7 Divided Lives Elsa Walsh (Simon & Schuster, $23) You don't necessarily have to buy the premise of Walsh's book--that the tensions in the lives of what she calls "hypersuccessful" career women closely resemble those of Wal-Mart clerks and high school teachers--to find Divided Lives fascinating. All you need is a ready curiosity for the ways in which TV correspondent Meredith Vieira, conductor and first lady of West Virginia Rachael Worby, and breast surgeon Dr. Alison Estabrook have made it in a man's world--and the amazingly intimate secrets they were willing to tell her.
8 Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams Lyle Leverich (Crown, $35) "To be passionate and to be lonely isn't the easiest of things in the world," Tennessee Williams once remarked about Eugene O'Neill. The playwright, of course, could very well have been talking about himself. The first of two volumes by a biographer whose work was delayed by years of wrangling with Williams' estate, Leverich's exhaustively documented, insightful portrait looks to become an instant classic. Our reviewer said it "reads like a psychological novel and ends like a cliff-hanger."
9 After All Mary Tyler Moore (Putnam, $24.95) Show us somebody who's not a Mary Tyler Moore fan, and we'll show you a misanthrope. Not that being one of the most beloved (and enduring) TV stars of her generation has always been a walk in the park. Moore's life reads like a sweeps week's worth of Oprahs: failed marriages, booze, diabetes, adultery, divorce, the deaths of her son and brother, a sister's drug overdose, a stalking fan, etc. But After All reads not like a celebrity bio but a real book by a courageous and determined woman. 10 High Fidelity Nick Hornby (Riverhead, $21.95) Nobody would want critics to say he'd written "the Lucky Jim of the '90s," but it's a tempting comparison. English journalist Hornby's first novel is a witty, candid exploration of the lonely nights and lost loves of a 35-going-on-18-year-old London record shop owner who measures out his life in pop culture terms. Ditched by his girlfriend Laura, who wearied of his faithlessness, he hides from his hurt by reorganizing his record collection and making inane lists: top five Elvis Costello hits, top five Cheers episodes. But just beneath the jokey surface lie haunting emotional truths.
THE WORST
1 Driving Under the Affluence Julia Phillips (HarperCollins, $24) As a bitchy, tell-all Hollywood gossip, Phillips was a knockout. Her first book (You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again) ratted on everybody and trashed some of the town's biggest names (and, even more fun, quoted them trashing each other). Alas, Lunch's success appears to have convinced her she was a writer--the Hunter S. Thompson of L.A., no less. Big, big, big mistake. She has absolutely nothing to say, at an absolutely numbing length (321 pages).
2 I Want to Tell You: My Response to Your Letters, Your Messages, Your Questions O.J. Simpson (Little, Brown, $17.95) As an old country song goes, if you don't know, we ain't gonna tell you.
