NOTEWORTHY PAPERBACKS

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

STICKY FINGERS: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, by Joe Hagan. (Vintage, $17.) This appraisal of Rolling Stone’s co-founder and publisher holds nothing back: not his narcissism and violent temperament, nor his legendary appetites — especially when it came to sex. Even though rock music’s importance faded and the magazine has thinned, Hagan makes a case for Wenner’s lasting place in 20th-century history.

LEA, by Pascal Mercier. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. (Grove, $16.) Two Swiss men meet by chance in Provence; one is trying to repair his relationship with his daughter Lea, a brilliant but mercurial violinist who is hospitalized in an asylum that once sheltered Vincent van Gogh. As the men’s stories and identities mix, the novel poses unsettling questions: Who are we? And what might it be like to be someone else?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford. (The Experiment, $16.95.) Blending data from archaeology to evolutionary biology, this rollicking study investigates how DNA links us to our ancestors. Rutherford takes readers back hundreds of thousands of years to the beginnings of the most recent iteration of humanity, and mines genetics to see our history in a new light.

HARMLESS LIKE YOU, by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. (Norton, $15.95.) This debut novel traces two coming-of-age stories: Yuki persuades her parents to leave her in New York so she can focus on her artistic development — and continue her love affair with the city in the 1960s and ‘70s. Years later, the son she abandoned tracks her down in Berlin. As Times reviewer Namara Smith said, Buchanan reminds us that “the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today.”

I CAN’T BREATHE: A Killing on Bay Street, by Matt Taibbi. (Spiegel & Grau, $18.) This deeply reported account frames the death of Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold in New York in 2014, as a consequence of profound societal inequities. Taibbi integrates the facts with the economic and political realities of Garner’s life, from institutional poverty to crooked landlords to racist law enforcement agencies.

THE NINTH HOUR, by Alice McDermott. (Picador, $17.) In Irish Brooklyn in the early 1900s, nuns take up the cause of a young widow and her daughter, Sally. Sally seems headed for a life in a convent, too — until worldly temptations interfere. Times reviewer Mary Gordon praised McDermott, saying, “She has now extended her range and deepened it, allowing for more darkness, more generous lashings of the spiritual.”