Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, by Ava Gardner and Peter Evans (Simon & Schuster), thrusts a three-dimensional portrait of the iconic pinup girl into posterity. After agreeing to collaborate with Evans for a memoir project, Gardner quashed the book in embarrassment once she realized just how much of herself she had revealed. Only after Evans passed away was this exclusive account made available. Hard living and the high life are blurred together throughout the narrative and shot through with Gardner’s dazzling beauty and ahead-of-her-time sexuality. Her charismatic voice, captured in Evans’ minimalist prose, is the driving force of the story, and is never overshadowed by juicy details from her numerous rendezvous and champagne-drenched marriages to Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, and Mickey Rooney. Gardner’s arc from Hollywood starlet to sex symbol to public service announcement reminds us of so many others struggling in the public eye.

Black Mistrial, by Mark Geragos and Pat Harris (Gotham Books), attacks the notion that defense attorneys are all complete shysters. Without spending excessive time bemoaning how those who practice their profession are regarded as fat cats bent on keeping criminals on the street, the authors explore the causes of the defense counsel’s fall from grace. Geragos and Harris unpack high-profi le trials such as O.J. Simpson’s to illustrate just where the criminal justice system goes wrong. They also sharpen their claws and take down the biggest perpetuators of the defense-lawyer- as-scumbag narrative. No player in the criminal justice game is safe from the withering tongue lashing the authors deliver. Watch as blowhards like Ann Coulter get sliced and diced, and overzealous prosecutors and tyrannical judges get exposed during cross examination. American justice may not be totally blind. But, like the larger American dream, Mistrial shows that everyone, not just defense attorneys, will do what it takes to get a piece.

Bad Boy, by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone (Crown), deconstructs the experiences that made Eric Fischl the man he is today. The authors mine Fischl’s childhood, his stint at art school in the heyday of free love, and his rise as a talented ingénue in an art world so different from his childhood in the confi nes of suburbia. They fearlessly turn over every leaf: We witness traumas such as his raging alcoholic mother’s apparent suicide and, later, his coke-fueled excesses when he lived as a rock star artist. But we also see how Fischl’s past, his demons, his sexuality, his tempers, and the pulsating zeitgeist become a potent artistic brew that allowed him to create the paintings that would make him famous. Through language that is both accessible and poignant, the authors interrogate Fischl’s oeuvre and uncover the links between personal struggles and the solitude of living in a moralizing society.

One and Only, by Lauren Sandler (Simon & Schuster), blends memoir and expository writing to make the case that, contrary to popular belief, only-children turn out just fi ne. Sandler draws from reams of historical writings, famous quotations from cultural bigwigs, and passé social science research to chronicle in detail the shaky foundations of the only-child-as-misfi t cliché. And after tearing down the supposed common knowledge that only-children are spoiled and poorly adjusted creatures, Sandler meticulously builds the case, stacking bricks of contemporary studies, that only-children are not only just as well adjusted as their multi-sibling counterparts, but in many cases they have a more secure sense of identity. As her writing builds steam, Sandler threads the needle by connecting the demands of motherhood and career to the larger project of feminism and modernity, arguing everything is more manageable, and more rewarding, in a one-child family.