In The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Pulitzer Prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin tackles Teddy through his relationships with Taft, his trusty-aide-turned-successor-turned-political-rival, and the “muckraking” reporters who exposed civil and corporate corruption and helped him push through reform.

Michael Paterniti’s The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese is a story about the importance of stories. The title promises action, a plot—perhaps a romance, an affair, a retaliatory act of violence or sabotage, all inspired, strangely, by a particularly delicious piece of dairy food. But there is little action, at least in the present tense.

If you’ve heard of Erwin Schrödinger, and your knowledge of physics is limited to a dimly remembered high school class, it’s probably because of his hypothetical cat.

It takes all of three sentences of Richard Russo’s new memoir, Elsewhere, for the Pulitzer Prize winner to confirm what even his most casual reader must suspect: This is a man who grew up among the shuttered factories and potholed souls that make up his fiction.