Also of interest... in group portraits

Three-Ring Circus

(HMH, $ 30)

The Los Angeles Lakers team that won three titles from 2000 to 2002 was not a happy family, said Sean Gregory in Time.com. In this “eminently readable” book, the young Kobe Bryant comes across as “mean, aloof, and impossible to coach,” a teammate to be put up with by coach Phil Jackson and fellow star Shaquille O’Neal. Author Jeff Pearlman acknowledges that Bryant matured into a different man, but the veteran sportswriter’s “unflinchingly honest” book tells a valuable part of the Kobe story.

The Zealot and the Emancipator

(Doubleday, $ 30)

John Brown and Abraham Lincoln are a study in contrasts, said Sean Wilentz in The New York Times. Both men sought slavery’s end, and in a dual portrait that combines “expert storytelling with thoughtful interpretation,” historian H.W. Brands shows how the radical floundered and the pragmatist prevailed. Rejecting portrayals of Lincoln as a reluctant abolitionist, Brands presents him strategically building an antislavery coalition over many years. Surprisingly, Brown’s defeat helped him finish the job.

The Daughters of Yalta

Historian Catherine Grace Katz “has uncovered a fascinating backstory to the Yalta summit,” said Juliet Nicholson in Spectator.co.uk. In 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met at a resort on the frigid Crimean Peninsula, the adult daughters of Roosevelt, Churchill, and U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman counseled their fathers and chronicled the negotiations’ unfolding drama. Katz’s eye for detail and the daughters’ letters “humanize Yalta as never before.”

150 Glimpses of the Beatles

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $ 30)

Devoted Beatles fans won’t find much that’s new in Craig Brown’s “riotous, hilarious” new history of the band, said Charles Arrowsmith in

The Washington Post. But Brown is brilliant at finding fresh angles, building a mosaic from 150 comic vignettes, excerpts, lists, and quotations that remind us of the story’s unlikelihood. Funny as the book often is, it is also poignant, thanks to Brown’s intuition for “both the quiet and the noisy devastations wrought by ambition, fame, personal tragedy, and time.”