REQUIRED READING

Stand Tall Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring by Dewey Bozella with Tamara Jones (Ecco)

Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens-raised Bozella (he moved around a lot as a kid) never had a song written about him, as Rubin “Hurricane” Carter did, by Bob Dylan. But he, too, was a boxer who was wrongly convicted of murder. Bozella, who got 20 years to life for the murder of a 90-yearold woman in upstate Poughkeepsie, spent 26 years at Sing Sing before he was exonerated. Prison ain’t a vacation, Bozella points out, as he takes the reader behind bars. There, he even shared a cellblock with an inmate who had committed the murder for which Bozella was serving time.

The Man with the Poison Gun A Cold War Spy Story by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books)

Ian Fleming gave us James Bond in “The Man With the Golden Gun.” Now, Plokhy (“The Last Empire”) delivers the true story of Bogdan Stashinsky, the Cold War-era Soviet assassin known for his novel method of spraying an undetectable poison into his victims’ faces to kill them. In 1961, Stashinsky defected to the West, telling all to the Americans. He still had to defend himself in a criminal trial. Read with a martini, shaken not stirred.

You Are Here: NYC Mapping the Soul of the City by Katharine Harmon (Princeton Architectural Press)

If the only NYC map you’re exposed to is a subway map, you’re in for a treat. Here, you’ll find imaginative maps through the years, from The New Yorker’s memorable “New Yorkistan” to a vintage nightclub map of Harlem and one of the Queens Jazz Trail to a “Smellscape” circa 1870 that showed the “locations of odor producing industries.”

Krazy George Herriman, a Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand (Harper)

In the late 19th century, artist George Herriman used the cartoon strip as a platform for social commentary. Now, Tisserand (“Sugarcane Academy”) tells his story. Born in New Orleans to mixed-race Creole parents, Herriman lived his adult life as a white person but often conveyed his true racial identity in his “Krazy Kat” cartoons, which drew fans ranging from Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel to President Woodrow Wilson. A close-up look at the golden age of cartooning through a unique man and his unique cartoon.

Metaphors Be With You An A to Z Dictionary of History’s Greatest Metaphorical Quotations by Dr. Mardy Grothe (Harper)

Joey Adams said, “A bikini is like a barbed-wire fence. It protects the property without obstructing the view,” and Robert Frost would approve. “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor,” the great poet said. Now Grothe rounds up metaphors from the Bible — “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country” — to Voltaire — “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.” The result is a distinctive dictionary of these devices.