BIOGRAPHY

David Bowie: A Life, by Dylan Jones (Crown Archetype; 522 pages; $28). How could an oral history of David Bowie not be enthralling? In these pages, more than 180 people speak their minds about the late musician and his many guises. A few of them: Peter Frampton (a childhood friend), musical collaborators Brian Eno and Nile Rodgers, and, not surprisingly, a few lovers.

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen (Riverhead; 515 pages; $28). Gessen has been opening Westerners’ eyes to Russia in a host of books, and her latest gives us a textured portrait of four people who grew up in the USSR and are now living, she writes about Vladimir Putin, “under a sort of dictatorship in exchange for stability.”

Grant, by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press; 1,074 pages; $40). The author of “Alexander Hamilton” (adapted into a musical you might have heard about), gives us a sympathetic portrait of the 18th president, a leader who, despite his faults, fought on behalf of black Americans.

Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster; 599 pages; $35). The biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin sizes up the life of the quintessential polymath. “Leonardo was a genius,” Isaacson writes, “but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.”

Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, by Joe Hagan (Knopf; 547 pages; $29.95). Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, recently made headlines by cutting ties with Hagan, his biographer. Which shows just how thorough Hagan was in writing about his subject, warts and all.