1. She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (37 Ink/Simon & Schuster)

While Harriet Tubman’s status on the $20 bill languishes in President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department, the woman known as “Moses” for leading enslaved people to freedom emerges as an action hero in the dramatic biopic Harriet and as a fierce advocate for suffrage and abolition in Dunbar’s richly rewarding tribute in book, replete with illustrations and photographs. Dunbar is a National Book Award finalist and co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. In this book, with a conversational tone grounded in scholarship (check the footnotes), she evokes a multidimensional Harriet, “full of black girl magic.” From Tubman’s headaches and seizures in her childhood, through her courageous, gun-carrying work as a Union spy in the Civil War and later her creation of a home and hospital for the poor and aged, Dunbar writes of her as “a true boss lady, a superhero, and a warrior.”

2. Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America by Sherrod Brown (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Brown may have withdrawn from 2020 presidential consideration, but Desk 88 may make readers wistful for what might have been. Brown, Ohio’s senior senator, could well have titled his engrossing, dramatic book Profiles in Courage, had not it been taken. He argues that the lessons from eight of the previous occupants of his desk in the Senate chamber – who were united in their progressivism – are still instructive for our country today. The eight who sat where Brown does include Robert F. Kennedy (New York), Al Gore Sr. (Tennessee), Hugo Black (Alabama), William Proxmire (Wisconsin), and George McGovern (South Dakota) -- men who were united in their progressivism, as Brown recounts in his engrossing, dramatic book. Some of those senators followed the tradition of carving their names inside the bottom drawer of the desk before leaving office. Brown recalls what drew him to Desk 88: He asked Sen. Edward Kennedy which of his brothers had signed it “Kennedy.” The senator’s reply: “‘It must be Bobby’s,’ he said. ‘I have Jack’s.’”

3. The Problem with Everything: My Journey through the New Culture Wars by Meghan Daum (Gallery)

Wary of “hollow indignation and performed outrage,” resistant to the resistance, Daum draws from her own experience, research and reporting from the front lines of a culture that is “effectively mentally ill.” With her counterintuitive point of view, Daum has written an ingenious jeremiad that is fun to read, with a distinctive tone and sensibility about campus dynamics, fourth-wave feminism, cancel culture, #MeToo, and identity culture that should be familiar to readers of her book The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Daum acknowledges that her own resistance may be fundamentally generational, but her frustration with resistance as public performance, the social media echo chamber, and the “chatterati” feels enduring as she challenges – but never chastises – readers to think for themselves.

4. Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law by Jeffrey Rosen (Henry Holt)

Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center and a George Washington University law professor, was a law clerk when he met then-Judge Ginsburg on the elevator when she was headed to Jazzercise class. That chance encounter revealed a mutual love of opera and led to 25 years of correspondence and joint appearances that became the basis of this illuminating book. Featuring transcripts of their conversations, edited for clarity by Ginsburg, the collection ranges widely – it even includes her tracked changes to Rosen’s marriage vows for the ceremony she performed in her Supreme Court chambers. Rosen recognizes the viral Tumblr blog that led to the book Notorious RBG and how, as Ginsburg’s celebrity grew, her dissenting opinions became fierier. That spirit is on fine display with her reflections on being the lone dissent in the 2013 decision Fisher v. University of Texas, which upheld the university’s affirmative action program; on the decision she would most like to overturn, Citizens United; and on her progression from what she describes as a “flaming feminist” in the 1970s to consistent voice for liberal values on an increasingly illiberal Court.

5. This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon)

Gaitskill’s emotionally and intellectually provocative novella, which ran in The New Yorker, now appears in book form, feeling as if it had been ripped from #MeToo headlines and specifically the 2017 Shitty Media Men Google spreadsheet. In alternating perspectives, from two longtime, middle-aged friends who are influential figures in publishing with their own charged relationship, Quin confides in Margot his creepy sexual behavior and how he gets into women’s psyches in a sadistic way. With a gripping narrative skill, Gaitskill builds suspense toward an inevitable downfall, raising questions about power dynamics, ambivalence, victimhood, self-knowledge, delusion, and complicity.