The moment the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, cameras converged off-field around Bill Murray, whose unwavering fandom of the tormented team heralded the end of their one-hundred-eight-year Billy Goat curse. In The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing (Random House, $26), Gavin Edwards uses The Ten Principles of Bill (my favorite being The Second: Surprise is golden; Randomness is lobster), to examine the endearing zen of this actor/comedian/everyman. In addition to highlighting these principles, Edwards attempts to reconcile Murray’s mythic man with his true identity. In doing so, the author aptly assesses Caddyshack, Stripes, and Ghostbusters as developing an onscreen persona where “the wiseass slacker gets the girl,” while revealing Murray’s off-screen identity as an actor who “throws away the script, only to improvise the best scene in the movie.” Edwards also considers the phenomenon of random Bill Murray sightings at archeological digs, weddings, and, most dramatically, at red lights—when fingers cascade to cover the eyes of a waiting pedestrian, only to disappear and reveal our beloved clown who jokingly says, “No one will believe this happened.”