Our Guide to the Fall's Hottest Reads

Reagan in Hollywood
BOOK:Marc Eliot writes about the future president's career as actor, pitchman and Screen Actors Guild chief. SEPT. 15
PRO: President of the United States was by far Ronald Reagan's greatest role, but here's how he rehearsed the part.
CON: There's not a lot new to say about his grade-B movies. "Bedtime for Bonzo," anyone?

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BOOK: A 900-page epic novel about the disappearances of hundreds of young women from a Mexican border town. NOV. 11
PRO: It's more accessible than Chilean author Roberto Bolaño's previous works.
CON: Just to reiterate: it's 900 pages long.

Goldengrove
BOOK:Francine Prose's elegiac story of a grieving 13-year-old girl. SEPT. 16
PRO: Fans of "The Lovely Bones" and "We Were the Mulvaneys" will adore this unpretentious novel about family and loss.
CON: Readers expecting literary complexity from Prose may be bewildered by the story's simplicity.

The Irregulars
BOOK: Before author Roald Dahl wrote "James and the Giant Peach," he spied for Britain during World War II. SEPT. 9
PRO: With Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and future adman David Ogilvy, Dahl hobnobbed in Washington, chatting up Eleanor Roosevelt and bedding Clare Booth Luce at Churchill's behest.
CON: Light on 007-style cloak-and-dagger capers. Author Jennet Conant chronicles lots of cocktails, few cyanide pills.

The Hemingses Of Monticello
BOOK: For any remaining doubters, Annette Gordon-Reed's biography makes a persuasive scholarly case that Thomas Jefferson's slave, Sally Hemings, bore seven of his children. OCT. 15
PRO: In tracing Hemings's genealogy, Gordon-Reed details the history of slavery in America and Jefferson's complex role in it.
CON: A dense, scrupulously researched 600 pages—not for the casual Jefferson fan.

The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006–2008
BOOK: The latest exposé from Bob Woodward detailing the behind-the-scenes maneuvers in managing the Iraq War. SEPT. 8
PRO: Woodward appears to have almost unmatched access to in-the room sources.
CON: His three previous Bush White House books stirred up some dust, but not much muck.