A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

WONDER BOY: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans >> (Holt, 400 pages, $19.99.) This biography traces the life of Tony Hsieh, the millionaire founder of the shoe retailer Zappos, “with the gathering tension of a slow-motion disaster,” according to a New York Times reviewer — from selling his first company to Microsoft to his struggles with isolation and addiction and his death at age 46.

SMALL MERCIES, by Dennis Lehane >> (Harper Perennial, 320 pages, $19.99.) Lehane’s latest mystery is set in the summer of 1974, when a busing backlash is roiling Boston. It “has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out,” a Times reviewer wrote.

THE LAST ANIMAL, by Ramona Ausubel >> (Riverhead, 304 pages, $18.) “In the Age of Extinction, two tagalong daughters traveled to the edge of the world with their mother to search the frozen earth for the bones of woolly mammoths,” starts Ausubel’s absurdist romp about family and climate change, which follows two teenagers, Eve and Vera, as they contend with their father’s death and their paleobiologist mom’s desire to birth a woolly mammoth in a lab.

MONSTERS: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer >> (Vintage, 288 pages, $17.) Dederer’s book, expanding on her viral 2017 essay, “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?,” plumbs the relationship between art, gender and morality in the work and lives of famous artists. It is “part memoir, part treatise and all treat,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote in her review.