the lives of writers; The season's best nonfiction reveals the stories behind the storytellers.

Byline: Megan O'grady

Spending one's life in the service of genius may be a thankless task, but at least it guarantees you a place in the history books. Leah Bendavid-Val's Song Without Words: The Photographs & Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy (National Geographic) revisits the woman best known for her turbulent 48-year union with Russia's greatest novelist. Credited with inspiring at least one of his characters-Anna Karenina's angelically dutiful Kitty-Sonya, as she was known, was the mother of thirteen children (eight of whom survived into adulthood) as well as a live-in critic, secretary, and muse. But what historians have largely overlooked-and what Bendavid-Val's beautifully presented book elegantly exposes-are Sonya's considerable skills as a diarist and, at a time when cameras were rare in Russia, as a wonderfully naturalistic photographer of prerevolutionary estate life. Meanwhile, Janet Malcolm deftly captures Alice B. Toklas's legendary 40-year partnership with the brilliant modernist Gertrude Stein in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press), clearing up a few mysteries along the way-including how two Jewish women were able to survive World War II in their provincial French ch,teau with the help of a Vichy collaborator.

Contemporary writers look to the past to answer questions about their own identities. In Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf), Edwidge Danticat pays moving tribute to the two men who raised her-her uncle, with whom she lived in Haiti until the age of twelve, and her father, whom she then joined in America-documenting a disintegrating Port-au-Prince and dubious American immigration policies. Racial politics also underscore Bliss Broyard's One Drop: A True Story of Family, Race, & Secrets (Little, Brown), which recounts the author's discovery that her father, the late writer and critic Anatole Broyard, had concealed his black ancestry from her and her brother, who were raised as white in Connecticut. In ...