If you were to accuse Jack Hitt of being an amateur, he might thank you. While the word has a pejorative ring to many, Hitt points out that in its truest form (from the root amo, amas, or amat) it has to do with being “in love with one true thing.” And if it’s prestige that the reader needs to justify the embrace of the amateur, how’s Benjamin Franklin as the first “garage tinkerer” for a start?

In the new paperback release of his book Bunch of Amateurs, Hitt covers an array of curious eccentrics of varying degrees of expertise who do things outside the restrictive boundaries of professionalism. Among other notable dabblers, we get self-styled biologists, obsessed birders, robot mechanics, and gungywampers (a very specific kind of archaeologist).

Hitt writes that “in European popular culture, amateurism is practically feared,” while in the United States, we admire a certain kind of risk-taker. In Europe, a renegade scientist is “mad.” In the U.S., he’s “absent-minded.” Our labcoat loonies don’t make monsters, he explains. They make flubber -- or sometimes, telescopes. Hitt wants us to see past our brand of condescending tolerance and see that there’s real value in the subcultures of D.I.Y. scientists and self-taught theorists.

In a chapter that illustrates how someone determined to do it himself can command some respect, Hitt brings us the case of John Dobson, a far out astronomer who made a telescope out of cheap glass, a cardboard tube, and a pair of Salvation Army binoculars. In the fifty years since then, Hitt writes, Dobson has “inspired generations of uncredentialed enthusiasts to prowl the heavens.” At the time of Dobson’s invention, reliable telescopes weren’t available for consumer purchase. But Dobson’s innovation and outsider ambition made the stars available to the masses. Not bad for an amateur.

Bunch of Amatueurs by Jack Hitt. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

After losing their friend on the roof of a hotel, accidentally stealing Mike Tyson’s tiger, suffering an assortment of bodily and dental harm, and tangling with a monkey with a particularly bad attitude, you’d think the boys of the "Hangover" movies might consider switching to water. But no, “the wolfpack” is back, in "The Hangover 3," which opens this Thursday. The tagline for this one is “It All Ends” -- but does that mean the drinking, or the series itself? It can be awfully hard to quit a good thing, as the authors of these irreverent memoirs about imbibing and (sometimes) getting sober, can attest. So, before you sneak that flask of wine coolers into the theater to watch the antics of a drunken Bradley Cooper and Company, check out these drinking memoirs.

Dry by Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs nearly lost everything to drinking. A dozen-drinks-a-night alcoholic, he hid his addiction from friends and family as long as he could, until he was forced to go to rehab or lose his job. Remarkably, the one thing he never lost was his sense of humor.  In this memoir, Burroughs manages to poke fun at himself and the cult of rehab while describing how he became an alcoholic, what he was like at his drunken worst, and the challenges he faced once he got sober. No preacher of AA pieties, Burroughs maintains a healthy disrespect for the sanctimony and self-congratulation that can come with getting clean. “Making alcoholic friends,” he writes, “is as easy as making sea monkeys.” Harder is becoming friendly with your sober self.

Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

“Our introduction wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t love at first sight,” Caroline Knapp writes about her first taste of alcohol. Like Burroughs, Knapp was a high-functioning alcoholic -- to family and friends, she seemed completely in control, but in truth her drinking controlled her life, not the other way around. Starting at an early age Knapp used alcohol as “liquid armor,” a way to feel more up to the task of navigating daily life. This memoir is less laugh-out-loud funny than the rest of the books on this list, but Knapp has such a clear, self-aware voice, she conveys the mordant humor of her most desperate behavior, like keeping a “show” bottle half-full of Cognac on display even though she lives alone, and is going through a real bottle every few days.

Bad Dog by Martin Kihn

One school of thought has it that addicts just need to trade their unhealthy addictions -- drugs, alcohol, gambling -- for healthy ones, like exercise. But competitive dog training? In this memoir, Kihn, a former TV writer, is one drink away from hitting bottom when Hola, a poorly-behaved Burmese mountain dog, comes into his life. Kihn realizes that he needs to get a handle on his drinking if he wants to hang on to his wife, his career, and his health, and the best way to do that is at the end of a firmly-gripped leash. As he trains Hola to become not just a good, but a winningly well-mannered dog, he trains himself to live the sober life.

Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler

If the guys from "The Hangover" ever need a fifth wheel, they’d find a kindred spirit in Chelsea Handler. In fact, the stand up comedian might just drink them under the table. In this humorous memoir, Handler writes about getting herself into an assortment of embarrassing and mortifying situations -- usually with the help of a hefty serving of vodka, her drink of choice. The comic, who has gone on to have her own TV show and kickstart the career of several other equally cocktail-happy comedians, is so associated with the drink, Belvedere Vodka sponsored a recent tour.

Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis

Some novelists drink in order to write.  Kingsley Amis, on the other hand, may have written in order to drink. This volume combines his three books dedicated to the art and pleasure of getting schnockered: On Drink, Every Day Drinking, and How’s Your Glass?. Amis’s great enthusiasm for all things alcoholic causes him to take a more-is-more approach to the subject: no single glass of fine whiskey for him. He writes about how to treat a hangover, how to economize on alcohol while still getting good and plastered, the best things to eat when your drink is the main course, and how to drink without getting drunk -- though it’s doubtful he employed this last trick all that often.

Editor's Note: In Eat The City, author Robin Shulman invites us to take a bite out of the Big Apple by meeting New York's finest foodies. Her subjects aren't mere food fans, mind you, but anyone who falls on the spectrum ranging from the locally-sourced farm to the wine-stained table. The book -- as much a biography of a city as it is its inhabitants -- offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of farmhands, food producers, bee tamers, taste-makers and supply chain experts, all of whom are deeply woven into the cultural fabric of New York City.

Every person profiled in Shulman's history of the NYC food scene proves to be a fascinating exploration of not just the sleepless city's past, but of the myriad modern personalities behind every NYC plate you've tasted. It's a delectable dish of a book, and below we've made sure to introduce you to some of the characters that fill its pages. If you haven't picked up Eat The City just yet, don't let your stomach grumble anymore. The paperback version drops today. 

1) Mark Solasz, scion of a meat-cutting family going back to pre-World War II Poland, where his father, Sam, learned the trade from his own father, before fleeing to fight with the Partisans in the forest against the Nazis. Sam came to New York in the 1950s with only a couple of knives and ten dollars he earned cutting meat on board the ship. Soon he ran a business in the Fourteenth Street Market, the largest meat processing center on the east coast, a rough, dirty Mafia-run place, so crowded that delivery trucks had to wait more than an hour to even pull in to the market. Eventually Midwestern companies began to box meat and ship it direct to supermarkets, city butchers largely disappeared, and most of the remaining Fourteenth Street wholesalers, including the Solasz father and sons, moved up to the Hunts Point meat center in the Bronx, where they serve restaurants and hotels. Meat has finally been shunted to the sidelines of the city.

2) Josh Fields and Jon Conner, who started brewing beer when they were roommates in a giant Williamsburg loft, and continued as the recession hit and their work as artists dwindled. Why not be independent, they thought, and make art of something their friends can drink? Why not start a commercial brewery? Over the course of a year, to the crooning of Sunday-morning Sinatra on NPR, Jon and Josh hammered, welded, drilled, insulated, encased, wired, coiled, computerized, and reformed a thousand dollars’ worth of odd parts into a functioning brewery. But when the landlord decided to sell the loft space, they had to find a way to make brewing work in New York, a city where space is so expensive it can be hard to start something as large as a brewery.

3) Gale Robinson, whose father during Prohibition helped create a stickily sweet kosher wine that would become Manischewitz. No rule of Jewish law says that sacramental wine must taste of Robitussin and grape Kool-Aid. But the Jews of New York City had long made do with the grapes available: Concords, whose flavor was so musky in a wine, it required copious amounts of sugar. Gale remembers begging her father to serve something better than the heavily sweet Manischewitz at the table. Despite her distaste, her father’s Passover wine symbolized American Judaism for generations.

4) Jorge Torres, the son of Puerto Rican sugar workers, who grew up on a sugar plantation and the cane plant from the age of nine years old, and who came to the Bronx as a young man as part of a generation that could no longer make a living working sugar. After a lifetime of manual labor, he has coaxed into maturity a stalk of sugar cane he grows every year in the soil of his community garden in the South Bronx. He has found a way to offer his children only the sweet taste of the cane plant, not its bitterness.

5) Christopher Nicholson, a winemaker in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn who produces a high-quality wine from Long Island grapes, bringing back serious wineries to the city after decades of dearth. Christopher works for the Red Hook Winery alongside respected California winemakers Abe Schoener and Robert Foley. In just a few years of operation, his wines have sold to restaurants such as Blue Hill and Momofuku. As the B61 bus wheezes by outside, Christopher continues his rigorous experiments in Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Riesling grapes.

This week in 1971, Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On was released by Tamla Records, a subsidiary of Motown. The unified concept album,  consisting of nine linked songs, was inspired by the experiences of Gaye's brother Frankie, who had witnessed sickening death and destruction during what he deemed to be an unjust and useless war in Vietnam, according to music writer David Ritz, author of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye.

The 2003 biography is compiled largely from interviews for Gaye's planned autobiography, which Ritz intended to co-write until Gaye was killed in 1984 by his own father.

"Looking at a crazed America at the start of the seventies, he asked, 'What's going on?', convinced that he had the answer," Ritz writes. The planned autobiography wouldn't have been the first collaboration between the two; Ritz is credited as a co-writer of Gaye's hit song "Sexual Healing." The biography's cast of characters includes Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder, and is buoyed by confessional insights from Gaye himself.

"I wanted to treat the album as an album, not as a string of small songs," Gaye told Ritz about the conception of What's Going On. "So I found a theme, and I tried to explore it from different angles. At first, I was afraid, because I didn't know whether this had ever been done before, but when I got started I actually found the process came naturally. It was easy. Don Juan was right: I was traveling down a path of the heart."

The introspective album, covering subject matter considered totally radical by 1971 standards, was an instant commercial and critical success. Although his first self-produced, self-written opus was career and life-altering,  Gaye's struggles with marijuana and cocaine addiction, the IRS, his marriages, and his relationship with his record label continued.

Upon hearing What's Going On for the first time, Motown didn't like the album. Ritz quotes Gaye's recollection of the experience: "They didn't like it, didn't understand it, and didn't trust it. Management said the songs were too long, too formless, and would get lost on a public looking for easy three-minute stories. For months they wouldn't release it. My attitude had to be firm. Basically I said, 'Put it out or I'll never record for you again.' That was my ace in the hole, and I had to play it."

Music history proves that Gaye was wise to trust his instincts in writing from his immediate experience. What's Going On, which topped Rolling Stone's year-end list as album of the year, was set in America's black urban neighborhoods. The title song begins with festive sounds fresh from the streets of his childhood, and during the recording of the album over ten days, Marvin's friends created an intimate atmosphere in which he could be most comfortable. Through loyalty to his own life story and his immediate circle's support for that vision, Gaye created a classic album that led to his recognition as a nuanced and serious artist beyond the confines of R&B, across the borders of country and race.

When Gene Rodenberry had the idea to transpose classic TV Westerns into a science fiction universe, did he guess his creation would spawn six TV series, a dozen films, and the undying devotion of generations of fans? And if he did, did he respond with pure Klingon rationality, or did he experience a bit of human glee?

This weekend, eager Trekkies will be lining up to catch early screenings of the latest movie, "Star Trek Into Darkness," which once again pits the crew of Starship Enterprise against forces of otherworldly evil. As they happily munch their popcorn, young viewers may not even know that the series is nearly 50 years old, or that Zachary Quinto is not the original Spock. For a look at Star Trek memories from the first generation of cast members and beyond, beam up these memoirs and biographies of all things Trek.

The Encyclopedia Shatnerica by Robert Schnackenberg

He went where no man had gone before. William Shatner, the original Captain James T. Kirk, did not achieve superstardom when Star Trek aired for three seasons, and after the show’s cancellation, was forced to live in his truck and scrounge for acting gigs. But once Star Trek became a cult hit in syndication, Shatner’s career was set, and he went on to star in T.J. Hooker and become a pitchman for Priceline.  Throughout, he made no attempt to hide his contempt for the Trekkies who made him a star, advising them to get an (Earthbound) life. In this biography, writer Schnackenberg looks at the man who was Kirk, and became a cult hero.

To the Stars by George Takei

He was named for King George, but his family spent time in a Japanese internment camp when he was four years old. This early, bitter experience didn’t stop young George Takei from pursuing his version of the American Dream – namely, to become an actor, at a time when few Asian faces were seen on TV or film. He would go on to star as Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek, a role he’d reprise in six of the films. In this memoir, he writes about his experiences growing up in Los Angeles, his lasting devotion to the Trekkies (he regularly appears at conventions) and his life beyond the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton

If Wil Wheaton considers himself a geek, he has plenty of fans who think the term is a high compliment, if not a boast. Wheaton played Ensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek the Next Generation, which aired from 1987-1994. He’d first achieved fame in the movie Stand By Me, but once Star Trek was cancelled, found himself floundering. Salvation came in an not-entirely-unlikely place: the internet, where he established himself as a blogger and online celebrity. In this memoir, he describes his journey from Hollywood, to deep space, to Topeka, Kansas, where he makes peace with his inescapable Star Trek alter ego and discovers his own identity.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek by Dave Marinaccio

According to writer Dave Marinaccio, “every situation you will face in life has already been faced by the crew of the Starship Enterprise.” So where else to look for wisdom than the experiences of Spock, Kirk, Sulu, and the rest? In this humorous memoir, Marinaccio applies Trekian logic to all the great questions of life – relationships, career, family, mortality, and how to lose a beer belly. If you think the premise for this book is slim, remember it is based on the best-seller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Kindergarten lasts just a year, but the Star Trek franchise is still going strong, so there must be some wisdom in there somewhere.

Some writers of memoir convey images so powerful, they stay burned in our memories like scenes from classic cinema. What pivotal memory from your own life might serve as the backbone for your story? These excerpts from ten of our favorite memoirs will hopefully inspire you to create your own everlasting visual in words.

1. My Life by Bill Clinton

On meeting his childhood hero, President John F. Kennedy:

"On my first day as President, I started out by taking Mother down to the Rose Garden, to show her exactly where I had stood when I shook hands with President Kennedy almost thirty years ago."

2. Wild by Cheryl Strayed

On losing her boot while solo-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail:

"I watched it bounce -- it was lightning fast and in slow motion all at once -- and then I watched it tumble over the edge of the mountain and down into the trees without a sound. I gasped in surprise and lurched for my other boot, clutching it to my chest, waiting for the moment to reverse itself, for someone to come laughing from the woods, shaking his head and saying it had all been a joke.

But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.

So I stood up and tossed the other one over the edge too."

3. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

On re-encountering his long-absent father, an alcoholic con man, while working as a caseworker at a Boston homeless shelter:

"When my father arrived I'd already been working there for three years, first as a counselor, then as a caseworker. He wasn't homeless when I first started -- marginal, sure, but not homeless. I remember the day he arrived the nights could still be cold. He raised his arms to enter, because every 'guest' has to be frisked -- no bottles, no weapons. This is the first rule."

4. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

On getting high:

"Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it...Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man."

5. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

On hitting the rock bottom that preceded her travels to Italy, Indonesia, and Bali:

"It was a cold November, around three o'clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and -- just as during all those nights before -- I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.

I don't want to be married anymore.

I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.

I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want to live in this big house. I don't want to have a baby."

6. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

On living in Paris and skipping meals to conserve money after quitting journalism:

"There you could always go into the Luxembourg Museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and see how he truly made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless and hungry. Later I  thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way."

7. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

On suddenly seeing her estranged mother from the window of a car in New York City:

"I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading...I slid down in the seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue."

8. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

On balancing work and motherhood, while traveling with her children to a business conference, flying on a plane owned by eBay CEO John Donahoe:

"Then just as finally as the flight finally took off, my daughter started scratching her head. 'Mommy! My head itches!'...I urged her to lower her voice, then examined her head and noticed small white THINGS. I was pretty sure I knew what they were. I was the only person bringing young children on this corporate plane -- and now my daughter most likely had LICE!" [Upon landing, an employee at the nearest pharmacy confirmed her diagnosis.]

9. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

On processing the sudden loss of her husband -- fellow writer John Gregory Dunne -- after he died of a heart attack while the two were sitting down to dinner:

"Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.

For a long time I wrote nothing else."

10. Darkness Visible by William Styron

On traveling to Paris in 1985 to receive a lifetime literary achievement award while exhausted and paralyzed by an almost suicidal depression:

"In Paris on a chilly evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind -- a struggle which had engaged me for several months -- might have a fatal outcome. The moment of revelation came as the car in which I was riding moved down a rain-slick street not far from the Champs-Élysées and slid past a dully glowing sign that read HOTEL WASHINGTON."

They’re the people you've known longer than anyone else. You love them; they drive you crazy; you see their facial expressions when you look in the mirror. Who in life do we know more completely than our parents? Maybe no one, but that doesn't mean we actually know them at all. In the documentary "Stories We Tell," director and actress Sarah Polley discovers that what she thought she knew about her mother, an actress who died when Polley was eleven, has only a glancing relationship with the truth.

As she interviews her mother’s former friends, lovers, and her own siblings and father, Polley uncovers a stunning secret that the family has kept from her for decades. The solution to the mystery changes not just what Polley understands about her mother and her family, but herself. Polley’s not the only one to have to reorganize her beliefs about a parent. Here are just a few memoirs about the lengths a family will go to keep a secret safe, and the shattering effects on the children who happen upon them, years later.

One Drop by Bliss Broyard

Bliss Broyard grew up thinking she was a stereotypical Connecticut WASP, the daughter of a prominent critic and writer who chronicled the Greenwich Village scene in New York City in the 1950s before decamping for the suburbs. Only after her father, Anatole Broyard, died, did his daughter learn that her father was part black, and had spent his life passing as white in order to be accepted by literary society. In this memoir, Broyard traces her father’s Creole family from Brooklyn to New Orleans, and considers the effect his racial subterfuge had on her parents, and her own life.

The Scientists by Marco Roth

For the Roth family, intelligence served as a kind of defense against the uncertainties of the world, and they raised their son, Marco, to be as well armed as possible. By the time he was a teen, Marco spoke foreign languages, listened to classic music, read Shakespeare and played violin. But all this erudition couldn’t protect the family against Roth’s father’s secret life, which was devastatingly revealed when he died of AIDS. Roth uses his father’s duplicity to explore his own privileged, precocious childhood, and the ways his parents both protected him from and left him vulnerable to real life.

The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris

To hear Michele Norris’s calm, smooth, commanding voice delivering the news on NPR’s All Things Considered, you’d think the woman behind the voice has never been surprised or caught off guard by anything. In fact, the opposite is true -- and it was Norris’s job that shattered that illusion of calm. While reporting on the state of racial relations in the country after Obama’s election, Norris turned her investigative eye to her own family. What she found was a history rife with secrets, including her father’s painful past in a racially divided Birmingham, and her grandmother’s work as a traveling “Aunt Jemima” for Quaker Oats, which caused Norris’s mother deep embarrassment.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks had been dead for twenty years when her family learned of the extraordinary contribution their mother had made to science and medicine -- a contribution Henrietta herself had never known about. Lacks’s cells were taken without her knowledge, and developed by scientists to become the first “immortal” human cells, used in polio vaccines and for research into cancer, cloning, and in vitro fertilization. The cells would have made Lacks a rich woman, had she known about their harvesting or seen any of the profits -- instead, her descendants grew up unable to afford health insurance. In this biography, Skloot uncovers the dark history of the cells, and the secret of who Henrietta was, beyond her biology.

Have you read other memoirs and biographies that reveal a shocking family secret? Include your thoughts in the comments below.

When it comes to memoirs, it’s a dog-read-dog world. It seems just about anyone who ever had a dog has written a book about dear old Bowser/Spot/Fifi, and yet, each season brings a new litter of tributes to the best/worst/smartest/most heroic dog that ever walked on four paws. Maybe that’s because when writing about dogs, with their indomitable spirits, their unflagging enthusiasm for life, and their endless capacity for forgiveness, it’s nearly impossible to fall into whiny self-pity and self-absorption that can be the pitfalls of memoirs about our all-too-human selves. Dogs are the ideal literary super ego – in writing about them, we write about not who we are, but who we wish we were.

In A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, writer Sue Halpern describes what happens when she decides to train her Labradoodle, Pransky, as a therapy dog, and take him into a public nursing home to work with the elderly residents. In the process, Pransky makes Halpern consider the meaning of life, and death, and explore what it means to live a genuinely meaningful, useful existence. For more adventures in canine companionship, check out these books.

Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean

When the first Rin Tin Tin died, in 1932, radio stations broke into regular programming to announce the sad news; legend had it that the noble dog had passed away in the arms of the movie star Jean Harlow. His legend was destined to live on, but not just the legend -- by the 1980s, the eighth Rin Tin Tin, a descendant of that first star -- was still drawing fans to the Official Rin Tin Tin fanclub. The wise-eyed German Shephard was a stable of movies, vaudeville, comics, books, and TV for the span of the Twentieth Century, and in this biography, Orlean traces the birth of the original dog, on the battlefields of the First World War, through stardom to something approaching immortality.

Marley and Me by John Grogan

It’s hardly the first dog memoir, but it may be the biggest. This charming book, which began life as a series of newspaper columns by Grogan about his adventures with his extremely ill-behaved yellow Lab (aka “the world’s worst dog”), has since grown into an empire of all things Marley, including a Hollywood movie and several spin-off books. In this memoir we find out how it all began, with a chance visit to a puppy farm that results in the spontaneous adoption of the exuberant, inexhaustible Marley, through Grogan and his wife’s struggles to train, or at least contain, the dog that drives them to the brink of insanity but eventually becomes an irreplaceable, deeply loved member of the family.

My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley

Before Marley, there was Tulip, and the decidedly non-dog-loving writer J.R. Ackerley. Through happenstance Tulip came into the middle-aged writer’s life and, well, you can guess the rest. The original “man meets dog, man falls in love” story, this memoir of the writer’s slavish devotion to his dog set the bar for all dog memoirs to follow. To those who prefer cats, Tulip may come across as just your run of the mill canine, but to Ackerley she was the world, far better company than most humans, the “ideal friend” he’d despaired of ever finding among his two-footed peers.

The $60,000 Dog by Lauren Slater

Writer Lauren Slater has a lifelong bond with animals. Her husband Benjamin? Not so much. Their value, he believes, is directly related to their “edibility,” and when Slater’s beloved Shiba Inu, Lila, goes blind, Ben cynically calculates that the dog has cost the family $60,000, in exchange for which Lila’s main contribution has been 400 pounds of poop. But when Ben becomes sick himself, Lila teaches him important lessons about resilience and bravery in the face of the unknown. In this memoir, Slater describes the deep relationship of mutual need that can develop between humans and their pets, and questions the belief that animals are, in any sense, “lesser” creatures than human beings.

Uggie: My Story by Uggie the Jack Russell

The movie The Artist tells the story of a silent film actor upstaged by younger talent with the advent of “talkies.” In real life, the film won an Academy Award, but the cast was still upstaged by the youngest -- and furriest -- star: Uggie, the Jack Russell who plays the main character’s faithful companion. In this pun-filled memoir (expect lines about “pawdicures” and “p-mails”) Uggie recalls his life in the limelight, from his early days as a waterskiing, skateboarding stunt dog, to his Hollywood debut, and through to his retirement due to health problems. Along the way, the reader gets glimpses of how animal actors learn to hit their marks, nail their lines, and steal audiences’ hearts.

On May 16, 1929, in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, a tradition was born: the Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the previous years’ best films, directors, and actors. The ceremony showed that the movie business was in transition, as Warner Bros. studio was recognized for its outstanding achievement in producing Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer,” the first full-length “talkie.” Within a few years, the silent movie business would give way entirely to sound, and in 1934 the Motion Picture Association of America began enforcing the Hays Code, intended to clean up the louche image and loose morals of 1920s Hollywood. Those early years of experiment and excess generated some of the all-time great life stories; here are our picks for eight of the best books on the studio era.

Jeanine Basinger’s The Star Machine explores where icons like Chaplin, Pickford, and their heirs came from: how the studio system produced, shaped, and exploited them, and how fame affected their lives and careers. Structured around case studies of dazzling and disobedient stars like Tyrone Power, Lana Turner, and Loretta Young, Basinger’s richly illustrated biographical study shows how actors were groomed, primped, polished, and presented to a public insatiably hungry for new screen idols.

Lyle Talbot’s life followed the trajectory of early twentieth-century American popular entertainment: After leaving home as a teenager to join a traveling carnival, Talbot became a stage actor, a Warner Bros. film star, and eventually a cast member of television shows including "Leave it to Beaver." In her acclaimed biography, The Entertainer, Talbot’s daughter Margaret uses her father’s extraordinary story to explore the changing landscape of American mass culture as it evolved from small-town sideshows, through the glamour of movie palaces, to the domestic comforts of the small screen.

Born Gladys Smith in Toronto in 1892, Mary Pickford was a child stage actress who was spotted by D.W. Griffith and invited to join his Biograph film company at the age of seventeen. After becoming a beloved fixture in silent film, Pickford began to exert more control over her career as the producer of her own movies, and in 1919 -- along with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks -- Pickford founded United Artists, cementing the power of producers and on-screen talent in Hollywood. Eileen Whitfield’s illuminating biography, Mary Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, reveals Pickford’s tough upbringing, her years of stardom, and her lasting influence on the film industry.

Few actors could match Mary Pickford’s fame in her day, but her United Artists co-founder Charlie Chaplin was one such star. His modestly self-titled autobiography, first published in 1964, is a standout of the genre: witty, revealing, and full of outlandish tales that may play fast and loose with the truth (like the one about foiling Japanese assassins), but they are so infectiously told, the reader hardly cares.

Harpo Marx, the brother who never spoke, was an off-screen charmer and bon vivant. His memoir Harpo Speaks! is cherished by Marx fans for its breezy style and insight into the professional and social whirl of the 1920s and 1930s. Harpo was a friend of critic Alexander Woollcott and a member of the glamorous, cynical circle at the Algonquin Round Table in New York, but he was also devoted to his wife, actress Susan Fleming, and their four adopted children (he was the only Marx brother never to divorce). His memoir, published shortly before he died in 1964, is a touching and unpretentious tale of talent, fame, and family, enlivened by the Marx Brothers’ signature offbeat wit.

The inimitable silent film actress Louise Brooks opens up in Lulu in Hollywood -- a series of autobiographical essays on her life, career, and struggles against the constraints of the studio system. One of the most famous faces of her day, Brooks escaped the claustrophobic Hollywood scene for Weimar, Germany, where she made "Pandora’s Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl" with the renowned avant-garde director G. W. Pabst -- a move for which she was unofficially blacklisted in Los Angeles. The films, which included frank depictions of such taboo topics as prostitution, illegitimacy, and lesbianism, remain classics of the silent era, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that Brooks was recognized as an icon in her own right.

In the years between the first Oscars ceremony and the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934, Hollywood films freely depicted women behaving badly, talking dirty, and making their own way in the world. In his survey Complicated Women, Mick LaSalle focuses on the female stars whose antics on and off the screen scandalized America, as their characters took lovers, enjoyed careers and sex, had babies outside marriage, and stood up to cheating husbands. He shows how stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West shocked and seduced their audiences during a brief golden age for women on screen.

The prolific film critic and historian David Thomson has written biographies of stars including Orson Welles and Marlon Brando, as well as the mammoth New Biographical Dictionary of Film, and is one of the most skillful chroniclers of America’s love affair with the movies. In The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, he offers a sweeping yet intensely personal narrative of the business and art of cinema, from its early days to its modern machinations, and of the personalities that drove its development.

Phillip Lopate, who began as a novelist and poet, has grown into the foremost American source of perspective and wisdom on the subject of autobiographical writing. In 1994, he solidified this role with The Art of the Personal Essay, a thick anthology including writers from Plutarch to Joan Didion. He directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections.

Earlier this year, Lopate published To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, a conversational guide incorporating the tips and insights of a writer and teacher at the peak of his mastery. It has quickly become one of the the most referenced and dog-eared books on our bookshelf, and here’s why:

1) He includes an authoritative and eclectic reading list of genre-defining autobiographies, essays, and memoirs, from the classic to the contemporary, organized by subject. Some of our favorites from the more than 300 titles he includes are Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage.

2) He admits to his discomfort with the evolving classifications of “creative nonfiction,” “memoir” and “lyric essay,” settling on “literary nonfiction.” If he’s not totally clear on what it all means, then we feel reassured about our own questions. “Nonfiction writers are the resident aliens of academia,” he writes. As enrollments in nonfiction MFA programs continue to increase, Lopate is doing all he can to legitimize the validity of writing about one’s own life and promoting professional outlets for personal narrative.

3) He helps writers achieve the necessary distance between their circumstances and their story by offering insight into how to turn oneself into a character. “When I sit down to write, I hear a voice in my head. Who sent me that voice?...All I know is that I keep listening for the voice to surprise me, say something out of the ordinary, provocative, mischievous, borderline dangerous…I wait to pounce with glee on some received truth,” he writes. It is only at the editing stage that he constructs or fabricates what he refers to as an “object” -- his persona on the page.

4) In the chapter “On the Ethics of Writing about Others,” Lopate provides tongue-in-cheek instruction on how to write with honesty and confidence about loved ones (“If you plan to write about friendship, make lots of friends, because you are bound to lose a few,” etc.), but he also offer practical tips derived from his own experience: when he first began writing about his family, he changed the names of his siblings, but not his parents, since his parents were already established, and his siblings were still in the thick of navigating their own young lives.

5) He reminds us that there are no right answers, only right efforts. Exploring the subject of how to end an essay, he admits that the conclusions to his own essays often arise from a combination of fatigue and optimism that “a possible solution, an intriguing glimmer” might function as an ending. He consciously leaves readers with some unresolved things to work out on their own, and after tinkering with lines and paragraphs as much as he can, he leaves them alone. He writes, “I am not interested after all in perfection; this ending will serve, it is good enough, it will have to do.”