BIOGRAPHY

Arthur Ashe: A Life, by Raymond Arsenault (Simon & Schuster; 767 pages; $37.50). Twenty-five years after Ashe’s death, Arsenault has written a thoroughly captivating biography of the tennis player who became engaged in the civil rights movement, the quest to end apartheid in South Africa, AIDS-related activism and many other causes.

— Joel Drucker

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster; 888 pages; $37.50). Blight’s exquisitely researched and incisively argued book is a richly detailed intellectual biography, full of new sources and interpretations that add clarity, meaning and verve to Douglass’ personal story.

— John David Smith

Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, by Lillian Faderman (Yale University Press/Jewish Lives; 286 pages; $25). In her stirring biography of the pioneering political leader and beloved global icon, Faderman paints a multifaceted portrait of a complicated man. Milk was a famously exuberant, theatrical figure, but Faderman elicits the drama of his life with understatement.

— John McMurtrie

Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, by Michelle Dean (Grove; 362 pages; $26). Dean’s exceptional book moves beyond individual biographies of writers — among them Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker and Rebecca West — to show what the whole of their experiences taken together mean.

— Meg Waite Clayton