Enter Talking, Joan Rivers with Richard Meryman...

Enter Talking, Joan Rivers with Richard Meryman (Delacorte). “Those who expect this memoir to be a compendium of one-liners will be disappointed. . . . Chiefly, it is a deeply felt and superbly written story of an incredible struggle, with barely a trace of that smiling-through-tears banality that infects most books of this sort” (Florence King).

Success Stories, Russell Banks (Harper & Row). “Quite steadily, and often powerfully, Russell Banks has been devising fictional varieties of the ‘this is poison’ labels on cigarette advertisements.” Many of the stories collected here “repeat, dolefully instead of tragically, the theme of imaginary betterment contained in ‘Continental Drift’ ” (Richard Eder).

The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting, Thomas C. Leonard (Oxford University). “A splendid, if episodic book. . . . Leonard demonstrates that the history of American political coverage is a story of cozy collaboration between the press and the politicians” (Gaye Tuchman).

The Men Will Fear You and the Women Will Adore You, William Hamilton (St. Martin’s: $5.95; cartoons). “Among the first rank New Yorker cartoonists, none other depicts so closely that fatal juxtaposition of psyche and trend that the magazine’s writers and advertisers present as real or idealized modern life” (Judith Martin).