Mary J. Blige (Music)

Mary J. Blige’s style — both musical and personal — has gradually evolved over her nearly 20-year career. The Grammy winner’s ninth studio album, “Stronger withEach Tear,” is the latest evidence of that evolution.

The disc’s title track is an empowerment anthem, representative of recent chart-toppers that have given the long-hailed “Queen of Hip-hop Soul” mainstream appeal. “In each tear there’s a lesson/ makes you wiser than before/ makes you stronger than you know,” Blige belts over a steady, marching beat.

Big buzz singer-rapper Drake joins the 38-year-old songstress on the uptempo single “The One,” and T.I. lends his Southern drawl to the bouncy “Good Love.” Both songs are good, but “In the Morning” is great because the track features Blige tapping into her signature soulful sound.

‘Pops’ (Books)

With his fun-loving stage persona and his mastery of music, he was beloved by people as varied as Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Wells. But there was more to Louis Armstrong than his artistic talent.

Armstrong was one of the few musicians to knock the Beatles off the top of the charts, but his musical ability was only part of his talent. He wrote two autobiographies — and there was none of that “as told to stuff”; he did it on his own.

Armstrong understood the drama of his life — both professionally and personally — and did a lot to document it. Besides his biographies, he was a great letter writer and was eager to use a tape recorder.

Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic and arts columnist, has put that wealth of material — including hundreds of private recordings of backstage and after-hours conversations — to good use in “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.”

Using Armstrong’s own words throughout the book, Teachout draws a picture of an exuberant musician; an ambitious artist; and a complex man who had an explosive temper, lifelong love of marijuana and battled everyone from racists to the mob.

‘Rewilders’ (Books)

“Rewilding the World: Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution” (Metropolitan Books, 401 pages, $28.50), by Caroline Fraser: A prominent biologist has estimated that there are 10 million to 20 million different plants and animals, and says half may disappear by the end of the century.

Conservationists want to hold on to as many as possible. If the tiny mold that led to the making of penicillin had gone extinct before researcher Alexander Fleming got hold of it, would we have the wealth of antibiotics that have been developed?

In recent years, many “rewilders” have concluded that the way to keep species from disappearing is to move back toward prehistory, when large animals like the woolly mammoth roamed untrammeled by man-made changes to the environment.

Caroline Fraser tells the fascinating, little-known story in “Rewilding the World,” collected in “dispatches from the conservation revolution.”