IN SHORT

(It Books). Lily Koppel salutes The Astronaut Wives Club (Grand Central). Travis McDade fingers the notorious Thieves of Book Row (Oxford). Scott C. Johnson surveils The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the C.I.A. (Norton). The forgotten generation and its forgotten war rise in Richard Rubin'sThe Last of the Doughboys (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Michael S. Smith, with Christine Pittel, deconstructs the alchemy of design in Building Beauty (Rizzoli). Anita Raghavan shows how today's Indian-American business class rises and falls with the Galleon collapse in The Billionaire's Apprentice (Business Plus). Oscar Goodman gets lucky in Being Oscar (Weinstein). William T. Georgis'sMake It Fabulous (Monacelli) will drive connoisseurs of design porn wild. Singer-songwriter Alina Simone writes a Note to Self (Faber and Faber). Ajit Varki and Danny Brower expose the great capacity humans possess for Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind (Twelve). Neal Thompson marvels at the life of the bizarre genius who created "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" in A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley (Crown Archetype).