HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

Roar! Imagine eavesdropping on roguish photographer, writer, and African explorer Peter Beard as he beguiles his daughter with thrilling adventure stories of roping rhinos and tracking lions, and you'll have Zara's Tales (Knopf).

Other beasts: VF. contributor and industry insider Peter Biskind charges through 30 years of Tinseltown history, prying open the jaws of Hollywood's Gods and Monsters (Nation Books). In Midnight at the Palace (Alyson), Pam Tent recalls her days as a member of the fabulous troupe the Cockettes in all its drag and glitter. Tama Janowitz, 80s literary "It girl" turned hip mom, recalls days of big hair and Mclnerney in her comical essay collection Area Code 212 (St. Martin's). Wade Davis brings the work and photography of Richard Evans Schultes, the father of ethnobotany and pre-eminent explorer of The Lost Amazon (Chronicle), into full flower.

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan paint De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf), the first major biography of the Abstract Expressionist who came to New York from Rotterdam as a stowaway and became the charismatic leader of the New York School. Greetings from Andy (Abrams) is an irresistible gift from Tiffany & Co.'s design director, John Loring. In consummate chronicler of life-betweenthe-sexes Fay Weldon's wicked Mantrapped (Grove), a woman and man find their souls transported into each other's bodies.

Marie Curie, the discoverer of radium, was undeniably an Obsessive Genius (Norton); Barbara Goldsmith documents the prejudices and upheavals Curie faced as a woman in a man's world. Blessed with haunting watercolor portraits by Cherry Hood, J. T. Leroy's Harold's End (Last Gasp), "a street-hustler power ballad," slices deep into a world of unbearable sadness and beauty. After a 20-year fiction hiatus, Marilynne Robinson rises from the phenomenal first-book success of Housekeeping with Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Elisabeth Kehoe

tells how the Jerome sisters crashed Victorian and Edwardian society by marrying English aristocrats to become The Titled Americans (Atlantic). In architectural photographer Robert Polidori's Metropolis (D.A.P.), urban buildings sit for their portraits. Kate Trant and Austin Williams make The Macro World of Micro Cars (Black Dog) look like big, big fun. Inside the photo archives of Twentieth Century Fox (Abrams), you'll discover stills from such genre-defining films as All About Eve and Cleopatra. Ann Hodgman knees the ho-ho holiday right in the Christmas balls in her sparklingly funny I Saw Mommy Kicking Santa Claus (Perigee). Douglas Levere and Bonnie Yochelson reconstruct New York Changing (Princeton Architectural) by returning to the haunts Berenice Abbott ⅛ captured in the late 1930s. Alan Hess serves up a helping of American roadside culture in Googie Redux (Chronicle). Roberta Price's Huerfano (University of Massachusetts Press) evokes life in the New Age commune movement of the 60s and 70s. In Chelsea Cain's gleeful and faintly subversive mock memoir, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth (Bloomsbury), a grown Nancy Drew divulges a crush on a Hardy Boy, a bust for reckless driving, and her battle with booze, all while solving a real humdinger of a mystery. Golly gee! What's not to love?!