Opinion

Required reading

Road to Valor

A True Story of World War II Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation

by Aili and Andres McConnon (Crown)

From a poor rural Tuscany family, a scrawny boy named Gino Bartali grew to become not only a two-time Tour de France champion, but an Italian hero. When the Mussolini regime tried to use Bartali’s 1938 win for pro-fascist propaganda, he refused to cooperate, instead helping the Italian Resistance. He not only sheltered a Jewish family in his apartment, he smuggled counterfeit identity papers in his hollow bicycle frame to save many other Jews from deportation to death camps. He then helped unite postwar Italy, winning the Tour in 1948, relying on cigarettes and Chianti for sustenance.

Superman

The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero

by Larry Tye (Random House)

If you’re a Superman fan, you’ve got to pay attention when TV’s Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen (Noel Neill and Jack Larson to George Reeves’ Superman) offer glowing blurbs for a book on the Man of Steel. Tye, who previously wrote a Satchel Paige bio, looks at the man from Krypton in all his guises — in the comics, TV, the movies. His stories about the pair of Jewish kids from Depression-era Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and how they created the heroic character which debuted in 1938, are the most interesting.

The Queen’s Lover

by Francine du Plessix Gray (The Penguin Press)

Long before Marie Antoinette lost her head, she lost her heart — to a handsome Swedish nobleman. In her latest work of historical fiction, du Plessix Gray — the 80-year-old Franco-Russian journalist, literary critic and novelist — imagines the affair between Count Axel von Fersen and the married French queen. Written as von Fersen’s memoir, their story starts with the amorous aristrocrats’ first meeting at a masquerade ball in Paris and continues through the French Revolution. It is not much of a spoiler to say things don’t end well for the courtly couple.

Beautiful Ruins

by Jess Walter (Harper)

The new novel from Walter (“The Financial Lives of the Poets”) is cinematic in scope, stretching from a small village on the Italian coast in 1962 to today’s Hollywood — with plenty of stops in time and place along the way. While all Italy is abuzz that “Cleopatra” is filming in Rome, tiny Porto Vergogna (Port of Shame) takes no notice. But when a bit actress from the film, Dee Mornay (a handmaiden to Liz Taylor’s queen) arrives and claims she’s dying, local innkeeper Pasquale Tursi is smitten. Fifty years later, Pasquale is determined to find out what ever happened to his long-ago crush.

Apron Anxiety

by Alyssa Shelasky (Three Rivers Press)

A cook-and-tell book? In her recipe-laden memoir, Shelasky, New York magazine’s Grub Street editor, tells the story of her whirlwind, drama-fraught romance with a celebrity chef. (She doesn’t name him, but all reports say he is Spike Mendelsohn from “Top Chef.”) The romance — conducted between flights to New York, DC and LA — is ill-fated. The recipes, though, which include “Easy Pizza After a Tough Time” and “Rainy Day Rigatoni,” are pure comfort.