IN PRINT

In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr. (Knopf, $26.95) is an exhaustive study of one of the more fascinating characters in entertainment history. Wil Haygood, scribe for the Washington Post, commands a level of scholarship in this biography that is beyond reproach.

But more than a simple telling of Sammy's life, he chronicles the history of black culture. Reaching back to the Civil War, Haygood maps the Davis family tree, and in so doing illustrates the worlds of vaudeville, movies and TV.

Not to say Sammy's life was simple. According to Haywood, Davis was almost resentful of his ethnicity. He dated—and slept with—white women almost exclusively. He mimicked only white performers. He was a sycophant, pawing at the cloaks of stars like his lifelong idol, Frank Sinatra. The thing that saved Davis was his phenomenal talent.

He could sing, act, do impersonations, and most of all, dance. And all of in the course of one performance.

While Haygood's writing rarely lifts itself off the page, the fascinating life story of the driven, complex performer keeps the reader turning the pages as determinedly as Davis pursued his goals of stardom and acceptance.

100 Suns (Knopf, $45) Armageddon as coffee-table entertainment. 100 Suns compiles striking photos of aboveground nuke tests in Nevada and the Pacific. In shot after shot, beauty binds inextricably with horror: These pictures of mass destruction are flat-out lovely, like nebulae seen through the Hubble. "Harry," a 1953 blast, has the bulbous cool of a Star Trek alien. "Yankee," from 1954, looks like a fiery new universe being born. And, in a way that makes for one chilling book, it was.