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1. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity by Neal Gabler (Knopf). Walter Winchell would have sent Rush Limbaugh out for coffee. Doubters among the uninstructed young are invited to read biographer Gabler's superb, richly detailed portrait of the grade-school dropout and vainglorious, third-rate ex-hoofer who, more than any other gossipist, invented the modern celebrity industry. His syndicated "colyums" and brassy, red-baiting broadcasts to "Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea" shaped U.S. lowbrow culture for the 1930s and '40s. When he died unlamented in 1972, Winchell was a lonely and bilious has-been, still clinging to the shabby remnants of his column.
2. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown). The author, a music critic, follows the self-created rock hero as he is borne to platinum paradise on a great celebrity updraft -- this despite Miss Marmann, his eighth-grade music teacher, who told him he couldn't sing worth a lick and gave him a C. Guralnick writes evocatively and sympathetically of Presley's first wild fame -- That's All Right, Mama, his first recording, made him a millionaire -- and tracks the star through the shattering death of his mother Gladys and his entry into the Army. A second volume is set to cover Elvis' long downward trajectory.
3. South Wind Changing by Ngoc Quang Huynh (Graywolf Press). A Vietnamese refugee to the U.S. who was a young student in Saigon when the war ended tells movingly of surviving a Marxist re-education camp and escaping Vietnam by boat. His adventures in the U.S. include earning a bachelor's degree at Bennington College and learning the rhythms of English well enough to write this haunting, oddly pastoral memoir. Even today, concerned that he may never see his parents in Vietnam, he writes, "I sat on the hill, surrounded by trees in their spring blossom, looking over the pond at Bennington College, listening ((to a lecture)) on Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. I felt like one of the characters."
4. Family by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, first visible as a New Yorker humorist, then as an observer in Great Plains, an elegiac portrait of the American heartland, turns reflective and inward in this long, moody rummage in time's attic. He began to gather material about his near and distant family after the death of his parents, searching, he says, for the meaning of life, for "a meaning that would defeat death." The journey -- perhaps more correctly his obsession -- began in 1987. Collecting family papers, dating as far back as 1855, he filed them in two boxes: the dad museum and the mom museum. The result of this painstaking and painful process adds up to a remarkable demonstration of Frazier's ability to write with rare, pure love and to make his feelings meaningful to casual passersby -- his readers.