Benjamin Franklin
by Edmund S. Morgan
Yale University Press
$24.95/$19.96

"Morgan (Sterling Professor of History, emeritus, Yale), the award-winning author of numerous books, including Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, here offers the best short biography of Franklin ever written. He is ideally suited to the task. For many years, he has chaired the administrative board that oversees the ongoing work on The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale Univ., 36 volumes to date), making this the first biography whose author can claim to have read virtually everything ever written by or to Franklin. Without denying Franklin's flaws, Morgan expresses affection and admiration for his subject throughout. He argues forcefully that Franklin's chief goal was to live a "useful" life, showing that Franklin held public service above his lucrative career as a printer and the fame he achieved as a scientist....Highly recommended." -Library Journal

Cicero: The Life and Times of the Rome's Greatest Politician
by Anthony Everitt
Random House
$25.95/$20.76

Brilliant, voluble, cranky, a genius of political manipulation but also a true patriot and idealist, Cicero was Rome's most feared politician, one of the greatest lawyers and statesmen of all times. Machiavelli, Queen Elizabeth, John Adams and Winston Churchill all studied his example. No man has loomed larger in the political history of mankind. In this dynamic and engaging biography, Anthony Everitt plunges us into the fascinating, scandal-ridden world of ancient Rome in its most glorious heyday.

Eminent Bostonians
by Thomas H. O'Connor
Harvard University Press
$26.95/$21.56

The history of Boston is inseparable from the life stories of its people-from the Puritans and Native Americans of the seventeenth century to the civic leaders and celebrities of today. In Eminent Bostonians, Thomas H. O'Connor, the preeminent historian of Boston, offers a personal selection of entertaining and enlightening brief lives of notable residents of the city. Eminent Bostonians includes some 130 figures of local and national significance from the arts, literature, religion, politics, science and medicine, business, education, and sports. Some would be on every list of prominent Bostonians, and some will come as a genuine surprise. From Abigail Adams to Leonard P. Zakim, here is a gallery of Brahmins and immigrants, workers and scholars, reformers and reactionaries, dreamers and schemers.

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
by Brenda Maddox
HarperCollins
$29.95/$23.96

When Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1962, there was virtually no mention of the invaluable contribution to the discovery made by Rosalind Franklin. In Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, award-winning biographer Brenda Maddox tells the real story of the life and work of this key scientist, misunderstood and marginalized by her fellow scientists and never given due credit for the crucial role she played in the discovery of DNA's structure. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at age 37, but not before she made a number of key discoveries and contributions to our understanding of life on earth. Brenda Maddox has been given unique access to Franklin's personal correspondence and has interviewed all the principal scientists involved, including Crick, Watson and Wilkins. What emerges in this biography is the portrait of a remarkably single-minded, forthright and tempestuous young woman who was all but airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
by Oliver Sacks
Vintage/Random House, pb
$14.00/$11.20

In this wonderful memoir, bestselling author Oliver Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his childhood in wartime England. There was the large, scientifically minded family in which his very early fascination with meals was nurtured - particularly by "Uncle Tungsten." There were his four years at the boarding school where he was sent at the outbreak of World War II to escape the bombings, and where, though he suffered extreme deprivation and cruelty, one can see the first gleam of his interest in the intellectual pursuits that would begin to shape him. And there was his return to London, an emotionally bereft 10-year-old who found solace in the secret garden of his passion for learning - about the nature of metals, gases and chemicals; about the hidden order of things outside himself.

Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
collected and edited by Carla Kaplan
foreword by Robert Hemenway
Doubleday/Random House
$40.00/$32.00

Arguably one of the most significant figures in the African American literary tradition of the 20th century, Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960) has only recently been acknowledged for her superb achievements. The author of four novels, including the highly acclaimed Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), plus an autobiography, numerous essays, and two books on black folklore, she became the first black student to graduate from Barnard College and later studied anthropology at Columbia. A principal in the Harlem Renaissance, she shared fame with her contemporaries, including Langston Hughes and Dorothy West. But recognition was limited; Hurston had to endure a string of menial jobs and died penniless and obscure. This collection of over 500 letters, chronologically arranged and carefully edited and annotated by noted Hurston scholar Kaplan, reveals a gifted yet complex personality at once humorous, cynical, and analytical. These letters to friends, editors, fellow writers, and others trace a life of humble beginnings, turmoil, and frustrations.