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Correspondent Susan Stamberg gathers recommendations for the season's best books from booksellers Rona Brinlee, Daniel Goldin and Lucia Silva. Their selections include comics about philosophy, novels about building families, and a box set that dives into the process of writing.

When young African-American men showed up at Boston City Hospital with knife and gunshot wounds, most were thought to be thugs or drug dealers. But Dr. John Rich took time to interview these victims and found out what was really behind their injuries.

The British are crazy for actor and comedian Russell Brand, but he's not content to stop with his compatriots. With a comic triumph as a bad-boy rocker in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and a startlingly frank memoir called My Booky Wook, Brand is shooting for Stateside stardom.

The heroines in the early stories of author Mavis Gallant deal with a reality Gallant herself knew — the freedom, and loneliness, of expatriate life. Those stories have been collected in a new book called The Cost of Living.

Hall of Famer Satchel Paige started his career pitching in the Negro leagues and later became a Major League star. Author Larry Tye spotlights the player who helped integrate the sport.

Romanian novelist Herta Mueller was awarded the 2009 literature prize for her depictions of "the landscape of the dispossessed." Her first novel, Nadirs, has just been reissued. Critic Alan Cheuse has a review.

Author Ethan Watters thinks that America is "homogenizing the way the world goes mad." In Crazy Like Us, he describes how America's approach to mental illness has spread to other cultures around the world, in a "globalization of the American psyche."

Rebecca Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is part academic farce and part metaphysical romance. The novel may not settle the question of whether God exists, but it does affirm the phenomenon of literary miracles, says Fresh Air reviewer Maureen Corrigan.

Jane Ciabattari says that Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir, Committed, retains the winning voice of her hugely successful Eat, Pray, Love while mapping the author's wavering conviction to avoid marriage at all costs.

The iconic rock singer has written a book called Just Kids about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The two met when they were young artists just starting out in New York in the late 1960s.