Samuel Johnson. Although there were detractors, the book was both a critical and commercial success when it was first published and has been a classic of English literature for more than 200 years. Adam Sisman reveals the difficulties involved in the writing process in his enlightening and fascinating Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson. Sisman demonstrates that “The story of Boswell’s life as he wrote the epic Life of Johnson is itself an epic: in the process Boswell experienced an extraordinary degree of exhilaration and depression, pride, humiliation, confidence, doubt, satisfaction, hurt, loneliness, disillusionment and grief.” A man of great ambition, Boswell had little to show for his efforts at the time of Johnson’s death. Writing the biography “was his last hope of achieving anything worthwhile.” Adam Sisman says “it was not Boswell the man that interested me, though he was a very interesting man, so much as Boswell the biographer.” Sisman deals with such topics as why Boswell was attracted to Johnson as a subject, and the ways in which he went about his work. He was aware that he was breaking new ground, in part because biographies in his time were reverential toward their subjects. How did he cope with the many challenges, artistic and personal, that appeared before him? Sisman explores the crucial decisions that set Boswell’s Life apart from other biographies of his time. For example, the first 53 years of Johnson’s life are covered in less than one-fifth of the book. The remaining 21 years (after Boswell met Samuel Johnson) constitute more than four-fifths of the total. This, of course, allows Boswell to include himself as a “character” and gives the book what Sisman calls its “special flavour.” A second crucial decision was to present Johnson’s life “in scenes” as in a play, a technique that allowed the central character to engage in conversation, an art at which he was known to excel.

Of particular interest, too, is the probing of what we now know to be Boswell’s extraordinary literary craftsmanship. For years Boswell’s literary reputation suffered because he was regarded more as a stenographer than as a writer. But now that we have his journals, we know more about his techniques. He did have a remarkable, but not infallible, memory. He wrote memoranda of various conversations, but not often on the days they occurred. As Sisman says, “Boswell’s skill was to sustain the illusion that what he wrote was just what Johnson had said. . . . His artistry concealed the extent of his invention. The naivetŽ he betrayed reinforced the sense of authenticity he wished to convey.” He was, too, almost obsessed about the accuracy of what he wrote. And there were problems with the sensitivities of those who had shared memories of Johnson. Sisman says that “Boswell could never free himself from the delusion that people would not mind even the most unpleasant facts being published provided they could be shown to be true.” Bringing the story behind the making of a masterpiece vividly to life, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task offers a unique perspective on one of the classics of English literature. It’s also a fitting tribute to the man who helped turn the biography into an art form.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

The title of the new book The Beatles: The True Beginnings is as misleading as it is enticing. And in any event, the key to the book’s appeal lies mainly in the authors’ names.

Three brothers from the Best family put this volume together. One of them, Pete, has for 40 years been the most enigmatic of all who have been touched by the aura of the Fab Four. He was, in fact, Fab himself at one time. As the Beatles’ original drummer, he shared every step with John, Paul and George, from the band’s first gigs up to the dawn of Beatlemania. For literally just a few days he felt the hysteria and adulation that would soon change his friends’ lives, the lives of millions of kids and pop culture itself.

And then, suddenly, mysteriously, he was gone. For reasons that have never been fully explained, his colleagues kicked him out, hauled in a big-nosed guy named Ringo to take his place and roared off into history, leaving Best in the dust to deal with overnight obscurity.

Now, put yourself in his shoes. While your old pals are gallivanting around the world, becoming zillionaires, hanging out with hokey holy men or French screen sirens, you’ve got to keep paying the rent on that flat in Liverpool. Lesser men might have become pathologically bitter. Indeed, Best does admit to being annoyed, but he kept his cool and now, in the most genteel fashion, he gets his revenge.

Revenge, because The True Beginnings isn’t really about the Beatles. Rather, it’s about a cramped little nightclub and the woman who ran it Best’s mother, without whom, her sons argue, the band never would have gotten off the ground.

It was Mona Best who turned her basement into a coffee bar, named it the Casbah and installed the prototype Beatles as its resident act. “She had a lot of charisma, a lot of foresight, determination and courage,” Pete Best explains by phone from the historic cellar itself. “Consequently, she turned her humble conception into the first rock ∧ roll haven in Liverpool. The Cavern was a jazz room at the time, so all the major bands in Liverpool clamored to play at the Casbah, because they loved the club and they loved my mother. She helped the Beatles when I was with them and even after I had gone. She never got the recognition she deserved, so my brothers and I had to put that story straight.” Fortunately, Pete’s youngest brother Roag had squirreled away newspaper clips, photos and boxes of junk that would turn out to be not only valuable but, improbably, beautifully photogenic a ratty pink hat from the band’s run at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller, owlish round glasses that John wore while helping to paint the Casbah ceiling.

Then there’s the Casbah itself, a reliquary of wall scrawlings and crumbled furniture. Photographed by Sandro Sodano, the space has a kind of shabby majesty. “We wanted to show off the beauty as well as the character of the Casbah,” Pete Best explains. “I suppose that seems like a funny way to describe it, but rock ∧ roll clubs today are like plastic palaces by comparison. The Casbah was totally different in the late ’50s in its layout and in the artistic work that went into it, so yes, we do call it a thing of beauty.” The text plays almost a subsidiary role to these images, though there is plenty to enlighten even trivia experts. (Try this: What object on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was lent to the band by an apparently forgiving Mona Best for the photo shoot?) And there are recollections from many who were there customers at the Casbah and in the German strip clubs where the band had its coming of age, musicians and, surprisingly, even from George Harrison and Paul McCartney.

“I didn’t actually do the interview with them,” Pete says. “Roag assumed that role because I was involved in other projects. But it was a magnanimous gesture. Like everyone else who spoke to us, they knew there was a wonderful story to be told. And just like everyone else who knew my mother, they loved her too.” Robert L. Doerschuk is the author of 88: The Giants of Jazz Piano and the former editor of Musician magazine.

When Gretchen Rubin decided to write about Winston Churchill, she found that some 650 biographies of Britain’s wartime leader had already been published. Nevertheless, she went ahead in an effort to make sense of conflicting evidence about one of the men responsible for saving the civilized world from Nazi Germany. In Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, she has assembled a fast-moving slideshow of literary portraits of this bold statesman whose self-assuredness, egotism and ambition were evidenced by his prediction: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Some of Churchill’s biographers, however, were not charitable to the great diplomat, and Rubin pits the favorable views against the disparaging ones. This technique makes for some startling contradictions when considering such topics as Churchill’s youth, sex life and politics. Perhaps Churchill’s greatest strength was his use of words. With his oratory, he braced Britain against the bombs and rockets that killed 60,000 of its civilians. Yet, in private conversation, he was considered a bore. When he began to talk at a meeting with Roosevelt, the exasperated president passed a note to an aide: “Now we are in for one-half hour of it.” A few other eyebrow-lifters: Churchill had no university education but won the Nobel Prize in literature. He spent most of his adult life in debt but depended on a valet to tie his shoelaces and dry him after bathing, and never did without expensive liquor, cigars or pale pink silk underwear. Rubin previously wrote Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, a book that offered strategic advice on helping the ambitious prevail a theme on which Churchill could easily have expounded. Her new book is an accessible study of one of history’s most fascinating figures.

Benjamin Franklin’s extraordinary and complex life as a printer, entrepreneur, postmaster and diplomat, among other activities had a profound effect on the development of the United States. As Walter Isaacson points out in his superb new biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American LifeKissinger: A Biography, brilliantly demonstrates a wide and insightful grasp of Franklin’s life. Isaacson’s Franklin is a charming genius and an imposing historical figure, but a man who left much to be desired for those closest to him. While he had, in Isaacson’s words, a "genial affection for his wife," it didn’t keep him from spending 15 years of their marriage an ocean apart. He and his son William had a close relationship, but it couldn’t survive their difference of opinion over the Revolution.

Franklin’s dislike of "everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people," as well as his longstanding opposition to arbitrary authority, made him a trusted figure for many colonists. In telling his story, Isaacson has crafted an impressive biography, a narrative that’s balanced to give us a strong sense of the many aspects of its subject. His book deserves a wide readership.

Speakers at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington were told to limit their remarks to five minutes, but no one moved to cut off 34-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. when he talked for 16 minutes. The Baptist minister’s “I Had a Dream” speech electrified the throng of more than 200,000 on the Mall, as well as the uncounted millions watching on television. The appeal of the speech, which some scholars and historians have ranked with the Gettysburg Address, is the focus of The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation.

This book will please wordsmiths, historians and students of rhetoric, as its author, Drew D. Hansen, parses virtually every sentence, with a side-by-side comparison of the speech as it was drafted, as it was written, and as it was delivered. The analysis uncovers the Biblical, historical and intellectual roots of King’s phrasing, and it shows that the speech was largely a combination of favorite set pieces that had been in King’s oratorical repertoire for many years. King later recalled that, in the middle of the speech, “all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used I’d used many times before, that thing about I have a dream’ and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don’t know why. I hadn’t thought about it before the speech.” But the words were perfectly suited for the man, the audience and the moment.

The triumphs and trials of this apostle of nonviolence are well known, but Hansen, a former editor of the Yale Law Review who was born after the speech, reviews them for those readers who associate King primarily with the names of schools and streets and a national holiday. With such ringing lines as “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” the speech made that auspicious day on the Mall a defining moment for King’s career and for the civil rights movement as a whole. Hansen captures it well. Alan Prince lectures at the University of Miami School of Communication.

In The Mercury 13, journalist and Mount Holyoke College professor Martha Ackmann serves up a fascinating account of the efforts by women to become astronauts in the early days of the U.S. space program. With NASA and other government officials firmly ensconced in the good ol’ boys club, there was never any doubt that the trainees for the initial Mercury space-flight missions would be exclusively men. Yet, as Ackmann shows, a staunch and able group of females, led by ace test pilot Jerrie Cobb, underwent the same physical and mental testing as later heroes Alan B. Shepard and John Glenn and might well have been excellent astronauts. Truth to tell, there were certain physical characteristics—for example, lower body weight—that led NASA executives Dr. Randy Lovelace and Air Force Brigadier General Donald Flickinger to believe that females might offer some advantages over their male counterparts.

Eventually, 13 women emerged as frontline candidates for Mercury missions. On a wing and a prayer, they soldiered on, hoping that NASA’s powerful all-male hierarchy would see their value to the program. But Vice President Lyndon Johnson, then the titular head of NASA, nipped these dreams in the bud. Not even a series of congressional hearings on the topic could sway the men in power. Ackmann provides interesting details on the lives of the would-be female astronauts and their battle to win a chance at making history. Besides being an excellent volume in the category of women’s studies, The Mercury 13 also serves to fill a critical gap in the history of NASA and (wo)manned space flight. A foreword is provided by ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr, who was a semi-finalist in the now-defunct journalist-in-space competition.

John Eisenhower believes that his father’s military career was much more important to him and to history than his eight years as a popular president. “Ike,” as the author’s father was universally known, passionately defended his military judgments, and late in life, when he was asked to name the greatest men he had worked with, most of them came from his pre-presidential years.

General Ike: A Personal Reminiscence is a fascinating look behind the scenes at Eisenhower and his relationships with the generals and statesmen whose decisions led the Allies to victory in Europe and Africa. The author brings unique credentials to this task. In addition to being Eisenhower’s son, he is a retired brigadier general, former ambassador to Belgium and a best-selling military historian. His portraits of the principle figures and comprehensive historical background regarding tactical, diplomatic and political decisions add much to the value and enjoyment of the book.

As the author shows, Ike was modest but also ambitious. He and George Patton were longtime friends, and Ike was willing to defend Patton’s inappropriate conduct because Patton’s effective leadership was crucial to the Allied cause. But Ike’s biggest burden was British Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, or “Monty.” John Eisenhower details some of their major differences and concludes that Monty “probably did more than any other figure of World War II to damage Anglo-American friendship.” Despite this, their disagreements did no serious harm to the war effort.

The author discusses the American officers who influenced Ike: Fox Conner, who recognized his potential; Douglas MacArthur, with whom he worked in the Philippines; and George Marshall, to whom Ike felt indebted for his extraordinary rise and for whom “he never lost a touch of veneration.” But Ike had a particularly important relationship with Winston Churchill. Both played many different roles in wartime that occasionally led to sharp differences; still, their friendship survived. This insightful and carefully crafted gem of a book demonstrates what Ike’s son told Congress in 1990: “Ike’s hands were always on the task at hand . . . he thought of himself primarily as a dedicated public servant, one who placed his country above himself.” Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.