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For three decades, Christian Gerhartsreiter claimed to be someone else. After fleeing his German hometown, he developed a series of false identities, moving up the social ladder as he moved across the U.S. Ultimately, he married a lawyer who believed he was a Rockefeller. Journalist Mark Seal talks about the mystery man at the center of his new book, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit.

Over the past decade, Macel Ely decided to find out who his great-uncle — the late gospel singer Brother Claude Ely — really was. In interviews with nearly 1,400 people, Macel discovered that Claude had a healing effect on those who came to his revivals — and his music influenced some of the pioneers of rock 'n' roll.

In Tayari Jones' novel Silver Sparrow, two young girls grow up as secret sisters. They are daughters of the same man, but have different mothers. And just one of them knows that the other exists.

It isn't easy to transition from teen idol to Hollywood star — and while heartthrob Rob Lowe may have succeeded, that's not to say his career hasn't seen some historic highs and lows. He chronicles his journey from the Brat Pack to The West Wing in a new memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends.

In Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs described his bizarre and brutal upbringing. And in turn, his brother and his mother published their own accounts of the family saga. In rival memoirs, the three writers blur the lines between fact and fiction and tell their own versions of the truth.

In the media, Stanley Ann Dunham is often identified simply as "a white anthropologist from Kansas," or "a single mother on food stamps." But biographer Janny Scott argues that those descriptions don't do justice to the president's mother — a complex, intellectual woman who led an "unconventional" life.

Drinking didn't stop in the United States from 1920 to 1933 — it just went underground. Author Daniel Okrent discusses the lasting cultural and political impact of Prohibition in his book, Last Call.

Two years after opening his award-winning Chicago restaurant Alinea, chef Grant Achatz was diagnosed with tongue cancer. He describes losing and regaining his taste in Life, on the Line. "My palate developed just as a newborn," Achatz says. "I don't recommend it, but I think it made me a better chef."

If celebrity tell-all books are the snack food of the literary world, author Susan Jane Gilman has been on a binge this year. Her picks — from various ranks of the pop-culture pantheon — may not be the proudest additions to your bookshelf, but they may be among the most amusing.

Journalist Max Hastings discusses his new book, Armageddon. The book tells the story of the bloody and violent final months of World War II from the point of view of the people who suffered through those months — and lived to tell about it.