1. Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment by Brad Snyder (W.W. Norton)

In his comprehensive of biography of Frankfurter, Snyder traces the jurist’s life from his birth in Vienna to his youth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Harvard Law School and his appointment to the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt. Snyder, a Georgetown law professor, clearly depicts Frankfurter’s role in the creation of the “liberal establishment” with his support of the New Deal and commitment to racial equity, as evidenced by Brown v. Board of Education, but also notes his determined belief in the importance of judicial restraint.

2. As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy by Alice Sedgwick Wohl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Pop art king Andy Warhol made glamorous Edie Sedgwick his muse, and together they soared to the apex of New York’s downtown cultural scene. Wohl, Edie’s older sister, explores the making of a social icon and her impulse for self-promotion and instant celebrity. Wohl vividly peels back layers of her affluent WASP family, which was bedeviled by mental illness and instability, and depicts a society of half a century ago that feels remarkably like our own.

3. Big Red: A Novel Starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles by Jerome Charyn (Liveright)

In his delicious, wonderful novel, Charyn evokes the Golden Age of Hollywood, but its special glow radiates from its narrator, the “Kid from Kalamazoo,” Rusty Redburn. The Midwestern farm girl leaves college for Tinseltown and gets herself embedded as a secretary for Columbia Pictures to spy on Hayworth and Welles in their home. Redburn comes to grasp Hollywood’s hierarchy of male power and appreciate the roots of Hayworth’s deep insecurities, and Charyn conveys the actress’s demise against the backdrop of movie glamour.

4. The Boys by Katie Hafner (Spiegel & Grau)

Socially awkward, tech geek husband Ethan and can-do, upbeat wife Barb meet at a startup, and she goes on to become a star researcher studying loneliness. When he balks at fatherhood, she brings home a pair of Russian orphans to foster. Hafner has constructed a fictional house of cards with a sharp gust of wind so surprising that even the closest readers will be compelled to ask: “What?” And then reread this wonderfully propulsive, deeply engaging novel, not only to figure out how Hafner did it, but also because she’s such a generous writer that one rushes to spend time with her characters.

5. Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll by Mary Llewellyn McNeil (Whaler)

Carroll’s combination of “achievement and modesty, intelligence and compassion” led McNeil to chronicle the journalist’s life, from leaving Wisconsin for United Press and his first byline in 1928, to a career spanning the London Blitz and the end of the Vietnam War working for The New York Times and the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. McNeil’s rich and lively portrait makes a case for Carroll’s prescience and insight, as in 1955 when he decried “the tyranny of objectivity” and the rise of McCarthyism, in which the media seemed complicit. In her admiring and almost wistful biography, McNeil charts Carroll’s final chapters, bravely fighting for the independence and eloquence of the Journal and Sentinel. “Words were important to Carroll,” she writes, “because he believed they held both power and nobility.”