“It is still not widely known in the United States just how deeply mambo and Cuban son seeped into American popular music,” writes Radanovich Wildman of Rhythm: The Life and Music of Benny Moré (2015). In this biography of bandleader, composer, and “King of the Mambo” Pérez Prado, Radanovich seeks to remedy this by using Prado as a focal point in a cultural history of the mambo. From Prado’s birth in East Matanzas, Cuba, in 1917, to his death in 1989 and beyond, the author traces the mambo’s evolution from the slower danzón to Prado’s greatest successes, such as his numerous film roles or his Billboard #1 song, “Cherry Pink Apple Blossom White.” The book is most compelling when delving into Prado’s character, such as when the author cites Margo Su, a staple of 1940s Mexican nightlife, in describing Prado as a “diva” who “bought a Cadillac and had the seats covered with tiger skin, wore heavy shiny gold chains adorning his neck and wrists.” Unfortunately, these insights are rare—Radanovich didn’t use many interviews, correspondence, or other primary materials; so much of the book reads like an informational guide to mambo. Still, he succeeds in conveying how radical this music was, from the “strident violence of his saxophones and trumpets” to threats of Prado being excommunicated from the Catholic Church because he was “the true incarnation of the devil.” The author also deftly notes the mambo’s underappreciated influence: “If you took away syncopated Cuban rhythm from early R&B and rock and roll, we would have a very different musical heritage.” It’s a perfect introduction to this style of music, though readers interested in the music theory of mambo or insight into Prado’s compositional process might want to look elsewhere.

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Many books have been freed from censorship by courts, James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover being only two of the most noteworthy. Aycock, a North Carolina writer and librarian who has devoted much of his life to the freedom of literary access, argues that another case matters. In 1982, the Supreme Court heard Island Trees v. Pico. “In the process,” he notes, “it gave us the first—and so far, only—library book ban case to be decided by the United States Supreme Court.” The case dates to 1975, when the Island Trees Union Free School District, on Long Island, sought to ban 11 books from its libraries, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Oliver LaFarge’s Laughing Boy. “No one had complained about these books,” he writes. “There had been no challenges, no letters to the editor, no public shouting matches. …The board simply acted. Like a sleeper cell.” Was removing these books a violation of the First Amendment? The court split. But what matters is the larger question of how potentially transgressive or challenging content can help young people make personal and social decisions. Each of the books in the case gets a full reading here, and the payoff is this: “Teens want sexual information. They need it. …When people search for information, they usually have one of three goals: to seek answers, to reduce uncertainty, or to make sense of a situation.” These goals, for Aycock, constitute the social function of literature. They also constitute the personal impetus for his book. “I entered middle school in 1985 and never received any sex education at all,” he writes. “Is it any wonder I turned to novels?” What makes the book more than a screed against the censor is the author’s unique personal investment. As he says, books teach what cannot be taught in class.

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) wasn’t the world’s most recognizable film director for his dashing good looks. In Young’s deep dive into the Master of Suspense’s approach to costuming his actors, she hypothesizes that there was “a wish fulfillment to Hitchcock’s filmmaking as he fantasized about being as suave and debonair as Cary Grant in impeccable tailoring, instead of being trapped in his own bulky, awkward frame.” As a director more invested than most in the clothes that went on his actors’ backs—he would occasionally take them shopping for their costumes—Hitchcock worked closely with the designers spotlighted herein, especially the multiple Oscar-winning Edith Head, who worked on nearly all of his movies, from 1954’s Rear Window onward. Young, a Scottish writer behind a previous Hitchcock book, Hitchcock’s Heroines, is like one of the director’s better on-screen gumshoes, sleuthing out and spotting patterns in Hitch’s costume and style preferences. She notes that “his psychopaths were typically dandies—Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, Bruno in Strangers on a Train, and Bob Rusk in Frenzy, had a flair for fashion and a desire to kill.” In a Hitchcock film, a purse isn’t just a purse: The title character in Marnie “keeps her proceeds from her crimes, and her neurosis, within a yellow pouch; in Dial M for Murder, Tony invades Margot’s maroon bag to frame her for murder; and Lisa in Rear Window proves her resourcefulness by squeezing her nightgown and slippers into a tiny overnight case.” As Young proceeds chronologically from film to film, skipping over precious few, she reliably supplies casting backstories and plot synopses—although this offering probably isn’t geared for Hitchcock newbies. Fashionistas should, of course, ignore that advice.

For all the ways that writers have anatomized the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, no one has approached it like Ahmed. An English broadcaster and the daughter of South Asian immigrants, she fell for the Beatles in 1979 at age 11 while watching videos of the band’s films. She views A Hard Day’s Night with an outsider’s eyes, concluding from a scene in which she identifies several non-white Beatles concertgoers that “Britain, for all its complicated social tensions, is captured in this film as having a multiracial reality.” This dovetails with a prevailing, persuasive contention of Ahmed’s: Unlike other British films of its time, A Hard Day’s Night manages not to seem old-fashioned when watched today. The author devotes the book’s first half to unpacking the movie’s plot (thumbnail: The Beatles commute by train from Liverpool to London, so they can perform on a TV show); the book’s latter half comprises chapters dedicated to, among other topics, and most illuminatingly, the film’s women. As Ahmed observes, they’re not just the screamers of the opening scene’s train-station chase: Female characters have jobs that keep Beatles business humming. Ahmed submits that “the film, while always making clear that the Beatles are lively young heterosexual men, never relies—in their encounters with females—on promoting the kind of stereotype that has dated so many British social realist films of its time.” Director Richard Lester’s other, like-minded choices (such as to ditch a scene from the script that contained what Ahmed calls “questionable racial humour”) reflect an aversion to mean-spiritedness, which may well be the key to why A Hard Day’s Night remains such a pleasure, as is this incisive, nimble title.

Naja and her best friend Sylda witness a shipwreck one stormy night near their jungle village of Karahvel, discovering a lone survivor: an albino woman in the throes of childbirth. The child who emerges is Rowan, who brings not joy but terror when a mysterious red crescent mark on his neck leads his mother to abandon him. While the village turns its back, a midwife named Kialla claims Rowan as her own before Naja does, despite the shaman Isakora’s rants that Rowan is cursed. Naja, a skeptic of the shaman and her predictions, eventually takes Rowan in only after her father and friends have all died. Crushed by grief, Naja is determined to teach Rowan to take care of himself before she dies. Told through the eyes of Naja, Rowan’s fourth guardian-mother, the narrative deftly pivots from a simple origin story into a complex exploration of society and motherhood imbued with strains of feminism. The author explores the costs of social ostracism, both forcefully inflicted and self-imposed, on an innocent child and the people who have chosen to be his protectors. Grief over death is ever-present within the story and frequently drives the life-altering decisions the characters make. The burdens and joys—sometimes inextricably intertwined—of being a woman and a mother are a consistent theme as well. The novel’s sympathetic characters and its implicit messages about finding a purpose in life promise a series that a general readership will enjoy. Readers see Rowan’s experiences threatening to shape him into a figure of vengeance, a temptation only avoided by the careful teachings of his mother figures and Naja’s mantra from her father: “Still water, steady heart.”