From the first sentence, Conway's memoir promises to be as remarkable and inspiring as the life it chronicles. As with the previous two volumes in her autobiographical series, The Road from Coorain (1989) and True North (1994), Conway once again places her life under a microscope, this time examining her 10 years as the first woman president of Smith College, a period devoted as much to Conway's education as to that of her students. In the decade from 1975 to 1985, Conway steered Smith through the first heady days of the feminist movement, ultimately shaping a college where women could acquire a diverse and dynamic education based on their individual and contemporary needs. For this child of the Australian outback, life as an academic official would bring challenges--political, financial, spiritual, and personal--to rival any she had previously faced and overcome. According to Socrates, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a credo Conway clearly adopted as her own, for few lives have ever been held to such self-scrutiny.

Elizabeth Taylor's life and 50-plus-year career have been scrutinized and analyzed in hundreds of articles and books. Although Amburn did plenty of interviews (500 by his count) in preparation for this contribution to the Taylor bookshelf, his sources weren't Taylor's close friends but rather those in her outer orbit. Nevertheless, he manages to get plenty personal, including details of Taylor's hemorrhoid surgery. If Amburn has an underlying theme, it's the profound effect that gay men have had on Taylor's life, starting with her father. Her relationships with some of those men, including Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, and Montgomery Clift, are well known, but Amburn adds a few new names to the list. Husband number two, Michael Wilding, gets tagged as bisexual, as does Richard Burton (in one scene, he's on his way to Eddie Fisher's house!). Not to worry, Taylor manages to have plenty of sex despite so many platonic relationships, and Ambrun takes time to chronicle much of it. He seems to run out of pages by the end, though, and must stuff his last chapters with perfume, Fortensky, brain tumors, and Michael Jackson. A quick, dishy read.

Peter Conradi is literary executor of the estate of Iris Murdoch (1919-99) and was her close friend in the 1980s and '90s, so sensible readers will not expect this to be a warts-and-all biography of the distinguished novelist and philosopher. What they get instead is a warm, appreciative portrait focused on Murdoch's formative years: happy Anglo-Irish childhood; intellectual fulfillment at Oxford University, where she joined the Communist Party and formed many enduring friendships; a stint in the civil service and work with refugees during World War II; and the postwar decade, when she began to write the intellectually challenging yet wickedly entertaining novels that made her reputation. John Bayley movingly described his wife's struggle with Alzheimer's disease in Elegy for Iris, and Conradi wisely does not reiterate that material. He concentrates on recapturing the intense young woman who awed fellow students with her brains and enticed men with her blonde hair and generous figure, yet kept everyone at a slight distance, finding epistolary relationships more manageable than the tangled sexual intrigues her fiction explores so acutely. She had many affairs, including a painful one with expatriate (and married) European intellectual Elias Canetti, but marriage to Bayley in 1956 gave her the stability she needed; over the next 40 years she produced 25 steadily more assured and provocative novels, from Under the Net through A Severed Head and The Black Prince to The Green Knight. Conradi uses interviews and Murdoch's journals to good effect in a lengthy but readable text that illuminates the personal experiences that so intimately informed her fiction.

He reached an apogee of fame in the mid-1980s as the producer-arranger of Michael Jackson's blockbuster album Thriller and the charity single "We Are the World," but Quincy Jones has been a force in American music since he was a teenager. He swung hard enough to play with beboppers like Dizzy Gillespie; he studied composition with the legendary Nadia Boulanger; he scored dozens of films and TV shows; he arranged and/or produced albums for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Leslie Gore, and rappers like Melle Mel don't disdain the old man either. Looking back at age 68 in a good-natured autobiography supplemented with brief chapters by such friends as Ray Charles and ex-wife Peggy Lipton, Jones asserts, "I've been driven all my life by a spirit of adventure and a criminal level of optimism." Given his beginnings, growing up poor in Chicago and Seattle with a mentally ill mother lurking in the background, that's quite an achievement. Jones never stood still long enough to let sorrow catch him, and though his treatment of his personal life is standard Hollywood glib ("Though Nastassja [Kinski]'s and my relationship as a couple was not destined to last, she is a great friend"), his prose catches fire when it touches on music: Dinah Washington "could take the melody in her hand, hold it like an egg, crack it open, fry it, let it sizzle, reconstruct it, put the egg back in the box and back in the refrigerator, and you would've still understood every single syllable." His furious energy may have been fueled by personal demons, but his joyous sweep through a half century of American pop convinces you that Jones was right to keep moving: "Nothing is ever wrong if it's going someplace," he asserts. "Music is about ever-changing." --Wendy Smith

Kurt Angle's life has been an epic journey. Growing up in a large family in Pennsylvania, Angle followed in the footsteps of his four older brothers when he decided to pursue wrestling. His discipline and hard work were soon rewarded: He won the Junior National Freestyle Championship and went on to become the Wrestler of the Year at Clarion College. In 1996, with many prestigious wrestling honors to his credit, Angle set his sights on a new goal: an Olympic gold medal. Months of grueling training paid off in the most spectacular way when Angle returned from Atlanta with a gold medal around his neck and renewed determination in his heart.He was just getting started. Angle soon joined the ranks of the World Wrestling Federation and quickly became a main event performer, taunting the crowds with his trademark "three I's": Integrity, Intelligence, and Intensity. These are all qualities that he really possesses, but his character does not always display them in the ring. Through his high-profile matches with some of the biggest names in the business, Angle is now one of the most infamous "heels" in the World Wrestling Federation -- and he loves every minute of it. He has won -- and lost -- the Intercontinental belt and the World title, and he continues to rile crowds and accelerate heart rates every time he steps into the ring. Kurt Angle is living proof that with hard work and determination anyone can fulfill their dreams.