When Tsutomu Yamaguchi died two weeks ago, at 93, he was eulogized as a star-crossed rarity: a man who lived through two atomic blasts, at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki. He was a man with very good luck, or very bad luck. It’s hard to decide.

In 1978, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe collaborated on an art show in New York that poet-critic Rene Ricard dubbed “Diary of a Friendship.” That could have been the corny subtitle of Just Kids, but the book⎯which is only occasionally corny and often deeply affecting⎯has none. Smith appends nothing market-friendly like “My Life with Robert Mapplethorpe,” probably for the same reason she uses, on the cover, a faded portrait of them taken at Coney Island in 1969 in lieu of a Mapplethorpe art photo. This is not a memoir of what these two became; it’s about their becoming.

Last spring, Wired magazine ran a mini-feature on how to make small talk. The tone was that of a pep talk, the advice poignantly remedial. The overall effect was to make the heart bleed for the presumed social ineptitude of the magazine’s tech-savvy readers.

When I was an elementary and junior-high school student in Arizona in the 1970s, the school lunch calendar was always a harbinger of fun meals to come: made-from-scratch Salisbury steak, baked chicken, spaghetti with meatballs, or tamale pie ladled out by smiling lunch ladies in hairnets and washed down with little cartons of fresh-tasting, ice-cold whole milk. We all got a lot of exercise back then; I was always hungry. I ate everything on my tray, even the peas, carrots, corn, or (God forbid) brussels sprouts, and I passionately loved the fresh-baked rolls and brownies, the Mississippi mud cake. The

Robin D.G. Kelley’s new biography performs the essential and gratifying task of transforming a deliberately enigmatic eccentric—”I like to stand out, man. I’m not one of the crowd”—into a warm, familiar, flesh-and-blood presence. Kelley emphasizes that the chapeau-sporting genius who wrote “Nutty” was at bottom a devoted husband and father rooted in a social network dating back to his childhood on West 63rd Street in Manhattan, where he moved from North Carolina at age four in 1922. There Monk lived—except for two teen years in a gospel roadshow and a few sojourns with relatives in the Bronx—until he retreated to

What is art education and what should it do? The essays that Steven Henry Madoff has assembled in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) explore this often-controversial question and attempt to determine how to educate people to become professional artists. Madoff is the Senior Critic at Yale University’s School of Art. Art School emerges from symposia that he conducted over a five-year period. Thirty prominent artists and educators contributed essays that assess, approve, and in some cases decry the purposes and pedagogy of contemporary formal art studies.

Drawing on the tradition of fanciful collage practiced by such poets as John Ashbery, David Shapiro, and Joe Brainard, Brandon Downing wields his own scissors to cut a distinctive patch within this New York School specialty. Other influences—Charles Henri Ford and Tom Phillips—may also be in evidence, but Downing’s assuredly contemporary sensibility marks both his choice of images and his orchestration of texts. Familiar visuals like those lifted from ’50s- and ’60s-era postcards, magazine ads, and grade school textbooks mix provocatively with rarer fare—a World War II plane-spotting guide, a stock certificate, and yellowed pages from a nineteenth-century book about

Cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco is the world’s foremost creator of “comics journalism”—a contemporary field he basically invented. His previous books, including Palestine—for which Sacco interviewed hundreds of people on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict—record, sometimes in minute detail, what is absent from the flash of news reports: the texture of lives on the ground. Sacco doesn’t flinch when depicting some of the most atrocious episodes in recent global history; in Safe Area Gorazde, his extraordinary volume on Bosnia, he presents intricately rendered drawings of mass graves. Sacco, who was himself born to a Catholic family in Malta, is