1. Garbo by Robert Gottlieb (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

“She was a phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth,” writes Gottlieb in this biography, as elegantly written and handsomely produced as its subject, who, he writes, “invaded the subconscious of the audience.” Contradictory Garbo went from an uneducated, penurious childhood in Stockholm to Hollywood and became an MGM star of more than 20 films and a beauty icon commanding huge fortunes. She then removed herself from the spotlight and lived a hermetic life after the movies. About the world beyond her mysterious, amazing eyes gracing the book’s cover, Gottlieb writes: “Only the camera knew.”

2. Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness by Elizabeth D. Samet (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In her sharp, insightful cultural history, Samet begins with Studs Terkel’s note to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Good War”:” An Oral History of World War II that the quotation marks suggest the incongruity in mating “good” and “war” that sentimentalizes war. In her fluidly written and nuanced book, Samet argues that “World War II remembrance continues to distort the country’s past and thus to obstruct the realization of a more expansive future.” Samet’s ambitious, capacious yet shapely book draws from a range of sources, from Army guidebooks to Frank Capra films and poet John Ciardi’s war diaries, to illustrate the “incarnations of – and alternatives to – a versatile, durable myth that still serves as a dangerous lodestone in American culture.”

3. Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen (Knopf)

As the pandemic has upended the workplace, Warzel and Petersen smartly argue for a new kind of work, though they admit that they “can’t fix the rot at the core of modern capitalism.” What they can do is key into the current contradiction of working from home: “The dark truth of remote work as we know it now: it promises to liberate workers from the chains of the office, but in practice it capitalizes on the total collapse of work-life balance.” Warzel and Petersen focus on four themes to achieve that balance: flexibility, workplace culture, technologies and community. They call for liberation from the frustrating, performative parts of office work and reimagine a workplace that is not a “breeding ground for microaggressions and toxic loops of hierarchical behavior” but rather is designed to reimagine relationships to work itself.

4. Ghosting: A Widow’s Voyage Out by Barbara Lazear Ascher (Pushcart)

With the force of Joan Didion’s classic memoir of mourning, The Year of Magical Thinking,  Ascher wrestles with the death of her husband of 35 years, whom she met as a college student. She propels her chronicle of the decade after his passing in finely tuned vignettes, about the cruelty of morning and waking from sleep to reality, and “cosmic winks” as she calls reminders of him, often birds in flight, recognizing that, as a neighbor told her: “You’ll think you’re sane, but you’re not.” When she meets a widower who also had had a long, happy marriage, they prepare to enter “the ruthless, radical contract” that compels them both toward the inevitable “until death us do part.”

5. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (Random House)

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, All That She Carried was praised as a “brilliant, original work that presents a Black woman’s countercompilation of lives that ordinary archives suppress.” Harvard history professor and MacArthur fellow Miles uncovers the story of a grain sack containing “a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair” and “filled with my Love always” given by enslaved Rose to her daughter Ashley as the girl was auctioned off in 1850s South Carolina, then passed by Ashley to her granddaughter Ruth. With extraordinary detective work and fidelity to scholarship, Miles uses this bag to illuminate generations of pain and injustice, and  is a must-read.