Also of interest...in icons of the 1970s

Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong (Simon & Schuster, $26)

This book “makes a persuasive case that The Mary Tyler Moore Show came along at just the right time,” said Glenn C. Altschuler in the Tulsa World. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s “charming” account of the sitcom’s seven-year run smartly highlights that the show’s portrait of a fashionable, single career woman tapped an affluent viewership no other show had courted. Even so, countless women idolized “Mary,” and Armstrong clearly was one of them.

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The Friedkin Connection

by William Friedkin (Harper, $30)

William Friedkin’s look back on his filmmaking career is “filled with memorably salty confrontations,” said Peter Tonguette in The Wall Street Journal. The director’s habit of resisting studio demands occasionally led to triumphs, like The French Connection and The Exorcist. Yet his attempts to play film artiste come off as misguided. “It cannot be a coincidence that this memoir is at its most engrossing when describing the solid, unpretentious entertainments its author once made so well.”

Flip

by Kevin Cook (Viking, $27)

The Flip Wilson Show ran only four years, but its host was “one of the great comic voices of the 20th century,” said Robert Lloyd in the Los Angeles Times. Though this overdue biography is short on analysis, it “flows easily” as it follows Wilson’s rise from a childhood in foster homes to the pinnacle of prime-time television. The comic’s easygoing stage persona belied a complicated private life, but he was essentially able to walk away at 40 on his own terms into a long, secure semi-retirement.

I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell (Ecco, $26)

Richard Hell is a Zelig-like character in the history of New York punk, said Eric Allen Been in The Boston Globe. A founding member of the band Television and thus of the entire CBGB scene, the Kentucky native claims to have pioneered the spiked hair and safety-pin look that circled the globe almost before he recorded his 1977 anthem, “Blank Generation.” This “valuable” book brims with boasts and put-downs, but also offers “clear-eyed” self-examination from a near-burnout.