1. A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump by David Plouffe (Viking)

True to its title, Plouffe’s book delivers a detailed manual for increasing the number of ballots cast for a candidate other than President Donald Trump. In an effort to defeat “the sociopath currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Plouffe, who was Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008 and senior adviser in 2012, exhorts concerned citizens to “(s)eize the weapons at hand!” Without donating money or even leaving the house, he says, voters can use social media, volunteer with campaigns, vote early, talk to friends, families, and neighbors, and build enthusiasm, which could increase Democratic turnout to 70 million or 75 million. This would be enough to win not just the popular vote but also the Electoral College, which is important because, as he argues, Republicans are “higher propensity voters.”

2. The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice against a Criminal President by Jill Wine-Banks (Henry Holt)

In her timely and lively memoir, Wine-Banks recounts her singular experience as a woman trial lawyer in the Watergate special prosecutor’s office. Her stories of cross-examining President Richard Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods about her famously “accidental” erasure of a White House recording and even of being threatened by FBI agents are vividly rendered yet seem almost antiquated in the context of today. An MSNBC legal analyst famous for her distinctive pins (a set of cherries demonstrates “how the Republicans are cherry picking details of the IG Report while ignoring facts of impeachment articles”), Wine-Banks brings her distinctively wry, feminist perspective to the Watergate era and today, arguing that Donald Trump, like Nixon, is “corrupt, amoral, vindictive, paranoid, ruthless, and narcissistic.”

3. The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business by Nelson D. Schwartz (Doubleday)

The gulf between rich and poor might be less meaningful today than the vast one between the super-rich and everybody else. In his well-titled The Velvet Rope Economy, Schwartz, a New York Times economics reporter, exposes privileges reserved for the extremely wealthy – like deluxe private airport terminals, medical “navigators” with connections to top specialists, and access to superior education – and examines how these excusive advantages exacerbate America’s growing inequality and enrich the companies that charge for these elite services. While Schwartz is attentive to the ways this privilege insulates the very rich, he points to companies devoted to fairness, for instance Southwest Airlines, Target, and the Green Bay Packers NFL franchise.

4. Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Hochschild recovers the story of a fascinating Russian-Jewish immigrant radical set in the Gilded Age in an engrossing biography with resonance today. From her labor in a Cleveland cigar factory, Stokes was inspired by socialist politics and worker rights, and she became a journalist for a Yiddish newspaper in New York and married a millionaire involved with settlement houses. Hochschild paints a vivid portrait of Stokes and her husband as well as the heady milieu of left-wing activism in which they moved with colorful idealists like Margaret Sanger and Eugene Debs – until dissolution of her marriage left Stokes in poverty, in a parable for our time of growing inequality.

5. The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (Harper)

 Erdrich’s radiant new novel is drawn from the experience of her grandfather, a factory night watchman and tribal leader of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa who fought the 1953 congressional bill that threatened to abrogate their treaty of land ownership. With her characteristic attention and sensitivity to the nuances of Native American life on the plains of North Dakota, with its beautiful landscape and wrenching poverty, Erdrich evokes this world fully, extending from the interlocking lives on the Chippewa reservation into urban America as two Native American sisters journey to the city and find themselves buffeted by another set of dangerous forces.