1. The Saint Makers: Inside the Catholic Church and How a War Hero Inspired a Journey of Faith by Joe Drape (Hachette)

Hope and inspiration seem in short supply as this pandemic persists, but a bit of divine intervention seems to burst from Drape’s new book, which has the Rev. Emil Kapaun, a Catholic priest and military chaplain from a tiny town near Wichita, Kansas, who died as a prisoner of war during the Korean War, at its center. Drape encountered the story of Kapaun, remembered for his courage that had the “softness of velvet and the strength of iron,” while he was in Kansas working on an earlier book, Our Boys. Resisting hagiography, he investigates the convoluted process of saint-making and the fascinating characters who gather evidence and led the campaign for Father Kapuan’s sainthood. Drape enriches an inquiry into his own faith with a light personal touch, drawing on his Jesuit youth and reflecting the universal draw of Kapaun’s heroism.

2. Storm Over Key West: The Civil War and the Call of Freedom by Mike Pride (Pineapple Press)

Key West is famed for its flamboyant nightlife, roaming roosters and literary figures like Ernest Hemingway, but Pride adds a new chapter in the island’s rich history with his deep investigation into how the antebellum years and the Civil War shaped the southernmost point in the continental U.S. Through a wide range of sources, from diaries to public records, Pride traces how Florida seceded and joined the Confederacy while Key West sided with the Union, with the enslaved freed after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, and black men drafted and deployed to South Carolina. While battles were not waged on Key West, yellow fever took its toll as did an 1865 hurricane and ongoing racial tension.  Pride vividly conveys the story of a group of citizens at the tip of the Confederacy who broke with their region and refused to join the Lost Cause.

3. Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation by Reid Mitenbuler (Atlantic Monthly)

Before Walt Disney, there was Winsor McCay, who created “Little Nemo” comics, the first moving drawings, in 1911 and launched the animation boom. Mitenbuler captures that excitement in his engaging, fast-paced, and deeply knowledgeable chronicle of those years, vividly portraying the dramas of animation pioneers and relating their tensions and rivalries as competition increased. He tells vibrant stories of the artists who created characters like Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and Felix the Cat, as well as the origins of classics ranging from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Looney Tunes, and sets them against the backdrop of American history.

4. Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy by Leslie Brody (Seal Press)

In 1964, Louise Fitzhugh published Harriet the Spy, a classic novel for young people that featured precocious 11-year-old tomboy Harriet M. Welsch living in a townhouse in New York City’s Upper East Side, encouraged by her nanny, “Ole Golly,” to keep a notebook because: “Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.” Brody carefully sets out to tell the truth about Fitzhugh’s life, from her privileged childhood in Memphis, raised by a father who won custody after a sensational divorce trial, who went on to Bard College and immersed herself in bohemian intellectual circles and lesbian relationships. Like her creation Harriet, Fitzhugh possessed a quirky independence and a gift for getting to the heart of things.

5. Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley (Knopf)

With a sly wink, this novel, “Perestroika,” or “Paras” for short, doesn’t concern Russia, but rather freedom, which is just what a French racehorse finds when she presses her unlocked stable gate ajar, and picks up her groom’s purse as she had  “just won a purse, and so, she thought, this would certainly be it” and finds herself free. Paras romps and grazes her way to Paris’s Place du Trocadéro, meeting Frida, a savvy German shorthaired pointer who buys food with the money inside the purse; cultivated, multilingual raven Raoul; a resourceful 8-year-old orphan, Etienne; his 96-year-old great-grandmother; mallards, and even a lovelorn rat. They bond and their relationships deepen as the curious filly explores this world around her, in a miraculous, saccharine-free anthropomorphic fable, which Scott Simon described on NPR as a “novel for mature readers who have young souls.”