This season's biographies and memoirs are not all simply books telling the life story of a famous person. "Her Husband" is the biography of the marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, while "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" is a memoir about the making of the Beach Boys album "Pet Sounds." We also review books about the very famous (Sammy Davis Jr., Sid Caesar) and the not-so-famous (author Dan Kennedy, Wyoming tattoo artist Karol Griffin).

Hughes and Plath remembered
In "Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, Portrait of a Marriage" (Viking, $25.95), Diane Middlebrook seems to ask us to finally understand the late poet Ted Hughes, not necessarily sympathize with him. Hughes has never been held in high regard by admirers of his wife Sylvia Plath; common wisdom deems that his affair with Assia Wevill and subsequent abandonment of Plath and their children directly accounts for Plath's suicide.

Common wisdom seems to have forgotten that Plath suffered manic-depressive cycles long before she was involved with Hughes -- on the evening they met, in fact, she bit him hard enough on the cheek to draw blood, kicking off their relationship on a note as tempestuous as that on which it ended.

Viking Press

Middlebrook's biography never glosses over Hughes' faults as a husband, dryly pointing out that he included the same poem (under different titles) in two books; one was ostensibly a memorial to Plath, the other to Wevill, who also died by her own hand. Middlebrook's focus instead is on how the two edgy personalities influenced one another over the truncated course of their marriage, goading each other to new literary heights.

Hughes and Plath converted their lives to poetry; Middlebrook skillfully reverse-engineers their work, unravelling the poems to find the lives within. Hughes' "Lines to a Newborn Baby," for example, is laid alongside Plath's "Morning Song" to reveal two quite different responses to the presence of the infant Frieda in their shared lives. The biographer draws on source material that has only seen publication in recent years; Hughes' collection “Birthday Letters” and Plath's “Unabridged Journals.” Fans of either author will see familiar scenes in "Her Husband," but from unique new angles.    —Kim Rollins

New York, New York
Scores of young authors think that they can compose their generation's Catcher in the Rye, but few attempts so blatantly invite comparison as "Little New York Bastard" (Four Walls Eight Windows, $13.95). Herein, M. Dylan Raskin (after introducing himself with, "The name Mike sickens me like nobody's business, believe me. It's too unoriginal,") drops out of school to sleep in fleabag hotels, loathe humanity, hang out in a natural history museum, and ultimately find companionship only in a young girl whose brilliant innocence touches him.

Four Walls Eight Windows

The memoir's other Salingeresque touches include a curious absence of genuine profanity (for example, the unlikely phrase "wherever the frig,") the use of italics to emphasize only the stressed syllable in a word, and a general overreliance on the adjectives wretched, dirty, stupid, miserable, and disgusting when describing urban life.

All the author's free-floating hatred is less than charming in a 22-year-old man. Passages such as "He was a nice guy. I love nice people like that. I hate people but I love nice people," sound banal rather than ingenuous. Raskin seems oblivious to the reality that he comes off as at least as dumb as the stupid world he despises; he decries "dramatic" people mere moments after recounting an incident where he throws a chair through a wall, accuses a hotel clerk of being a "charlatan" for charging him for a long-distance call (that M. Dylan did actually place), and nonsensically claims a coffee shop is run by "Bolsheviks" when they won't let him occupy a table without ordering anything. Are we really supposed to identify with this rebel without a clue?    —K.R.

'Hitchhiker' Guide
Douglas Adams fits into the Geek Pantheon at an astonishingly high level, somewhere around Gene Roddenberry. Like Roddenberry's "Star Trek," Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has its own cult of devoted fans, its own numerous in-jokes and references. Adams himself, who died in 2001, was never as well known as his works, so I eagerly dug in to "Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams," by M.J. Simpson (National Book Network, $27.95).

National Book Network

Four hundred pages later, I don't feel I know Adams any better. Simpson, the co-founder of a British science fiction magazine, has obviously done his research -- his book is chock full of dates and names and footnotes. But he doesn't seem to know what Adams was like as a person, what inspired him, what he loved. The book repeatedly breaks the only rule of Writing 101 -- it tells, never shows. It tells us about Adams' shocking early death at his gym, but we're not shown what happened or even much of its aftermath. We learn much about the business of publishing and making radio shows, but somehow the fun, the creativity is lost. Adams himself is gone, but surely his friends and family could have shared anedcotes and somehow made this book spring to life.

Adams had a quirky, fun view of life, the universe and everything, to cite one of his book titles. It's a shame that doesn't come through in this otherwise solid book.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Hail, Caesar
The world in which Sid Caesar rose to fame is no longer with us, but his influence on modern comedy cannot be overstated.

PublicAffairs

In "Caesar's Hours: My Life in Comedy With Love and Laughter," by Sid Caesar, with Eddy Friedfeld (Public Affairs, $26), the legendary comedian relates a life of luck, talent, and every comedian's best friend, good timing.

"Caesar's Hours" really snaps into gear midway through the book, when Caesar relates life on the set of his famed variety program, "Your Show of Shows." The sketches he relates still hold up after 50+ years, and Caesar remembers offstage antics as if they happened yesterday.

After chapter after chapter of such fun memories, Caesar jerks the readers down to earth by dropping a bomb: He was an alcoholic for decades. While such a confession can't be easy, the readers now feel lied to by the previous chapters, in which Caesar presents himself as the consummate professional and ultimate funnyman.

For a man so public in his career, Caesar seems protective about all of his personal life, not just his drinking. He thanks his wife profusely, but we never get a peek into their private life. You won't put this book down feeling you know Sid Caesar, but you will know a great deal about his groundbreaking work in comedy.    —G.F.C.

No loser
"Loser Goes First" (Crown, $21.95) reads like the 223-page transcript of an uproariously funny Roadrunner cartoon, starring author Dan Kennedy as Wile E. Coyote. The resemblance seems especially remarkable when halfway through his memoir Kennedy narrowly misses being crushed by a blazing tree.

Crown Publishing

Kennedy's life is a long series of lapses in judgment; one expects his author photo to show a hand-shaped welt on his face caused by repeatedly slapping his own forehead. In addition to failing at being a firefighter, he also fails at being a rock star (witness him quitting his job to devote himself to his music, only to have to pawn all his instruments in order to make rent), an espresso-stand manager (witness him shivering on the Seattle waterfront during the tourist off-season, soothing himself with nitrous oxide hits from the whipped-cream canister), an advertising copywriter, sketch comedian, professional bass fisherman, film extra, and health-club desk clerk, not necessarily in that order.

Through it all, he still gets a kick out of mentally delivering imaginary victory speeches and media interviews; the practice is sure to come in handy when he gains the celebrity status that always seems barely out his grasp. Like the rest of us, he never quite believes in his apparent destiny of being a languishing nobody -- although at his high school graduation he does suffer a moment where "It feels like everyone in the bleachers is suddenly clapping at me, not with me... sort of like drunk patrons at the local steakhouse who get a kick out of a tray of glassware dropping."    —K.R.

Story of an album
I let my husband, a big Beach Boys fan, read "Wouldn't It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds" by Charles L. Granata (Chicago Review Press, $15.95) before I did. When he handed it back, I asked him about what he read.

Chicago Review Press

"I learned that 'Sloop John B' didn't really belong on the album, but 'Good Vibrations' did," he said excitedly. "And I also learned that if your wife is telling you you're taking too much LSD, you should probably listen to her." Good points, both.

"Pet Sounds" was listed as number 2 on Rolling Stone's recent list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and for the millions of us who didn't need a magazine to tell us that, this book is a treasure.

After a slow beginning, the book takes off when it begins to trace the lineage of "Pet Sounds." You'll want to have the album handy while reading -- there are paragraphs that simply cannot be read without a song playing in the background. Granata examines each song as well as the album as a whole, filling the pages with information that both the casual fans and the true music scholars will appreciate. ("Caroline No" was originally titled "Oh Carol, I Know," but Wilson misheard the lyric and the song was renamed.)

As my husband noted, the book also gives details about Wilson's personal life, much more fraught with problems than the hours he spent in the studio. This is vital to the understanding of the LP, but that's not the focus of the book -- there are plenty of Wilson and Beach Boys biographies out there for readers who want that. This book is more a biography of an album, and thankfully, "Pet Sounds" is both deserving and fascinating.    —G.F.C.

Rat Packer remembered
Sammy Davis, Jr., never was as prominent in the Rat Pack as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Yet there's no doubt that the road he took to garner such fame was pockmarked with the kind of obstacles Frankie and Dino would never have to face. Those obstacles -- and his life's many triumphs -- are spelled out in Gary Fishgall's "Gonna Do Great Things: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr." (Simon & Schuster, $26)

Scribner

Davis never had a traditional childhood,  joining his father's vaudeville troupe at age three. As an adult, he faced racism in both his personal and professional lives, scorned for marrying a white woman and prevented by his race from staying at some of the very same venues where he was performing. In perhaps one of the saddest events related in the book, Davis was uninvited from John F. Kennedy's inauguration -- politicos feared that the sight of Davis and his white wife would turn off Southern Democrats.

As his popularity soared, Davis broke numerous color barriers for entertainers by simply demanding venues treat him the same as they would a white man. When those places knuckled under, other entertainers demanded the same treatment, and thanks to Davis, the floodgates were open.

But Fishgall doesn't shy away from the more unpleasant aspects of Davis' character. The artist was unquestionably self-destructive, cheating on his wives and indulging in drugs and emotionally empty sex. Yet when seen in the context of his whole life, the flaws seem more understandable, and readers are likely to put down the book with a newfound respect for the singer. Davis may have stood in the shadow of Sinatra on stage, but offstage he took second place to no one.    —G.F.C.

Behind the scenes
“The Stories of His Life: Orson Welles,” by Peter Conrad (Faber and Faber, $25) is no standard biography. Instead of exploring the what, when, and where of Welles’ life, Conrad looks at the how and why. He takes a series of archetypes -- Faust, Renaissance Man, Quixote -- and then looks closely at Welles’ life as an actor and director define those archetypes. Conrad quotes Welles early on in the novel as saying, to an almost empty theater audience, “Isn’t it strange that there are so many of me -- and so few of you?” Conrad uses this quote to make the assertion that Welles constructed a number of life stories and that he embellished his stories.

Faber & Faber

Conrad looks at Welles films as if they are each in their own way autobiographical. So that not only is Welles cast as Peter Pan or the quintessential American, he’s also cast as Charles Foster Kane or George (a part he didn’t play) from “The Magnificent Ambersons.” When Conrad does a close reading on those films, it’s as if he’s also doing a close reading of Welles’ life. The man literally becomes his own movies. When he makes the case that “Citizen Kane” can be read as a retelling of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, he’s also making the assertion that Welles’ by creating Kane on screen is also a Kubla Khan figure.

It’s a fascinating journey, but this is no light read. This is no tell-all about the life of Welles, though, strangely and delightfully, you may leave the book actually feeling as if you know the man and his work better than would had you read a standard biography. The reason for that is simple, in a standard biography would have had to pick one archetype and stick to it. Here we meet the many faces of Welles - all of them believable and all compelling.  --Paige Newman

Skin story
"Skin Deep," the autobiography of Wyoming tattoo artist Karol Griffin (Harcourt, $24), is required reading for any otherwise intelligent young woman who has found herself setting off on a clearly-marked Wrong Path -- for anyone, for that matter, who has ever leafed through an IKEA catalog and marveled at why anyone would deliberately seek out a bland life.

Harcourt Press

This memoir, illustrated with a smattering of Griffin's tattoos and a handful of antique postcards depicting the West as we like to imagine it was, is the story of a woman who sees beauty only in wildness. We watch as the uncontrollable men she loves are killed, paralyzed, incarcerated -- and, of course, illustrated. Somehow, though, no vignette is more strikingly awful than Griffin's brief period of attempted normalcy, wherein she marries an attorney and moves to San Francisco for a few years: an existence she describes as "Donna Reed on a bad acid trip."

The book swings between such poignancy and wry, raised-eyebrow hilarity, a high point being Griffin's stint on a dude ranch, posing as "Karol Many Feathers," with her purple hair stuffed under a black braided wig. She delves into topics ranging from Maori tribal practices to the sartorial divide between Levis and Wranglers. Many characters come through her boss Slade's shop, get inked, and never recur -- a mosaic of small asides that, from a less skillful writer's pen, would make for a disjointed, frustrating narrative. We know, however, that everyone who passes under Griffin's needle leaves scarred for life. Likewise, her true tales of bikers and prairies and mushroom-induced vision quests will linger under the reader's skin.    —K.R.