1. The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett (Simon & Schuster)

Providing a jolt of optimism in book form, Harvard public policy professor Putnam and Aspen Institute strategist Garrett have written a macro-history tracing the hill-shaped curve reflecting the 125 years of the “I-we-I” era and how the collective “we’re all in this together” was replaced by a libertarian individualism. Building on Putnam’s landmark Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, the authors focus on the current moment and its amalgam of economic inequality, social isolation, narcissism and individualism, and rancorous political polarization. Putnam and Garrett marshal wide-ranging evidence, in lucid prose as well as graphs and charts that include the frequency of certain words in millions of books, to explain why America got better, then worse – and suggests how we can get better again.

2. We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper (Grand Central)

As a Harvard College undergraduate, Cooper heard rumors of the murder of an outspoken anthropology student, Jane Britton, four decades earlier, and her obsessive curiosity and pursuit of justice resulted in this compulsively readable true-crime story, enriched by Cooper’s personal introspection and perceptive insights into the mysteries of the era and particulars of the rarefied milieu. Cooper’s dogged investigation propelled authorities to reconsider that cold case as she pursued leads that led to DNA testing that proved the killer’s identity. Toward the end of her smart, compelling debut, Cooper finds the stone plaque marking Britton’s grave and leaves a note: “Dear Jane, I hope I’m telling the story you want me to tell.”

3. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (W.W. Norton)

Ben-Ghiat locates Donald Trump in a sequence of the world’s authoritarian rulers from World War II to today. A professor of Italian history, she analyzes the continuum of right-wing strongmen, from the fascist takeovers by dictators like Mussolini and Hitler, to military ones by Pinochet and Gaddafi, to the warped elections of Berlusconi, Putin, and Trump. Ben-Ghiat details how these contemporary strongmen accrued and maintained their power and deepens understanding of them by demonstrating how they asserted and weaponized their masculinity.

4. Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin (Knopf)

“Black holes are special because there’s nothing there,” writes Levin, a Barnard College professor of physics and astronomy, in her warm, smart prose inviting readers to share her fascination with these cosmic phenomena. Enhanced by wonderful artwork, Levin’s book glides through the universe, from relativity and quantum mechanics to the solar system, the Milky Way, and the Andromeda galaxy. Stirring imagination and curiosity about the mysteries of black holes, Levin makes a case that they are a fodder for fantasy.

5. To Be a Man: Stories by Nicole Krauss (Harper/HarperCollins)

A talented novelist (The History of Love, Great House), Krauss makes her robust imagination, elastic range, and original voice abundantly clear in this wonderful story collection. With her Jewish frame of reference, these stories are mostly contemporary and set in the future rather than the past. Krauss pushes the boundaries of realism, memory and traditional notions of spirituality. Human relationships are at the center of these stories, ranging from an older man emerging from surgery and immediately encountering his new grandson about to undergo his bris to an eerily resonant one in which gas masks are distributed and homeowners are instructed to seal their doors and windows.