Chris Stein—co-founder, with Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie—has an amazing memory, an engaging, offbeat storytelling style, and a gift for memorable formulations: “Heroin is like getting a loan consolidation: you take a lot of problems and trade them in for one big one,” he tells us. His memoir, Under a Rock (Macmillan Audio, 10 hours and 18 minutes), opens with a foreword written and read by Harry. The actor Dennis Boutsikaris, known for roles in Better Call Saul and The Good Wife, takes over for most of the book; then the author himself reads a moving afterword in which he reveals that during the gestation of the memoir his teenage daughter Akira died from an accidental overdose. Worrying about his shortcomings as a role model, he writes, “I thought that I presented my own drug experiences in a negative light to our kids, but I’m wracked with guilt that any discussions might have been misconstrued.” From the details of his childhood in 1950s Brooklyn to the punishing, hotel-room-wrecking concert tours of the ’70s and ’80s to cameos by Messrs. Warhol, Bowie, Basquiat, Ramone, Scaggs, and Pop, Under a Rock is a “fascinating yet cautionary account regarding the hazards of rock ’n’ roll and celebrity,” as our critic put it in a starred review.

RoseMarie Terenzio, who was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s assistant at George magazine, has a bit of a cottage industry going with memorials to her dead boss, following up a 2012 memoir, Fairy Tale Interrupted, with an oral history, co-authored with longtime People magazine editor Liz McNeil. Read by Terenzio and six additional narrators, who take turns playing everyone from Mike Tyson and Brooke Shields to the People reporter assigned to the “Sexiest Man Alive” story, JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography (Simon & Schuster Audio, 14 hours and 53 minutes) works very well in audio. The opening chapters include testimony from Secret Service agents involved with the family at the time of his father’s assassination; schoolmates and lifelong besties—though no Kennedys whatsoever—recall his years in prep school and at Brown. Though the portrait is a bit soft-focus overall, Kennedy’s rocky road to the New York state bar (“THE HUNK FLUNKS,” as the New York Post put it, twice) is not spared. The last section of the book details the plane crash that killed Kennedy, his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren. Analysis of the accident by aviation experts makes painfully clear the hubris of the fledgling pilot’s decision to take off that stormy July night.

About two-thirds of the time, listening to pollster Nate Silver read On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (Penguin Random House Audio, 15 hours and 4 minutes) made me feel smarter—privy to the esoteric knowledge that allows Silver’s subjects to win tens of thousands or even millions at the poker table. Some of the time, however, I was lost; I’m afraid cryptopunks and blockchains are as obscure to me as ever. But even then, Silver’s writing style, wit, and candor make for an entertaining listen. He admits that he’s most powerfully driven by the desire to be right and, aside from a notorious lapse with the 2016 election, he usually is. (And, he’ll have you know, he was less wrong about Trump than everyone else.) His guiding metaphors, the River and the Village, describe two camps: people who think the way he does (Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Vegas) and the liberal establishment and media (the New York Times, Harvard, D.C.) The audiobook comes with a PDF including all the charts and graphs referenced in the text and a very helpful glossary. As our starred review put it, the book is “a clever look into a unique realm.”

Marion Winik hosts NPR’s The Weekly Reader podcast.