Unsure what new book to read next? Sit back: We read the book reviews in case you missed them. Below are the collected reviews of two new books being discussed in leading journals and magazines. Today we look at "Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbara Streisand" by William J. Mann and "The Scientists: A Family Romance" by Marco Roth.

"Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand" by William J. Mann

Known for his biographies of Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, William J. Mann turns his attention to a young Barbra Streisand, focusing on the singer’s hard-fought fame between 1960 and 1964. The subject of several previous biographies, Streisand is, in this latest dissection of her life, depicted through a prism of class and bald-faced religious intolerance, with much commentary given to her shirking of the ugly duckling label. In the most critical review of Mann’s biography to date, The New York Times’ James Gavin gives Mann credit for vividly evoking “the atmosphere of Streisand’s New York,” but notes that his prose can sometimes be purple when trying to “freshen up the old stories” and more effusive than analytical when discussing Streisand’s art. Writing for slantmagazine.com, Mark Griffin is less bothered by Mann’s writing, calling the book, “meticulously researched and genuinely engrossing” and notes that it “offers one of the most sympathetic portraits of Streisand to emerge from the stockpile of books that have been written about the “Greatest Star.” Kirkus Reviews is similarly open in its praise of “Hello, Gorgeous” arguing that it is “surprisingly suspenseful and masterfully paced” with Mann shining “the spotlight on an awkward yet ambitious teenage girl who aspired to play grand theatrical roles.”

"The Scientists: A Family Romance" by Marco Roth

The only child of a doctor and a classical musician, n+1 cofounder Marco Roth was a precocious child who absorbed much of the literary and social mores of his privileged New York parents. Roth’s remembrances of his cozy upbringing are later challenged when he is faced with conflicting narratives of how his father contracted the AIDS virus in the early 1980s (he died in 1993 when Roth was just fourteen), the reflection on which is the heart of “The Scientists.” Quoting the French novelist Henry de Montherlant as saying, “happiness writes white,” Adam Kirsch in his review in The New Republic praises Roth’s memoir as “a beautifully intelligent and moving testimony to the truth of this sad maxim” before detailing the ways in which Roth’s investigation of his family’s secrets reveals him to be in his own way a scientist, concluding that  “few people manage to view themselves with the candor and subtlety that Roth summons in The Scientists.” Picking up on the privilege and academic ardor that infuses the memoir, Dylan Hicks writing in Minnesota’s The Star Tribune calls it “graceful” and says that Roth “has managed to write a frankly ivory-towerish book that all the same feels wisely grounded.” In an early, starred review that succinctly summarizes Roth’s path to examining the constructs of his tiny family, Publishers Weekly calls the work “a ferocious literary exercise in rage, despair, and artistic self-invention.”