Also of interest...praise for famous women

Marlene

by Charlotte Chandler

(Simon & Schuster, $26)

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“Reading a biography by Charlotte Chandler is like going to a séance,” said Joseph McBride in the San Francisco Chronicle. As she’s done previously with Groucho Marx and Joan Crawford, Chandler here summons the spirit of Marlene Dietrich, as well as the ghosts of people who knew and loved her. “Pages upon pages” of ostensible interview transcripts can make it seem as if the late star is still with us. As at a séance, though, sometimes the revelations seem “too good to be true.”

No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

(Knopf, $28)

“The life and loves of the great French chanteuse Édith Piaf are a biographer’s dream,” said Susan Miron in The Miami Herald. Though she’s the 29th author to take the lure, Carolyn Burke succeeds in creating a “vivid portrait.” Piaf’s life has “engendered many legends and half-truths,” and Burke is especially good at sorting out the truth. The singer’s claim that her mother gave birth to her on the street, for instance, is put to rest with the discovery of a hospital birth certificate.

Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

(Harper, $27)

From the 1920s into the ’40s, Ethel Waters was “the most famous black woman in America,” said Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times. This new biography reveals Waters as a polymath who “belied stereotypes,” found fame recording songs like “Stormy Weather,” and later achieved acclaim as an actress. Though little known today, Waters blazed a new path into the mainstream—“as a sexy, self-confident diva who explored the full range of African-American experience without apology.”

Sempre Susan

by Sigrid Nunez

(Atlas & Co., $20)

Disclosing “the private lives of public intellectuals” can be a seedy business, said Alice Gregory in The Boston Globe. But Sigrid Nunez, who was the girlfriend of Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, performs the task “elegantly” in this new memoir. Sontag comes off as “great, but flawed,” possessed of bottomless curiosity and intellect but mercurial in her affections. In the end, Nunez’s affectionate, evenhanded appraisal “humanizes one of the most intimidating figures” of late-20th-century culture.