Also of interest…in American originals

Carroll Shelby

by Rinsey Mills (Motorbooks, $35)

This biography of an auto-industry legend needs “a bigger engine,” said Mark Yost in The Wall Street Journal. Shelby, who died last month at 89, lived a colorful life, and British writer Rinsey Mills “makes a start” here at filling in the details. But a 1950s Le Mans champion who later gave the world the Shelby Cobra as well as the look of many American muscle cars deserves a bolder, more energetic portrait. Good books have been written about Shelby’s cars, “but none yet about his life.”

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Jubilee Hitchhiker

by William Hjortsberg (Counterpoint, $42.50)

For decades, sport fishermen have purchased Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America in search of angling tips, only to be hit with “an eccentric and slyly profound” countercultural novel, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. “A prototypical hippie” whose droopy mustache “made him look like Gen. Custer at an acid test,” Brautigan was undone in the 1970s by fame. William Hjortsberg’s biography offers a “definitive” look at “this most offbeat of American writers.”

Here Lies Hugh Glass

by Jon T. Coleman (Hill and Wang, $28)

Like the man himself, the legend of Hugh Glass won’t die, said Stephen J. Lyons in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Severely mauled by a bear and left for dead, the 1820s frontiersman became the subject of lore after he crawled and hiked 200 miles just to kill the men who’d abandoned him. Historian Jon Coleman “masterfully mines what scant life poor Glass left behind” to explore a story that arguably laid the foundations for America’s love affair with rugged individualists.

A Disposition to Be Rich

by Geoffrey C. Ward (Knopf, $29)

Before there was Bernie Madoff, there was 19th-century Ponzi schemer Ferdinand Ward, said Carlo Wolff in CSMonitor.com. The historian Geoffrey Ward paints his great-grandfather as an epic scoundrel who became the most hated man in America after swindling Ulysses S. Grant and causing the collapse of several banks. Decades of research lie behind this book, which showcases the author’s powers of historical synthesis. None of the story is invented, but it “often reads like fiction.”