HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

This is your life!

Obsessed with measuring your self-worth by age? Gird your loins for Eric Hanson's A Book of Ages (Crown). To wit: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple at 21, and Edison dreamed up the lightbulb at 32. Take heart, though— Grandma Moses didn't show her first painting until 78.

Dean Haspiel and Jonathan Ames illustrate the life of Jonathan A., heretofore known as The Alcoholic (Vertigo), a bracing shot of his crack-up, chased with humor. A behemoth in the rock 'n' roll industry, Danny Goldberg, former P.R. man for Zeppelin, manager of Nirvana, and record-company impresario, spins a life of Bumping into Geniuses (Gotham). Philip Smith grows up mystical in Walking Through Walls (Atria). Brenda Wineapple's White Heat (Knopf) reveals the epistolary "romance" between the eremitic Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, \ gunrunner and radical abolitionist turned literary adviser. Jennet Conant outs The Irregulars (Simon & Schuster), W.W. II-era British spies—among them former R.A.F. pilot Roald Dahl—who, armed with dastardly charm, infiltrated the highest ranks of the American political world.

Jonathan Fast depicts the American phenomenon of school shootings as acts of Ceremonial Violence (Overlook). New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins's The Forever War (Knopf), brutally intimate, compassionate, often poetic accounts of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, is destined to become a classic.

Emma Gilbey Keller profiles seven women who pulled off The Comeback (Bloomsbury), ditching their nine-to-five careers for the 24-7 job of mom and then, years later, hopping back onto the hamster wheel. Peter Galbraith predicts the Unintended Consequences (Simon & Schuster) of the Iraq war, and the magnitude of the mess our next prez will inherit. In Left in Dark Times (Random House), BernardHenri Levy confronts the "new barbarism." The poems in Billy Collins's killingly clever Ballistics (Random House) investigate the mysteries of human nature. Philip Roth expresses his Indignation (Houghton Mifflin). Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum enchants in Ms. Hempel Chronicles (Harcourt). Alice Schroeder's bio, The Snowball (Bantam), cashes in on Warren Buffett. Phaidon pays homage to two giants, Le Corbusier le Grand and The American House. Nicholas Coleridge's novel stars a merciless ty-( coon who delights in manipulating his Godchildren (St. Martin's). Alain Stella savors the world's most Distinctive Vintages (Flammarion). Oh, life is sweet.

QUICK TAKES

Designer Christian Liaigre and Thomas Luntz decorate Liaigre (Flammarion). Photographer Bob Davidoff and Linda Corley compile The Kennedy Family Album (Running Press). Leah Bendavid-Val edits National Geographic: The Photographs (National Geographic). Abrams celebrates Yves Saint Laurent: Style.Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell assemble The Black List (Atria). Ernie Colon and Sid Jacobson survey America After 9/11 (Hill and Wang). Daryl Easlea backs up The Story of the Supremes (Victoria & Albert Museum).