No matter what your political orientation, if you believe — or ever did believe — in the potential betterment of humanity, then you’ve got something to learn from the strange and tragic story of Leon Trotsky. It’s a tale of pride and power and political failure, of genius turned to the service of dogged, dogmatic conviction, of a supremely intelligent man who destroyed others in the name of a cause that then destroyed him. It was a story that finally reached its end in 1940, in a legendary encounter with an assassin armed with a mountaineer’s pickax, as Stanford professor Bertrand Patenaude illustrates in “Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary,” his gripping, cinematic new book about the last years of the Ukrainian Jew who was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. (Whatever your feelings about Trotsky, the story of his murder by Ramón Mercader, the suave Stalinist agent who had wormed his way into the heavily guarded Trotsky compound outside Mexico City, may give you sleepless nights.)

The one true intellectual among 20th-century revolutionaries, Trotsky has been the subject of numerous biographies, including the one he wrote himself (“My Life”) and Isaac Deutscher’s overly worshipful but still definitive three-volume treatment. Patenaude is not exactly competing with those, although at this point in history his book will provide a completely adequate summary of Trotsky’s life and achievements for most general readers. (As Patenaude observes, if you’re inclined to read Trotsky’s own work, his masterpiece remains the epic-scale “History of the Russian Revolution.”) Instead, he paints a distinctive portrait of a human Trotsky, in exile and in disgrace, and hence at his most sympathetic. Trotsky feeds bunnies and chickens at his house in Coyoacán, sleeps with Frida Kahlo and feuds with her husband, Diego Rivera, and launches all-too-accurate broadsides against his nemesis Joseph Stalin, which would be widely and shamefully ignored or resisted by many Western leftists.

At the same time, Patenaude argues that Trotsky’s political, philosophical and personal failures were profound and inescapable. In this telling of the tragedy, our hero’s tragic flaw is a mixture of incurable optimism and stubbornness. Trotsky became V.I. Lenin’s principal lieutenant just before the October Revolution of 1917 and was without doubt its greatest rhetorician and orator, as well as the founder and commander of the Red Army. But as Patenaude reminds us, it was Trotsky, a lifelong believer in social democracy as a mass movement, who had warned a few years earlier that the political philosophy Lenin dubbed “democratic centralism” was dangerous: “The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies,” he wrote in 1912, “and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction.”

All the what-ifs, in Patenaude’s view — what if Trotsky had out-maneuvered Stalin, after Lenin’s death? What if Trotsky had acknowledged the revolution’s crimes and turned away from orthodox Marxism? — are irrelevant, because Trotsky could never have done those things. His genius lay in language, not politics. (It sounds like he’d have made a great TV personality.) I’m not quite sure about this. Trotsky did allow himself momentary room for doubt, writing just before the end of his life that should worldwide proletarian revolution not arrive with World War II, “nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program … ended as a Utopia.” Even with all the blood on his hands and all his misguided certainty about Marxian “dialectical materialism,” Trotsky still stands out as a vital, monumental figure somewhat larger than his context. As philosopher John Dewey wrote to his fiancee after watching Trotsky speak, “‘Truth, justice, humanity’ and all the rest … are receding into the background before the bare overpowering interest of the man and what he has to say.”

The eccentric, extravagant socialite Marchesa Luisa Casati once declared, “I want to be a living work of art,” and it’s a feat she pulled off during her lifetime. More significantly, though, even in a world where celebrities work overtime to assert themselves as daring originals, the Marchesa Casati continues to cast her hypnotic, heavily perfumed spell from beyond the grave.

That seductive aroma wafts from every page of “The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse.” Casati (1881-1957) was a tall, slender beauty with a taste for the unusual (even, apparently, when it came to sex) and a luxurious and idiosyncratic personal style: A celebrated figure in early 20th century European society, she’d stroll through Venice leading her two pet cheetahs on jeweled leashes; her daily look comprised an electric tousle of dyed-red hair and eyes rimmed with wide, dark rings of kohl. (She also used belladonna drops for added sparkle — please don’t try this at home.)

This year marks the 70th anniversary of David O. Selznick’s much loved movie version of Margaret Mitchell’s equally loved “Gone With the Wind.” Readers are ferociously protective of their favorite books, and there’s no doubt that the movie version — credited, ultimately, to director Victor Fleming, although both George Cukor and Sam Wood spent time working on it — takes some significant liberties with the source material. But, as film critic and historian Molly Haskell suggests in her breezy yet deeply insightful study, “Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited,” the “book” versions of Rhett and Scarlett and their “movie” counterparts reinforce one another rather than cancel each other out: For good reason, the two couples share space in our collective imagination rather than jockeying for supremacy.

You think reality TV invented shamelessness? Kids, you have no idea.

“The Brady Bunch” was a corny, campy, but strangely lovable part of our lives. “The Brady Bunch Variety Hour” was the mutant cousin in the basement. Now, even those born long after the time when a perm and wide shirt collar were somehow considered attractive can experience it in glorious horror via a photo-packed, glitter-dappled scrapbook co-written by the one in curls herself, Susan Olsen.

For one strange and inexplicable late ’70s year, America’s favorite blended family returned to the television airwaves as the spangly stars of one of the most appallingly weird spectacles to ever make it to network television. “Love to Love You Bradys” is, undeniably, a head-scratchingly hilarious celebration of a show that welcomed both Tina Turner and H.R. Pufnstuf, that notoriously featured a “fake Jan,” and that the authors themselves refer to as “a steaming turd.” It’s also a candid peek into the workings of a sinking, polyester ship, replete with closeted homosexuality (Robert Reed), drug abuse (Maureen McCormick), hissy fits (Florence Henderson) and some of the worst attempts at singing and dancing ever recorded in human history.

Muriel Barbery’s last book, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” was a massive bestseller both in France and in America. But while the story of a depressed concierge and an angsty teen girl had moments of lyricism, I found its near-constant literary and philosophical allusions pretentious, and its characters unlikable. Thankfully, Barbery’s new book (or old book, technically, as it was written first), “Gourmet Rhapsody,” manages to transform these weaknesses into strengths.

How is it that the juicy slice of cult greatness known as “The Lost Room“ never went further than a six-episode miniseries on the (then) SciFi channel? Ten times more clever and a hundred times more stylish than fan-bait like “Fringe” and “Warehouse 13,” the 2006 show may have suffered from the excellence of its ingredients, specifically a fine cast, led by Peter Krause (“Six Feet Under”) and Julianna Margulies (“ER”), easily lured away by richer projects. (Krause went off to star in ABC’s now-canceled prime-time soap, “Dirty Sexy Money,” which was no better than it sounds.)