1. The Best Presidential Writing: From 1789 to the Present by Craig Fehrman (Avid Reader Press)

So what makes for the “best” presidential writing? There’s the soaring oratory of Abraham Lincoln’s “Four score and seven years ago,” FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” While Fehrman features those classics, he also rescues gems from more obscure presidents, such as Grover Cleveland and Chester Arthur. There’s the infamous, from Richard Nixon on “Checkers” and his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and Calvin Coolidge’s “It costs a great deal to be president,” to an overlooked bit of TR wit: “The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech.” A unique perspective on American history, Fehrman’s wonderful volume ends with a pre-presidential bestseller published in 1987, from Trump: The Art of the Deal: “You can’t con people, at least not for long.”

2. Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 by Neal Gabler (Crown)

In the first of two volumes, Gabler argues that Sen. Ted Kennedy was “the most consequential legislator of his lifetime,” who had risen above tragedy to become the patriarch of his glamorous family as well as an effective leader. An experienced biographer of figures including Walter Winchell and Walt Disney, Gabler brings a cinematic arc to Kennedy’s life and vividly captures his lawmaking, from his work on liberal causes such as the Voting Rights Act to health insurance, in addition to portraying the little brother reshaped particularly by brother Bobby’s assassination followed by the Chappaquiddick car accident killing Mary Jo Kopechne. These tragedies in the waning days of American liberalism are particularly moving at the conclusion of this volume as Kennedy is attacked by mobs of Boston anti-busing demonstrators.

3. The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Books That Carried Them through a War by Delphine Minoui, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In this wrenchingly beautiful book, Minoui, a Middle East correspondent for Le Figaro covering the Syrian civil war, learns of a small cadre of pro-democracy protesters in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, whose form of resistance was a secret library in the basement of a nearly destroyed building. President Bashar al-Assad condemned them as jihadists, but they remained, collecting thousands of volumes from the rubble of Daraya, gathering to read and discuss these books and ideas, everything from Shakespeare to The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Minoui communicated with them through spotty internet connections, finding that from the ruins they found a freedom of which they had been deprived.

4. Face to Face: The Photographs of Camilla McGrath by Camilla McGrath and Andrea Di Robilant (Knopf)

A gorgeous time capsule of photographs, punctuated by lively remembrances by Griffin Dunne, Vincent Fremont, Harrison Ford, Fran Lebowitz, and Jann Wenner. McGrath, daughter of Italian aristocracy, and her husband, Earl, a screenwriter-producer-curator, lived in a sphere of sophisticated celebrity where McGrath captured casual moments with, for instance, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Linda Ronstadt and Gov. Jerry Brown, Anjelica Huston’s wedding party, Andy Warhol and his dachshund, David Hockney and Stephen Spender, Jackie Kennedy by the pool. McGrath had an eye for a moment, and in this collection of warm black-and-white images, she captures a bygone era of casual glamour.

5. Collected Stories by Shirley Hazzard, edited by Brigitta Olubas, foreword by Zoë Heller (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Hazzard may be best known for her novels, including The Transit of Venus (National Book Critics Circle Award winner) and The Great Fire (National Book Award winner), but her stories came first, won her great acclaim, and are now gathered in this elegant volume. In her sharp, smart foreword, Heller notes that Hazzard’s stories are not literary artifacts of their time. “The stately rhythm of Hazzard’s sentences, the epigrammatic precision of her observations, the decorousness of her glancing, ironic blows,” she writes, “have a closer affinity with the classic prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with the frank, unbuttoned work of her contemporaries.” As Heller observes: “In Hazzard’s work, beauty in whatever form – a sentence, or a table setting – has a moral value.” These stories, many of them previously unpublished, possess a beauty to be admired, savored, and very much valued.