Required Reading

The Friedkin Connection

by William Friedkin (HarperCollins)

Filmmaker Friedkin, born in Chicago to Russian immigrants, made his name with a great New York movie — “The French Connection.” Among the actors he considered for the Popeye Doyle role, before settling on Gene Hackman, were Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason and even columnist Jimmy Breslin. “You can write your columns from the set,” Friedkin told him. Luckily, Breslin declined. Two years after the 1971 film won five Oscars, another of his films, “The Exorcist,” earned 10 nominations.

Imperial Dreams:

Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre

by Tim Gallagher (Atria)

To Gallagher, the editor in chief of Living Bird magazine, the treasure of Sierra Madre is not gold, but a 2-foot-tall woodpecker with a trumpet-like call. In his search for the bird — not seen since the 1950s — in the mountains of Mexico, he comes up against heavily armed drug traffickers, fleeing villagers and unforgiving terrain. An adventure to remember.

Hillbilly Heart

by Billy Ray Cyrus (New Harvest)

It’s no exaggeration to call country star Cyrus’ memoir a hoot. Among his tales: As an amateur baseball player hoping for a big-league career, he suddenly switched gears to music after hearing a voice in his head telling him to buy a left-handed guitar and start a band. When he was the opening act on Dolly Parton’s tour, a supermarket weekly claimed they were lovers. Dolly laughed at it, telling him the tale would sell records. And the pictures of his famous daughter Miley as a doe-eyed tot are simply priceless.

A Fort of Nine Towers

An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A story of survival and resistance in Afghanistan, from a native man who came of age during the pre-9/11 civil war. As a boy, Omar — who is also the co-author of “Shakespeare in Kabul” — hid from the mujahideen with his family in the turreted fort that was near his home and for which the book is titled. At age 18, amid the Taliban’s rise to power, the author opened a carpet factory in Kabul where he employed and sheltered 40 women and girls, covertly teaching them literature and history as they wove rugs. A rare insider view of how the Afghan people endured the violent final decade of the 20th century.

Carrie and Me

A Mother-Daughter Love Story

by Carol Burnett (Simon & Schuster)

Burnett — also the author of memoirs “This Time Together,” and “One More Time” — remembers her oldest daughter, Carrie Hamilton, who died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 38. The book covers Hamilton’s unconventional life, including her stints in acting, singing and rehab. Burnett incorporates e-mails, excerpts from her daughter’s diary, faxes and an unfinished novel Hamilton was writing in her last years while living in an isolated cabin in Colorado. A poignant and, of course, funny look at a life cut too short.
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