Also of interest ... in screen celebrities

How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

(Houghton Mifflin, $28)

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Forget Elizabeth Taylor’s Oscars, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Author William Mann wants us to believe that the role Taylor “truly mastered” was that of a front-page celebrity. Focusing on his subject’s glory years, Mann’s “eminently yummy entry” in the Taylor dossier “is pretty much everything you’d want in a Hollywood biography,” though “not a whole lot more.” The serially divorced beauty comes across as “remarkably” uncomplicated—a woman who simply wanted to live well.

I Am the New Black

by Tracy Morgan

(Spiegel & Grau, $25)

“Live from New York, it’s … the worst childhood ever,” said Mandy Stadtmiller in the New York Post. Comedian Tracy Morgan has lots of painful memories to share, from the early death of his heroin-addicted father to his bumbling bid to make it as a teenage crack dealer. “But as dark as many of the revelations are,” Morgan’s first book “reads exactly the way” the eccentric Morgan talks. It’s full of humor, unbridled shout-outs to favorite colleagues, and, of course, “predictably unpredictable philosophizing and aphorizing.”

American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

(Harmony, $26)

Clint Eastwood is a “fair director,” a “rather ungenerous actor,” and far from the nicest guy in the world, said David Thomson in the San Francisco Chronicle. There’s not much “new or surprising” in Marc Eliot’s biography; two similar volumes were published a decade ago, and Eastwood hasn’t changed much. But Eliot does have one advantage: In recent years, Eastwood’s ability to go it alone when getting a story told on screen has distinguished him as “one of the greatest producers we’ve ever had.”

American on Purpose

by Craig Ferguson

(Harper, $26)

The Scottish-born host of CBS’s The Late Late Show seems allergic to cheap laughs, said Andy Borowitz in The New York Times. Establishing in this memoir the same kind of intimacy he does on TV, Craig Ferguson recounts his life “without letting jokes get in the way.” A bleak youth near Glasgow and a long bout with alcoholism were redeemed when Ferguson headed into rehab and then to the country he had for years admired from afar. Sincerity in a comedian is a form of courage. That’s what makes Ferguson so rare.