1. Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein (Avid Reader Press)

Editor-at-large and co-founder of Vox Klein brings his powerful explanatory powers to bear in this persuasive political history and social commentary on how “identity politics” replaced ideology after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Klein argues that as Democrats have become more diverse and Republicans more homogeneous, weak parties and strong partisanship can lead to demagoguery. With keen understanding of the media landscape, Klein explains how the demise of mass media – network television and newspapers – has fueled niche publications and websites that fan the flames of disunion.

2. The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever by Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

When Garrett arrived at Harvard in 1959, he belonged to “the largest group of Negroes admitted to a freshman class to date,” and by graduation they were recognized as black men. More than half a century after they arrived in Cambridge, former NBC News producer Garrett tracks down his classmates for this amalgam of memoir, group biography, and social history. Recalling their college years of meals at the “Black Table” and Malcom X’s 1961 appearance on campus, he traces their trajectories from Jim Crow through the age of Trump.

3. Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin (Liveright)

While automobile ownership brought new freedom to black people, it also led to new encounters with hostility and violence. In Sorin’s fascinating new book, she explores this contradictory role of the automobile in American history and how black drivers and passengers would look through their windshield and encounter “a landscape of demeaning and frightening imagery” in billboard signs and roadside eateries like “Topsy’s,” which featured logos of stereotypical enslaved black women. Informed by her own family’s travels, Sorin looks back through the history of black motorists who relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book for names of gas stations, eateries, and motels that would welcome them in the Jim Crow South, as well as “sundown towns” where they would not be safe after dark.

4. Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Atria)

“Dear Prudence” advice columnist at Slate and co-founder of The Toast, Ortberg brings a charming, slightly off-kilter, and smart sensibility to his high-energy essay collection. Mixing memoir essays about his gender transition, and distinctive cultural riffs, Ortberg blends biblical references with pop culture and classic literature, making surprising, and entertaining, connections. Ortberg writes with irreverence about his obsession with the rapture and his evangelical childhood, but he segues between television obsessions from “The Golden Girls” to “Law & Order.” He signals his distinctively sharp yet loopy style in the first chapter, titled: “When You Were Younger and You Got Home Early and You Were the First One Home and No One Else Was Out on the Street, Did You Ever Worry That the Rapture Had Happened Without You? I Did.”

5. Weather by Jenny Offill (Knopf)

Offill won a following with her beguiling novel Dept. of Speculation, which sketched the course of a marriage through glistening prose fragments, and her readers will be richly rewarded by Weather. It’s narrated in a similarly fragmented style by a librarian named Lizzie, who worries about disasters – from environmental to cultural – on the horizon while she also works answering mail for a buzzy, hyper-charged podcast. In Lizzie’s head, balancing the doomsday scenarios with the quotidian aspects of life, including a new cable show Extreme Shopper and the cumulative weight of it all, makes for a singular, compelling reading experience.