25 Books You Can't Put Down

Stormy Weather by James Gavin

608 pages; Atria

People told her she wasn't "colored enough." (Ethel Waters, among others, despised her.) They said she had no sense of rhythm, couldn't sing the blues. But Lena Horne's patrician beauty dazzled white audiences, and in the 1940s, her sexy, stylish cabaret and film performances made her a star. James Gavin's Stormy Weather (Atria) tells how this elegant icon—polite to a fault, quietly enraged by Hollywood racism—spent decades getting comfortable in her skin.