1. What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era by Carlos Lozada (Simon & Schuster)

He reads them so we don’t have to. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post critic Lozada, who has also received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, has read 150 nonfiction books on our current age to “preserve a snapshot of how we grappled with the Trump era in real time,” noting the irony that a man who rarely reads books has propelled so many about his presidency. In his engrossing, insightful book, Lozada devotes little time to tales of White House scandals, intrigues, and policy quarrels, but focuses on those titles that are not beholden to this moment, which is why they reveal so much about it.

2. Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime by Jennifer Taub (Viking)

In her rousing manifesto, law professor and activist Taub takes aim at white-collar crime – embezzlement, fraud – and argues that it has been on the rise since the 2008 financial crisis while simultaneously criminal prosecutions have “cratered,” and that this situation has become even worse during the Trump era.. These crimes cost society many more billions of dollars a year than crimes like theft and robbery, yet upper classes are immune to prosecution, Taub contends. She vividly conveys her examples of corporate criminal activity, including bribery involving a portfolio manager for a state retirement fund and opioid-pushing Purdue Pharma, and points to President Donald Trump’s numerous pardons and society’s blind eye to crimes like investment fraud, computer hacking, and money laundering, arguing that the Justice Department needs a new division to fight these privileged criminals.

3. Trust: America’s Best Chance by Pete Buttigieg (Liveright)

Mayor Pete may have dropped out of the 2020 presidential primary, but along the way he distinguished himself as a literary stylist in his debut memoir, Shortest Way Home. In Trust, Buttigieg adroitly mixes personal reflections with history and philosophy to create a far-ranging and supple narrative about how the public has lost faith, arguing that the rise of glaring inequality fuels resentment and distrust in not only the government that failed to prevent it, but also those who benefit from this growing gap. Buttigieg laments that “the very same internet platforms that have need for good and balanced journalism have also demolished that journalism’s revenue, with newsrooms thinning and news outlets closing at a fast and frightening clip.” He insists there is a “need to figure out a way to reward a carefully sourced news story with at least as much revenue as a Macedonian teenager’s website can get by running a fake news post claiming that Britney Spears had been eaten by alligators.”

4. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (Ecco)

What begins as a social novel – an affluent Brooklyn couple and their children settle in a secluded, luxurious Airbnb getaway – becomes an astonishing, propulsive, apocalyptic work of great imagination. (Leave the World Behind was longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction.) The family is surprised when the wealthy, Black homeowners appear one night, claiming that there has been a blackout in New York and that they feel unsafe in their Park Avenue high-rise. Alam does a double-flip and springboards into the dark waters of instability when life is shaken by paranoia, doubt, and speculation. Read it before the Netflix movie starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington hits.

5. Like Love by Michele Morano (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State Press)

Morano grapples with iterations of love in her dazzling collection of essays, pieces that fit together as a nonlinear memoir. Love takes on so many different forms, resisting conventional standards in a wide range of essays. At “nerd camp,” in one essay, an older female teacher has a crush on a precocious boy, “a thirty-year-old man in a little boy’s body.” In another, clarity is found in the “magical power of the American diner” where she works a terrible job, “with its public yet intimate space, its business of comfort, its mediation of loneliness.” This slender, shapely, and robust book moves from Morano’s childhood bedroom to motherhood, Medea, and Mary Cassatt.