Also of interest...in American eccentrics

Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

(Viking, $30)

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Reading about the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax “can make a person feel very, very lazy,” said Mark Berman in The Washington Post. From an early age, Lomax combed the American countryside searching for the roots of American folk music, and was an “archivist, producer, anthropologist, singer, political activist, and theorist, to name a few of his roles.” Music scholar John Szwed’s new biography captures the essence of Lomax’s collecting urges, though it “skimps on the kind of personal material that might have humanized his subject.”

Endgame

by Frank Brady

(Crown, $26)

Few people more convincingly possessed both genius and madness than Bobby Fischer, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. In this evenhanded and thus grandly “absorbing” biography, a man who knew the late chess champion as a child elucidates how Fischer’s “volatile intelligence” led both to grandmaster status at age 15 and to anti-Semitic diatribes and various “crackpot” behaviors in later life. You don’t even have to know chess well to find the drama compelling.

Moneymakers

by Ben Tarnoff

(Penguin, $28)

Before the Federal Reserve began regulating the money supply in 1913, “counterfeiters were a roguish personification of the American dream,” said Michael Washburn in The New York Times. In Moneymakers, first-time author Ben Tarnoff weaves together vignettes about clever forgers like David Lewis, a self-fashioned “American Robin Hood” who printed fake bills as a way of attacking financial elites. Tarnoff’s larger point—that counterfeiters of the period served as the country’s “shadow financiers”—is resonant and sound.

The Last Greatest Magician in the World

by Jim Steinmeyer

(Penguin, $27)

Step aside, Harry Houdini, said Kenneth Silverman in The Wall Street Journal. To historian Jim Steinmeyer, it’s forgotten man Howard Thurston who deserves the title of America’s Greatest Magician. Thurston and his signature act, The Wonder Show of the Universe, seem to have “disappeared with the wave of a wand.” But Steinmeyer corrects the sleight with this “fascinating portrait” of the entertainer, from his pickpocketing youth through his intense rivalry with Houdini.