Baum on Books

With his new book called “Howard Stern Comes Again” – two decades after the off-the-charts sales of “Private Parts” and “Miss America” – Howard Stern, the Shock Jock of the Western World, may disappoint those who expected his new memoir to be as shocking. But the old “poster boy for doing everything offensive,” as he once described himself, delightfully surprises . . . and charms. Though not to worry, he’s still outrageous.

Who knew that until the middle of the last century, East Granby, Connecticut, was a center for Connecticut Shade, a hand-tended tobacco leaf used as a wrapper for premium cigars? And that the work, which relied a lot on summer migrants, many students from the South, once included Martin Luther King? Keith Scribner knew because he spent a lot of time in East Granby when he was young, and he knows that growing and harvesting tobacco is a back-breaking chore.

Want to be a political journalist or biographical historian? Forget graduate or journalism school. Read Robert Caro’s "Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing." Caro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and recipient of so many other prestigious awards, got them for superb investigative reporting on brilliant, ruthless men.

To judge from much contemporary fiction and successful film adaptations, The Psychological Thriller is hot. Typically featuring dark twisty plots and mysterious, pathological characters, many of these nerve-wracking novels turn on the menacing machinations of vengeful women.