Fact is more fantastic than fiction this month, as illustrated by the intrepid rise, fall, and rise of former Sotheby's chairman A. Alfred Taubman in his memoir Threshold Resistance: The Extraordinary Career of a Luxury Retailing Pioneer (Collins). "I don't think the full impact of what I was facing hit me until the husky female clerk entered the courtroom and announced, 'The United States of America vs. A. Alfred Taubman,'" he writes. From his humble beginning in Depression-era Detroit to his mastery of the ultra-competitive retail arena, Taubman chronicles the amassing of a fortune that led to his ultimate acquisition of Sotheby's-and the price-fixing scandal that resulted in a one-year prison sentence.

Feuding financial lions are at the center of William D. Cohan's The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co., the World's Most Elite and Enigmatic Investment Bank (Doubleday). Cohan delves beneath the Lazard Freres mystique to lay bare the explosive battles between superstar investment bankers Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner.

High Rise Low Down (Barricade Books), by Denise LeFrak Caliccio, Kathryn Livingston, and Eunice David, features not the successes and failures of business luminaries, but instead the ins and outs of their ultra-exclusive Manhattan domiciles. This dishy delight spotlights the razor-sharp screening process of the most coveted addresses, a giddy peek behind the curtain for aspiring residents.

Gotham itself is under scrutiny in Jerilou and Kinglsey Hammet's The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town? (Princeton Architectural Press), a provocative speculation on the possible demise of New York City's creative and cultural edge. This collection of essays, with photographs by Martha Cooper, is as much a loving ode to the greatness of old New York as it is a rallying cry to keep Manhattan one step ahead of the crowd.

Kirk Douglas celebrates 90 years in Let's Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving, and Learning (Wiley), reflecting on life, love, and six storied decades in film. On love: "I found that when I was young, I was incapable of deep love because so much of me was wound up with myself. Romance begins at eighty." The screen legend ruminates on the highs and lows of Hollywood, soul-searches after the death of his son, Eric, and sounds off on today's lightning rods, from Mel Gibson to Jimmy Carter to the war in Iraq.

A real-life hero more daring than any movie character is revealed in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucinda Franks's My Father's Secret War (Miramax), in which she reconnects with her estranged father to learn that the distant man she has known as Dad once posed as a Nazi guard during the beginning of the Allied invasion of Germany, slipping behind enemy lines to sabotage operations and eventually becoming one of the first to bear witness to concentration-camp atrocities.

World War II also figures into the legacy of famed French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism now celebrated in Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook (Thames & Hudson) by Ute Eskildsen and Michel Frizot. Bresson was captured and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp for three years, and thus presumed dead by the Museum of Modern Art as it prepared a memorial exhibition. In a joyful twist of fate, Bresson ultimately collaborated on the exhibition, which took place in 1947-four years after his escape.

In what should be required reading for every woman, Leslie Bennetts tackles the economic and psychological repercussions of abandoning a career for full-time motherhood in The Feminine Mistake (Hyperion). Bennett, a longtime Vanity Fair scribe, is passionate and persuasive in her plea for women to think twice about walking away from jobs only to put their (and their children's!) economic fate solely in the hands of someone else.

Fate is in the balance for the heroine of Lionel Shriver's new novel, The Post-Birthday World (HarperCollins), in which a single kiss has the power to set in motion two very different lives. The universal question "What would my life be like if…" is tantalizingly explored in the latest novel by the award-winning Shriver, who says of her latest gem, "This is a novel about trade-offs-since in my experience when you gain in one area by switching lovers, you lose in another."

True-life greatness is once again the inspiration for Girl With a Pearl Earring author Tracy Chevalier's Burning Bright (Penguin Group), in which she explores a fictional world of painter William Blake, an artist who imagined earth as the meeting point between heaven and hell.

A beauty with brains meets the ultimate evil in Jose Carlos Samoza's Zig Zag (Rayo), a smart, sexy thriller in which an elite group of scientists is sequestered on a remote island to explore the most important scientific discovery since the Theory of Relativity. When something goes horribly wrong, the group disbands-never to speak of the project again. Now, ten years later, a gorgeous young physics professor learns that each member of her former team is being brutally murdered one by one, and has to face her (literal) demons by returning to the island where it all began.

And it's a superstar debut for model Paulina Porizkova and her first novel, A Model Summer (Hyperion), an insider's look at the high-stakes world of high fashion. This glittering coming-of-age tale features a 15-year-old stunner named Jirina who finds herself swept into an unexpected modeling career, where she navigates the tricky terrain of her own burgeoning beauty, a catty industry, and first love.