“Everybody is a star,” Sly Stone once sang—but few have shined as bright and hot as he did. The legendary funkster shot to fame in the late 1960s with an uplifting message and his racially mixed band, the Family Stone. Then came mounting pressure, creeping insecurity, drug addiction, and run-ins with the law. Questlove directs this sonically charged dive into Sly’s rise and retreat into reclusion. Thursday, Feb. 13, Hulu.

by Bill Gates

“Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world,” said Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate,” the co-founder of Microsoft and former richest man in the world has since grown up enough that he’s become “a beloved elder statesman.” In his first memoir, you won’t hear about the aggressive business tactics that made Gates controversial or the global-minded philanthropic efforts he has devoted a third of his life to. It covers only his first 23 years, from his birth in 1955 into a happy family through the creation of Microsoft and the startup’s agreement to supply a version of its Basic programming language to Apple Computer. Young Bill was on his way. “This volume, still, is more than just a geek’s inventory of early achievements. There is a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout.” 

“As he paints it, Gates’ Seattle childhood hit all the notes of a ’50s sitcom,” said Steven Levy in Wired. “But the family dynamic was fraught, often because of Gates’ personality quirks”—namely, his youthful arrogance and mulishness. His supportive parents did get him into a top private school, though, which gained him unlikely access at age 13 to a computer as well as to coding—the machine’s magical language. “This is Spider-Man getting bitten by the spider, the Incredible Hulk getting exposed to radiation,” said Tom Whipple in The Times (U.K.). If you’ve encountered Gates’ life story before, you know that his friend, future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was right there with young Bill as he caught the coding bug. Soon, Gates and his pioneering pals will be writing code to automate the school’s class schedule, then selling a payroll program to local businesses. But because this planned first volume in a trilogy closes when the company itself is very young, Source Code feels like a book best left to “the real Gates aficionados.” 

“Inevitably, much of Source Code reads like self-justification,” said Richard Waters in the Financial Times. Gates bullied Allen into accepting a smaller ownership share? Well, he was doing more of the work. He abused his access to Harvard’s computer lab? Hey—he was just following the anything-goes hippie ethic of the 1970s. Still, Gates does make his early story his own, sharing his embarrassment about some of his behavior even as he mentions that if he were coming of age today, he probably would be diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. And because this book delivers an account of his rise that’s “replete with cliff-hanger moments and revealing new details,” it at least bodes well for Volume 2.

The swinging ’60s singer who beat addiction

Marianne Faithfull transformed hard living into hard-won redemption. The Londoner found fame at 17, after Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham met her at a party and chose her to record the Mick Jagger–Keith Richards song “As Tears Go By.” As Jagger’s eventual girlfriend—and a muse who inspired songs such as “Wild Horses”—she became an icon of Swinging ’60s London. She co-wrote the Stones’ druggy “Sister Morphine” and acted in films, including the eroticized 1968 drama The Girl on a Motorcycle. But her partying years gave way to a breakdown, a suicide attempt, heroin addiction, and homelessness. She re-emerged with the acclaimed 1979 album Broken English, which paved the way for a third act, as a husky-voiced chanteuse singing of loss and resilience. “I don’t know how else to be but raw and honest,” she said in 2014. “Even if I try to, I can’t stop myself from saying what I think.” 

Born Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull, her heritage was “one of intrigue, decadence, and fallen empires,” said the Associated Press. Her father was a former British spy, her mother a bar- oness descended from Austro-Hungarian aristocrats. As a child she spent time in both a convent school and a “sex-obsessed commune,” and by her teen years she was emulating Joan Baez and singing in folk clubs. Discovered by Oldham, who hadn’t heard her sing a note, she nailed “As Tears Go By” in two takes, and the song quickly soared to Britain’s top 10. That made her “a breakout star,” said Rolling Stone, and when she took up romantically with Jagger two years later, her “It girl status” was cemented. She made headlines when, during a drug raid on Richards’ country house, she was arrested wearing only a fur rug. But then she began to spiral, suffering a miscarriage and a pill-fueled breakdown; soon she’d “disappeared from the spotlight in a haze of heroin addiction.” 

Substance abuse had roughened and deepened her once wispy voice by the time she returned with Broken English, said The New York Times. A raw record of “unforeseen character and depth,” the platinum-seller turned Faithfull into “a symbol of survival and transformation.” In the following decades, she continued to tour and record despite mounting health problems, and wrote a pair of candid memoirs of her turbulent life. “Never apologize, never explain—didn’t we always say that?” she wrote in 1994’s Faithfull. “Well, I haven’t and I don’t.”