1. Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent by Rich Cohen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

When Cohen played ice hockey as a kid, his father occasionally came to his games and barely paid attention except to yell, “Get up! You’re not hurt!” on two occasions. Now, Cohen writes, there’s a “new kind of hockey parent.” In this smart, funny account of the season his 11-year-old son, Micah, spent with the Ridgefield Bears, from tryouts to state tournaments, Cohen not only captures the maniacal, obsessive hockey scene in Fairfield County, Connecticut, but also grapples with why his own intensity leads him to a cardiologist, migraines, and sleepless nights. His gift as a writer is his kaleidoscopic view of the youth hockey world “as if we’re no longer one nation but a million little nations with a million little nationalisms, each being the project of turning a youth player into a star.” Cohen’s generosity and wit infuse his chronicle, making it a fun read, though he blows the whistle on bad behavior. “The mildest New Jersey heckler outdoes Connecticut’s most vociferous,” he writes. “The nastiest are found on Long Island.”

2. The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution by James Oakes (W. W. Norton)

Great Emancipator or Reluctant Savior? Historian Oakes, widely admired for his keen understanding of the dynamics of abolition, presents a new and nuanced view of Lincoln, whose “commitment to the federal consensus, far more than white supremacy, accounts for his deliberate approach to emancipation and abolition.” Oakes persuasively argues that Lincoln’s effective use of the Constitution to prevent the expansion of slavery and incrementally work toward passage of the 13th Amendment to prohibit slavery was wise and necessary to eliminate the possibility of reenslavement when the Civil War ended. In the moving scene ending his book, Oakes quotes Lincoln being characteristically eloquent about the 13th Amendment. “This amendment is a King’s cure for all the evils,” Lincoln declares. “It winds the whole thing up.” 

3. Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer (Scribner)

Pitzer has a gift for injecting narrative history with her own experience, enriching deeply researched sagas from the past with her own fearless curiosity. In Icebound, she has scoured archives to chronicle the three dramatic expeditions of 16th-century Dutch navigator and cartographer William Barents, who was determined to find the northeastern passage to China. Barents and his crew contend with frozen seas, polar bear attacks, frigid temperatures, and scurvy – and eventually are poisoned by polar bear liver – in their quest for imagined riches at a warm North Pole. With Barents’ diaries and ship logs, Pitzer joined Arctic expeditions and sailing trips between 2018 and 2020 to reconstruct his mythic voyages, infusing this rich history with her perspective, and she recognized how much the Arctic climate and landscape had changed between her journeys.

4. How I Learned to Hate in Ohio by David Stuart MacLean (The Overlook Press)

The cri de coeur of Hillbilly Elegy is nowhere to be seen in MacLean’s winsome and provocative tragicomic novel narrated by bullied and lonely high school freshman Baruch Nadler, who, known as “Barry,” is relentlessly attacked by homophobes in his rural Ohio town in the late 1980s. Writing in short, well-carved chapters, MacLean introduces a new classmate, a socially adroit Sikh boy named Gurbaksh “Gary” Singh, who bonds with Barry, stands up to the bullies who torment him, and somehow carries a panache that makes Barry “popular adjacent.” But as MacLean writes, “Adolescence is not for amateurs.” MacLean has mastered the tones of striving diffidence in his teen characters as their worlds fall apart at home with badly behaving adults, anger simmers below the surface of daily life, and racial violence erupts. How I Learned to Hate in Ohio becomes not only a finely observed novel but one with a deep social conscience.

5. The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968-2011 by William Feaver (Knopf)

Feaver, an art curator and critic who spoke daily by phone with painter Lucian Freud and says they spoke thousands of times over more than three decades, reveals the portraitist in Technicolor 3D. Feaver writes about the commerce and technique of Freud’s art, from dealers and collectors, to his models, including mothers and daughters. As Feaver points out, it was not clear how many children Freud fathered, except that there were many and that he did not keep track of them. In this second and final volume of Feaver’s biography, what emerges from all the stories of Freud’s conquests, passions, painting, gambling, and friendship circle (which included W. H. Auden, Picasso, and Virginia Woolf) is a ravenous man, hungry for life.