An 'Uncensored' look at 'The Simpsons'
When author John Ortved began researching his unauthorized oral history of “The Simpsons,” television’s longest-running prime time comedy that just entered its 21st season, co-executive producer James L. Brooks reportedly asked current and former staffers to clam up. According to Ortved, who lives in Toronto and New York, Brooks did so by sending a letter “specifically asking them not to speak to me.”

Orson Welles' daughter recalls father in memoir
It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to be the eldest daughter of film legend Orson Welles, a man so wrapped up in his cinematic vision, and raising money for that vision, that to have him in your life meant playing by his rules.

Chris Welles Feder unravels the experience in her subtly captivating memoir, In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles.

Review: 'Googled: The End of the World as We Know It' by Ken Auletta
In Googled, New Yorker reporter Ken Auletta explores media old and new, arguing that something sinister is afoot in the rise of the search engine king. Google, he asserts, is taking over the world, and that scares him.

Review: 'The Lacuna' by Barbara Kingsolver
Harrison William Shepherd is the main character in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, but Frida Kahlo is the star. And Kahlo wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Review: 'Invisible' by Paul Auster
Relatively early in Paul Auster’s new novel, one of its narrators says that “any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value.” True enough, Invisible is a book whose value is a function of its riskiness.

Review: 'Sugarless' by James Magruder
“Different is the kiss of death in high school,” Broadway playwright and theater teacher James Magruder writes in his first novel, Sugarless, a coming of age and coming-out novel set in the conservative Christian suburb of Wheaton in 1976.

Review: 'Fromms: How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis'
On the morning of May 17, 1943, the personal household possessions of Julius Fromm, a deported Jewish entrepreneur who had built a successful business in Germany, were among those being auctioned off in Berlin. On that day, nearly 165 bidders from all social classes “cheerfully and cheaply enhanced their households to the detriment of exiled, deported and often already murdered Jews,” according to Gotz Aly and Michael Sontheimer in Fromms: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis.

Review: 'Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson' by Wil Haygood
The boxer Sugar Ray Robinson was a man of glittering skill and deep complexity. So complex, in fact, that several writers — including Robinson himself — have tried and failed to render a full portrait. Until now. Wil Haygood’s new biography of Robinson, Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, is about as fine a book about a boxer as you will find

Best Sellers
The late comedian George Carlin tells never-before-told stories of his own life in Last Words, which squeaks onto the nonfiction list at No. 10 this week. Carlin’s friend and author Tony Hendra recorded 15 years worth of conversations to put together the book that chronicles Carlin’s life from birth to his final years.

Literary listings
EVENT OF THE WEEK:   Former Vice President Al Gore will sign copies of Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, noon Tuesday at Borders, 150 N. State.