Cameron Crowe’s talent for bringing personally pressing social issues to life will soon take on the drug addiction subject du jour: methamphetamines. His film will be based on “Beautiful Boy,” journalist David Sheff’s unblinking account of his struggle to save his son from a lethal meth habit and fleshed out with parts of “Tweak,” the younger Sheff’s own version of his years as a child addict. [via Screenrant.com]

What we don’t know about new memoirist Mark Owen is his real name. What we do know is that he’s an ex-Navy Seal, a member of the infamous Team Six that tracked and downed Osama Bin Laden -- and that he’ll share those secrets with us in a personal account due out this September 11. “No Easy Day” will be co-authored with military journalist Kevin Maurer. It remains to be seen just how close to classified the story will be. [via Time]

If you like pirates, the only thing better than being one might be the tall tales you get to tell after surviving a year as pirate hostage. The memoir (to be released this September) of Rachel Chandler and her husband Paul begins in 2009 on the Indian Ocean, then details the hijacking of their boat and months of enduring beatings and solitary confinement as their captors tried to trade them in for millions of dollars before they were finally rescued by U.S. Navy Seals. [via NPR]

On December 21, 1960, a man interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr., recording the event on film for future use in a memoir that was never written. Fifty-two years later, the interviewer’s son Stephon Tull has come across the long forgotten footage, filled with some of the legendary leader’s early thoughts on nonviolent resistance and the fledgling U.S. civil rights movement a full three years before his “I Have a Dream” speech. Tull plans to sell the reel-to-reel later this month -- to a buyer with biographical intentions, we hope. [via USA Today]

David Foster Wallace has been gone for four years now, but the first book-length account of his life, out this week, helps bring him back a little. A master of both fiction and essays, Wallace continues to inspire slavish reader devotion for his intellect and use of language, both of which he administered with an extraordinary emotional generosity. The workings of his mind took on a lethal form for the chronically depressed Wallace, one he described as “a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it” -- and one treated thoroughly and compassionately by his biographer, New Yorker staff writer D. T. Max. [via the New York Times]