“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot, but literary types will find publishers have done their best to disprove the modernist anglophile. From highbrow fiction to high-profile memoir to high-hopes self-help, this spring’s books offer bibliophiles a delightful fix.

How Can You Defend Those People?, by Mickey Sherman (Lyons Press). It’s a good question, and one that Sherman answers as you’d expect a good defense attorney would: by telling a familiar story from a fresh angle. A gifted performer and a gutsy tactician, Sherman illuminates the mind of the criminal defense attorney, revealing the machinations that make our legal system the most mystified arena of the public sphere. Sherman’s is an intimate memoir with metanarrational aspirations, and altogether a revelatory read. With insights on jury selection and tips on trial by media, Sherman fearlessly answers the questions of the voyeur and the moralizer with forthrightness and a flair for the dramatic. Sherman’s a character (literally—James Patterson writes him into books and Barry Levinson has given him an appearance in film), and it’s clear why he’s picking up the Dershowitz torch: the same amiable personality, natural intelligence, and masterful equivocation are as charming here as they are in the courtroom, where they’ve won him impossible juries, media attention, and innumerable detractors. Even noble legal spieler Dominick Dunne, well-known for his disdain of the defenders of the guilty (his feud with the late Johnnie Cochran over his defense of O.J. Simpson ended only shortly before Cochran’s death), blurbs for Sherman: “Though I’ll never agree with him, I must admit I really enjoyed his book.” A sentiment that may be shared by many a reader. After witnessing the Duke lacrosse debacle and the skewering of Ted Maher by the Monaco authorities, we recognize more than ever that the legal world needs advocates like Sherman–zealous and steady acolytes of the ostensibly guilty—to balance the scales of justice.

No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey, by Scott Huler (Crown). When NPR contributor and noted author Scott Huler pledged publicly that he would never read the blind bard’s most obligatory of epics, he was tempting the humor of the divine. A writer’s pride, like a warrior’s hubris, precedes a fall, and the fate of each is the plaything of the gods. So with a tattered copy of the timeworn tale in tote, Huler sets off, bouncing from kayak to ocean cruiser, from Africa to Asia, and from temptation to epiphany, to retrace the storied wanderings of the Homeric hero Odysseus. Huler’s narrative is equal parts travelogue, introduction to Epic Poetry and meditation on middle age. The author is as competent a guide through the unfamiliar terrain of an ancient literature as he is through the geography of the Mediterranean. Reading poetry as cartography turns out to be a joyous and perilous indulgence, resulting in a memoir full of glorious landscapes, serendipitous friendships, and its fair share of fist-shaking at the sky. If Huler at times waxes didactic, he is to be forgiven, as his prose, as Robert Frost suggested all good writing should, amalgamates delight and wisdom. “Home is always home,” Huler writes in a characteristic moment, “and one lifetime is enough.” Perhaps his next project will trace the poetic steps of Dante’s descent—it would be a hot read, but I’d follow him there, and back.

Virtue, Valor and Vanity: The Founding Fathers and the Pursuit of Fame, by Eric Burns (Arcade). As the cult of celebrity consumes a presidential primary season marked by irrational mania and interminable debate, Burns reminds us that the public battle over the spoils of power is not simply a product of the media age. Bringing to life a familiar cast of historical characters—Adams, Franklin, Madison, Hancock—the Emmy winning host of Fox News Watch ponders how political fame and civic benefaction may be two sides of the same coin. Burns, who employs an historian’s eye for detail and significance and a gossip columnist’s eye for the juicy and explosive (as concerned as John Adams may have been with the birth of a country, he was equally as consumed by the number of women Ben Franklin bedded in Paris), is interested in the human drive at the core of the American experiment, and he proves again and again that private vices inform public virtues. The ambition, vanity, and jealously of these mythic men joined them in competition and camaraderie—an alchemy that brought forth a nation conceived by their avidity, charisma, and gravitas. Burns’s book is a humanizing project, and a call for us to now praise famous men—though if we do not, they will not hesitate to do it for us. “Each man must be his own trumpeter,” wrote John Adams. As today’s politicians battle over the spoils of power, they would do well to cast a backward glance to the days when fame was more a means than end, its seekers more visionary than opportunist.

QUICK PICKS:
If your New Year’s resolutions have gone the way of Giuliani’s, pick up James Arthur Ray’s Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want (Hyperion), a pragmatic, holistic guide to happiness. But if your best-laid plans have blossomed like Senator McCain’s, Deborah Norville’s Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You (Thomas Nelson) is a reminder that you didn’t get there by yourself (read: Mom’s Day nears!). Borzoi Reader fans will gratefully grab the long-awaited, much-anticipated release of Pulitzer prosaist Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf). Following a year in which we witnessed the passing of many literary luminaries (Norman Mailer, David Halberstam, Madeleine L’Engle), Penguin releases Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of unpublished writings from dark humorist Kurt Vonnegut—a few select fragments to shore against our ruin.