Lives of the famous and the unknown

Biographies and memoirs can give us a glance into the lives of the famous and prominent — one book this season focuses on actor Cary Grant, another on legendary quarterback Joe Namath.

But sometimes, equally as fascinating are the lives of those we don't know, but meet through their books — a new teacher in New York City, or a Montana artist. Here's a look at some of this fall's crop.

Daddy dearest
Anna Cypra Oliver's father Lewis killed himself before she was old enough to know him. Her mother followed a failed marriage to Lewis with a couple of abusive, nightmarish father figures, and by the time she reached adulthood, Oliver had figured out that the fact that she knew almost nothing of her father might be why his death had become the central and defining event of her life. "Assembling My Father" (Houghton Mifflin, $25) is the story of her extensive efforts to learn something about him.

This is ultimately a dual biography of sorts — it is Oliver's own story, including her struggles with her mother as well as her own troubled marriage, and it is the tale of her father. As she speaks to people who remember him, his own difficult life story comes into view, and it becomes clear that there will be no simple explanation for her father's death. Instead, she focuses on small things — her father's quiz-show experience, his doodles and poetry, and the details she can get from family and especially from her father's friends. Her frank discussion of her own conflicted feelings of sadness and intense anger is very powerful, as all of her relationships — the one with her mother, in particular — are profoundly affected by her search.

The book delivers exactly what the title promises — it is Oliver's attempt to piece together a portrait of her father from a lot of tiny pieces. As a recounting of careful detective work, as a story of Oliver's personal troubles, and as an effort to retrace how a man might become suicidal, it's a dark, affecting book.    —Linda Holmes

More than dashing
On screen Cary Grant was the picture of self-assurance, but this may have been his greatest acting feat. In his new book, “Cary Grant: A Biography” (Harmony Books, $25.95), Marc Eliot paints a fascinating portrait of the actor as someone who never really thought he had talent and who relied on great directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (“North by Northwest,” “Suspicion”) and George Cukor (“Philadelphia Story”) to make him more than a last-minute replacement for Gary Cooper — who turned down many of the early roles Grant ended up taking.

Eliot also explores Grant’s rather fascinating private life, which included, according to Eliot a 10-year homosexual relationship with actor Randolph Scott, five marriages and one doted-on daughter. Although left-leaning politically and a bisexual, apparently Grant was also involved with the FBI, allegedly spying on his second wife Barbara Hutton (of the Woolworth fortune) for J. Edgar Hoover. With his third wife, Grant was introduced to therapy sessions that included the use of LSD. The book also details Grant's close friendship with the elusive Howard Hughes (which makes it seem very strange that there’s no Cary Grant character in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Hughes film, “The Aviator”).

It’s amazing how many stellar films Grant starred in, and Eliot does a great job of detailing the story of each. You’re sure to have a list to take to the video store when you finish this biography. But even more interesting is how Eliot demonstrates how Grant’s roles reflected his personal life in spite of the fact that he tried to avoid such films. Grant turned down “Lolita” even though he was known for dating much younger women, yet starred in “Night and Day” about the closeted Cole Porter. A look at a troubled yet ultimately successful man, “Cary Grant” is a very readable book that makes the dashing leading man seem human.  —Paige Newman

"FBI Girl"
One of the things that makes memoirs difficult is that in order to be compelling, they need to be personal. And in any personal story, there is a tendency for everyone but the narrator to become flattened; for them to so emphatically exist only as accessories that no real complexity can develop. What distinguishes Maura Conlon-McIver's "FBI Girl: How I Learned to Crack My Father's Code" (Warner Books, $23), is that she maintains an impeccable balance between telling an intimate, engaging family story and somehow still respecting that her parents, in particular, had a life and a relationship and a set of problems that, for the most part, were not about her.

When she was growing up in southern California, Maura's father, Joe, worked for the FBI, a fact that excited and puzzled her. Joe is fiercely devoted to family, particularly his own brother Jack, a New York priest, and Maura's younger brother Joey, born with Down Syndrome and unquestionably his father's favorite. Maura aches to understand and be close to her father, gobbling up little tidbits about the FBI that he indulgently drops for her from time to time, and trying to decipher what she comes to call his "code."

Conlon-McIver acknowledges, without dwelling upon, her parents' sometimes troubled marriage, her mother's intermittent bouts of bone-deep sadness, and the ways that raising Joey both blessed and challenged her family. She doesn't explicitly try to explain these things; she mostly recounts her childhood perceptions, but describes them with the fuller perspective she developed as an adult. The result is ultimately a funny, complicated, satisfying love letter to her family, very much worth reading.     —L.H.

‘Driving’ readers crazy
Determined to overcome her driving phobia, "Vanity Fair" correspondent Amy Fine Collins takes driving lessons with a Turkish ex-pat named Attila — and the story of their strange friendship became Collins's memoir, "The God of Driving: How I Overcame Fear and Put Myself in the Driver's Seat (With the Help of a Good and Mysterious Man)" (Simon & Schuster, $24).   The memoir itself is a lot like the subtitle — overly long and pleased with itself, and not nearly as clever as it thinks.

Collins is an off-putting narrator; she brags about her décor, name-drops posh restaurants, and subjects readers to pointless descriptions of the impractical designer outfits she selects for her driving lessons.  She also whines about the trials of a trip to the DMV — stale material that makes her seem even more aristocratically out of touch.

Still, the story itself is reasonably compelling, in theory.  Collins sets out to beat her fear of driving, and becomes closer and closer to Attila as she does so.  The two of them rent luxury cars together, talk on the phone and travel together, and psychoanalyze each other.

But their unique relationship, intimate but non-sexual, is marred by clumsy dialogue and melodramatic imagery (Collins compares a seatbelt to "one of "Laocoön's attacking serpents").  The author's snobbish self-regard makes it hard for readers to relate.  The book would have worked better as an article — written by someone else.  —Sarah D. Bunting

Personal ‘Things’
You won't pick up another book that's anything like Hannah Hinchman's "Little Things In A Big Country: An Artist And Her Dog On The Rocky Mountain Front" (W.W. Norton & Co., $26). Hinchman's hand-lettered journal wraps up her sketches, watercolors, and observations about life as a single woman, an artist, and an environmentalist in the American West, in a part of Montana where the economy is driven by ranchers.

The look of the print in the book is a matter of personal taste; Hinchman's letters are wide and short, and it isn't the way you might choose to read text if it were going to tumble on for paragraph after paragraph. In this setting, though, broken up by art and a good amount of white space, it doesn't interfere too much with what she has to say.

This is a book to dip in and out of, for the most part. Unlike a novel that you might swallow in a series of gulps, Hinchman's journal creates a picture from, as promised, little things. She draws leaves and sketches her faithful dog Sisu, shows what prints in the snow look like, and lets the image of her life develop. She includes lists she's made, notes she's taken, drawings of swatches of cottonwood bark. Her prose is lovely, as well — she writes affectionately about Sisu and the pronghorns, about swans and local orchids and the rodeo. It's a colorful, observant book that's duplicates the feeling of having a cup of coffee with a person about as closely as is possible.     —L.H.

Teach your children well
In 2000, Donna Moffett was a legal secretary who'd made a nice life for herself in New York City. Then she answered an ad to join the New York City Teaching Fellows program, and suddenly she was a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn, at a school where more than 3/4 of the student body could not read at their grade level. Some of her students were new to America, and to the English language. Some were always hungry, unable to get a real meal at home. Donna Moffett had none of the education classes regular teachers take, nor had she ever student-taught. With the limited guidance of the Fellows program and her own common sense, she was on her own.

Moffett is even directed as to which papers she can hang on her room walls — they must be ones that meet state standards, meaning the children who aren't doing as well can't get even this little ego boost.

Abby Goodnough tracks Donna through those early days in "Mrs. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America" (Public Affairs, $25). It's a fascinating look at not only one tiny classroom, but at New York's — and America's — educational system. The Fellows are promised extra help (and free classes towards a master's degree), but that leaves other teachers resentful, and understandably so. Donna barely has time for the promised classes anyway, she's too overwhelmed trying not sink below the paperwork and other problems any teacher faces. She's far from the perfect Hollywood teacher — she gets impatient, makes mistakes —  once falling for a student's story that his mother was shot and killed, not realizing he's just making it up for attention. Yet she perseveres, and keeps on fighting.

Moffett must also fight against the school's overly planned curriculum. Her school uses the reading program Success For All, a businesslike way of reading instruction that forces teachers to follow a by-rote script that even includes hand signals. And because the school at which she teaches has been judged a failing school, Moffett is even directed as to which papers she can hang on her room walls — they must be ones that meet state standards, meaning the children who aren't doing as well can't get even this little ego boost.

The world of education is often as frustrating as it can be fascinating, and Goodnough doesn't shy away from either side. It's hard not to like Moffett, but it's also hard not to shake one's head at the speed in which the Teaching Fellows program was slammed together. That said, a year spent in Moffett's classroom is time well-spent.    —G.F.C.

‘Broadway’ show
Biographers sometimes try too hard to find themes in their subjects' lives, and to tie them to a central thesis — although people's lives don't always cooperate by forming neatly structured narratives.  But in Mark Kriegel's "Namath" (Viking Books, $27.95), football Hall of Famer "Broadway" Joe Namath's life does follow an exciting and informative plot.

Kriegel refers to watershed moments, such as Namath's parents' divorce and The Guarantee (Namath personally pledged a Jets win in Super Bowl III over the heavily favored Colts), throughout the narrative, but these references aren't strained.  Surprisingly, his (sometimes chapters long) digressions work, too; a discussion of the New York Jets' early years could have slowed the book down, but Kriegel provides enough information for context, then returns to his primary subject.

Broadway Joe had a llama rug in his bachelor pad, guest-starred on ‘The Brady Bunch,’ and flouted league rules with his Fu Manchu mustache.

And what a primary subject: Namath didn't just set passing records while playing on bum knees, a great story on its own.  Broadway Joe had a llama rug in his bachelor pad, guest-starred on "The Brady Bunch," and flouted league rules with his Fu Manchu mustache. 

Kriegel gives Namath's on- and off-the-field exploits equal time, evoking the vernacular of the era easily and making decades-old gridiron contests exciting — even to readers who don't follow the game.  He gets funny, pithy quotes from Namath's intimates, and captures Namath's post-career emptiness without schmaltz.  It's a great read for fans of the game, and just as great a read for fans of good biographical writing.    —S.D.B.

Turn to ‘Stone’
Courtney Angela Brkic's memoir, "The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living" (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $24), is actually two memoirs.  One is the story of her father's family, particularly her star-crossed grandmother Andelka.  The other, interwoven with the first, is a painful recollection of Brkic's work with an international forensic team in Bosnia, where she helped to excavate remains in Srebrenica and elsewhere after the war ended in the mid-1990s.

Brkic also penned an award-winning volume of short stories, "Stillness," inspired by that same stint with the forensic team, and her prose often has the cadence of a myth or fairy tale: "God began His slow death in those days, for all of them."

But for all the narrative's grace, it's also chilly and removed.  The "characters," all real people, sometimes seem two-dimensional.  Andelka is a bit too heroic, her interior monologue too elegant and sharply observed; Brkic didn't witness Andelka's tribulations firsthand, and her take on it is at times too polished to be credible.

Brkic's account of present-day events operates at the same distance.  The story of her experience in the field, like that of her grandmother, is a good one, curious and sad, but Brkic insulates herself from a genuinely emotional telling of it with too many writerly details and self-conscious descriptions. 

"The Stone Fields" is a quick, smooth read, but given the subject matter, it should have been rougher, harder to digest.    —S.D.B.

A dimmed star rekindled
After a number of up-the-track finishes by authors trying to emulate the success of Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling “Seabiscuit: An American Legend,” a worthy successor has at last broken out of the pack.

“Wink,” by Ed Hotaling, (McGraw-Hill, $23), is the story of Jimmy Winkfield, the last great African-American jockey. Like Hillenbrand’s tale of the equine overachiever of the Depression, Winkfield’s story is so incredible you’ll find yourself wondering why you’ve never heard it before.

A two-time Kentucky Derby winner (1901 and 1902) after just a few years in the saddle, Winkfield nevertheless soon struggled for mounts amid a rising tide of racism in American horse-racing — a situation compounded by his ill-advised decision to cross an influential trainer. So in 1904, he went to Russia to ride under contract for an Armenian oil tycoon.

Winkfield and his fellow racetrack habitués led some 260 thoroughbreds on foot on an amazing three-month, 1,000 mile odyssey to Warsaw to escape the advancing Communists.

Winkfield’s successes in Russia and elsewhere in Europe were legendary — one Russian horseman later wrote that. “in the days before the revolution, the name Winkfield was like Shoemaker, Arcaro and Longden — combined in one.” But his greatest adventures were yet to come. During the Russian Revolution, Winkfield and his fellow racetrack habitués led some 260 thoroughbreds on foot on an amazing three-month, 1,000 mile odyssey to Warsaw to escape the advancing Communists.

Later, after establishing himself as a trainer in France, Winkfield watched the Nazis overrun his  farm in Maisons-Laffitte, an episode that produced a dramatic encounter in which the diminutive jockey grabbed a pitchfork and went after a German soldier who was abusing a horse.

Despite such heroism, Winkfield was no saint. Hotaling, a longtime television producer, pulls no punches in detailing his broken marriage, multiple affairs and distant manner with his children. But the author also does an excellent job of breathing life into the quiet, dignified little man with an enormous will to succeed. And while Hotaling's writing isn’t quite as sparkling as Hillenbrand’s, his command of the material (he also wrote a previous work, “The Great Black Jockeys”) and abundant research make this a book for racing fans, history buffs and any reader who enjoys a compelling real-life story that reads like fiction.  —Mike Brunker

Dead men do tell tales
Can't miss an episode of "CSI" or "Cold Case"? Then you may want to pick up a copy of Emily Craig's "Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes" (Crown, $25). Craig was a medical illustrator who changed careers midlife after her work helped identify a murdered toddler the cops called "Baby Lollipops." From there, she headed off to learn her trade at the infamous Body Farm in Knoxville, where donated bodies are exposed to the elements so the pace of decomposition under various conditions can be tracked. She's now the only full-time state forensic anthropologist in the nation, working for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Craig was a medical illustrator who changed careers midlife after her work helped identify a murdered toddler the cops called ‘Baby Lollipops.’

It may seem obvious from the title, but Craig's book is not for the squeamish. She seems to relish her unusual occupation, but her vivid descriptions of the way maggots breed on a dead body, or how human flesh burns, may turn even the sternest stomach. It's also tough to read about her more famous cases, including her work after the Branch Davidian fire and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Craig had been taught all her life to read the messages left behind in bones and flesh, but even she has to steel herself when dealing with events of such massive loss.

If you can get past the graphic descriptions, Craig's book is really a detective story, and she's a pro. Finding a ring of keys with a body, she soaks them until a two-letter state abbreviation can be read, and with that, knows the keys date from after 1963, when such abbreviations were introduced. In one case, where a body was hidden in a West Virginia coal mine, she must work on her hands and knees in the pitch dark of the mine, but still manages to slide the body, undamaged, into a body bag for later examination. After the Oklahoma City bombing, she is called in to help identify a mysterious leg which some claimed belonged to the "real bomber." Craig proves that the leg belongs not to a mysterious bomber, but to a young mother who was at the Federal Building applying for a Social Security card.

Craig's book is told in first-person, which does personalize her work, but also allows her to jump around in ways that can be hard to follow. She'll start describing a case, then that will inspire her to discuss how she can tell if bones belonged to a male or female, and what race the person belonged to. If you can stay with her as she moves from topic to topic, the end result is worthwhile. If a network gave Craig her own show, I'd definitely tune in.    —G.F.C.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor. Paige Newman is MSNBC.com's Movies Editor. Mike Brunker is MSNBC.com's Horse-racing Editor. Sarah D. Bunting and Linda Holmes are frequent contributors to MSNBC.com.

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