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Thumbnail image for lorna-scan003.jpgNell Freudenberger's "The Newlyweds" (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf) manages to do the opposite of what many chick-lit books do. Rather than make extraordinary lives seem dull, it makes ordinary ones seem fascinating.

It's the story of Amina Azid, who leaves Bangladesh for Rochester to marry George Stillman.

Winter King Cover.jpgEverybody's heard of Henry VIII, but what of his father, Henry VII? The founder of the Tudor dynasty was a usurper who had little claim to the English throne, but proved to be an extremely modern monarch, who found that he could control his people by surveillance and by manipulating markets rather than simply by waging war.


Fans of PBS' much-talked-about series "Downton Abbey" on "Masterpiece" often want to read more about the Edwardian era and World War I.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said, "Everyone has three lives, a public life, a private life and a secret life." That may be true, but these days, there seems to be a shortage of public intellectuals.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow opined in "A Psalm of Life" in 1838 that "Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime/And, departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time." While both writers and readers today take a much more skeptical, critical approach to the lives of the great than they did 173 years ago, biographies -- the more unvarnished the better -- have, if anything, an even stronger appeal. And this is a particularly good moment for books about important figures in the arts, among them Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway and Spencer Tracy.

As Charles Baudelaire put it, "A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors." And some of them also contain cautionary tales.

As Michel de Montaigne put it, "When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and vanish the clouds from my mind." Here are my responses to some of the books that I have found particularly absorbing recently.

Reading has shaped my life for as long as I can remember. As Robert Gottlieb told The Paris Review in 1994, "I was about forty years old when I had an amazing revelation -- it suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life. I hadn't even known that I had thought it, it was so basic to me."

What follows are my responses to the books that I have read in recent weeks.

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