Lifestyle

This week’s must-read books

Respect Yourself Stax Record and the Soul Explosion
by Robert Gordon  (Bloomsbury)

The latest book from Gordon (“Can’t Be Satisfied”) is more than just a look at one of the best record labels ever. It’s a cultural and sociological study of America in a pivotal time in its history — that just happens to have a great soundtrack. Founded in late ’50s Memphis as Satellite Records by a white brother and sister, Stax became an oasis of racial harmony in the Jim Crow South. Label chief Jim Stewart shared a desk — and a phone — with African-American Al Bell in 1965, unheard of at the time. Three years later, riots broke out in Memphis when Martin Luther King was murdered there, but Stax headquarters was untouched. We wish a CD came with the book — but you can find the music of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Isaac Hayes, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding and the rest of the Stax roster yourself.

Want Not
by Jonathan Miles  (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

In his second novel, Miles (“Dear American Airlines”) braids together the stories of three seemingly unconnected groups of characters, beginning on Thanksgiving Day 2008. There’s the freegan couple, a middle-aged linguistics prof living in suburban Jersey and a 40-something mom/part-time actress and 9/11 widow who is remarried to a debt collector.

Deadly Stuff Players
by Flo Anthony (Strebor/Atria)

As a celebrity journalist, former Post reporter Anthony is well-versed in pop culture. And she’s used that knowledge to craft a spot-on mystery filled with chilled Cristal, hunky pro athletes, sex tapes, fallen stars, gangs, Vegas craziness and police corruption. It all centers on Valerie Rollins, the gossip queen of Black Hollywood, who teams up with former NFL star Rome Nyland, now a private eye.

Earth: An Alien Enterprise The Shocking Truth Behind the Greatest Cover-Up in Human History
by Timothy Good  (Pegasus)

Many of us would consider this book a farce. But if you’re a believer, Good — billed as “one of the world’s leading experts on alien phenomena” — has the goods. Among his tales of contact between aliens and humans from 1932 on, we are particularly intrigued by his story that Neil Armstrong confirmed there were other spacecraft already on the moon when Apollo 11 landed in 1969 (this, he says, was overheard by his source, an MI6 agent, through a hotel room wall at a conference).

Sylvia Porter America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist
by Tracy Lucht (Syracuse University Press)

Long before the likes of Jane Bryant Quinn and Maria Bartiromo, it was Sylvia Porter. The Hunter College grad was turned down for jobs as a financial writers by Associated Press and the New York Sun — AP, Lucht writes, told her it “never had a woman in its financialnews department and never would.” But the New York Post brought her on in 1935, where her byline was S.F. Porter. A fine look at Porter, women in journalism and personal finance.