Briefly Noted

Last Girl Before Freeway, by Leslie Bennetts (Little, Brown). The most notable revelation in this snappy biography of the comic Joan Rivers, who died in 2014, is that, after her husband’s suicide and a brutal professional failure, she considered killing herself, too. But the best parts of the book are tart evocations of the mid-century comic-club scene and of Rivers’s inimitable panache. Bennetts, who has previously written about women and work, doesn’t sugarcoat Rivers’s legendary harshness toward the rest of her sex, from stewardesses to Elizabeth Taylor, nor does the book downplay the positive effect that Rivers had on the visibility of women in show business. A shameless fabulist and social climber, who threw fax machines when she got angry, she was also brave and tireless, and these qualities are given equal weight.