To read the Globe's review of the books listed here, click on the title.
FRED ASTAIRE
By Joseph Epstein, Yale University Press, 191 pages, $26.75
This is as much an attempt to set the record straight as it is an appreciation of a preposterously famous man who somehow managed to preserve an air of mystery about him. Nicely paced, almost scientifically analytical in explaining why Astaire became a legend while others merely became movie stars, and filled with illuminating asides and unexpected wisecracks, Fred Astaire manages to draw a direct line from Denis Diderot to Alexis de Tocqueville to Marcel Proust to Fred Astaire. My top hat’s off to this guy. Joe Queenan
THE BARD: Robert Burns, A Biography
By Robert Crawford, Princeton University Press, 466 pages, $39.95
The mercurial quality of Scottish poet Robert Burns, whose 250th anniversary it was in 2009, is not easily captured. But Robert Crawford does so with assurance and fluency. He manages to combine narrative richness with a close reading of the work that sets it in both its literary and historical context. In lengthy, deeply rewarding chapters, Crawford brings a poet’s ear and a novelist’s technique to bear to bring a lost world to life. John McTernan
THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT
Cambridge University Press, 750 pages, $52
Samuel Beckett’s letters are essential reading for any admirer of his work. The letters are tricky, amusing, bitter, filled with puns in several languages, accounts of his sadness, criticism of writers Beckett is reading (Jane Austen is “the divine Jane”), appreciations of music (loves Beethoven’s late string quartets but finds his Sixth Symphony vulgar) and painting (his words about Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire are striking). Reading these is like being let into a writer’s laboratory. André Alexis
ANGELS AND AGES: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
By Adam Gopnik, Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $27.95
How Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln (born the same day in 1809) established “moral modernity” is the broad subject of Angels and Ages. The two are emblematic figures in the spread of what Gopnik calls “bourgeois liberal democracy.” With his own memorable tropes and bounding, often giddy prose, along with passionate storytelling, Gopnik shows that Lincoln and Darwin weren’t only inspired and brave, they were also eloquent and persuasive. Charles Foran
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NOT YET: Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying
By Wayson Choy, Doubleday Canada, 208 pages, $27.95
In this memoir, Wayson Choy almost dies twice, his heart failing him a second time, four years after the 2001 multiple cardiac events. His representation of illness and recovery is as sensitively and sensuously rendered as immigrant experience was in his novel The Jade Peony, with the same degree of candour, humour and authenticity. Choy’s craft enables his book to transcend the illness and suffering he endured and to become a virtual journal of his fighting through the soul’s darkness to light. Keith Garebian
ENTER MOURNING
By Heather Menzies, Key Porter, 240 pages, $21.95
Though the memoir of losing a parent or partner to the devastations of dementia may be all too familiar, Heather Menzies takes fresh ownership of this tale by looking at how daughter and mother find new ways to connect as disease hacks away old ones. It is this constant psychological tension, along with Menzies’s exploration of self and language, that elevates Enter Mourning from a lament to a magnificently memorable memoir. Paula Todd
MY JUDY GARLAND LIFE
By Susie Boyt, Bloomsbury, 285 pages, $27.50
