1. Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City by Rosa Brooks (Penguin Press)

In her extraordinary chronicle of becoming a reserve police officer in our nation’s capital, Brooks has bridged the vast chasm between Blue Lives Matter and Defund the Police. A journalist and professor on sabbatical from Georgetown University Law School, Brooks worked in the 7th Police District, “the poorest, saddest, most crime-ridden part” of the city. In stories drawn from daily encounters, she writes: “Police officers have an impossible job: we expect them to be warriors, disciplinarians, protectors, mediators, social workers, educators, medics, and mentors all at once,” and blame them “for enforcing laws they didn’t make in a social context they can do little to alter.” She saw abuses and systemic problems, as well as “flashes of cynicism and casual contempt,” but also compassion, courage, and creativity. With sharp insight and an instinct for narrative, Brooks’ is well suited to be an effective advocate for much-needed change. “Crime is real – and the misery, pain, and fear engendered by violent crime,” she writes, “are visited most often on the very same demographic groups who are disproportionately likely to end up incarcerated.”

2. The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP by Alex Tresniowski (37Ink/Simon & Schuster)

Tresniowski infuses the 1910 true-crime story of Tom Williams, a Black handyman wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting and murdering a 10-year-old white girl in Asbury Park, N.J., with heroes of the time like crusader Ida B. Wells, who helped create the NAACP. While the NAACP’s lawyers work to free Williams, Wells and the Sheriff are aided by an unconventional private detective on the cutting edge of forensic science, Raymond Schindler, who extracts a conviction from the real villain in a gripping narrative from a fraught time that resonates today.

3. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth (Bloomsbury)

Readers of Perlroth’s alarming book will urge Washington to come up with a coherent, strong cybersecurity policy immediately, convinced by her argument that the U.S. is vulnerable to a new invisible global warfare. Perlroth, cybersecurity reporter for the New York Times, exposes the underground market for cyberweapons, and while it may seem that Russia poses the greatest threat to the U.S., she shows that Iran and China are overlooked at our peril. Perlroth takes readers on a vivid, fascinating tour of this shadowy world as she investigates hackers, creators of the world’s digital infrastructure, and the group that released National Security Agency hacking tools.

4. Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer (One World/Random House)

Lehrer, a much-heralded painter and writer who was born with spina bifida, recounts her difficult childhood and, with extraordinary art and graceful prose, tells the story of how she evolved not only as a disabled person and artist but as a woman with a complicated sexuality. Specializing in portraits, Lehrer takes on stigma with insight, grace, humor, and generosity. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, Golem Girl is a gorgeous book that is intellectually provocative, drawing its title from Jewish folklore in which a rabbi creates from mud an anthropomorphic monster that becomes a mutable metaphor, villain or victim, which Lehrer makes radiant in her memoir.

5. Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint by David Hardin (Belt Publishing)

At the height of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, poet and writer Hardin worked for five months as a volunteer with the Red Cross, delivering emergency bottles of water to many residents who could not reach the city’s distribution sites. In exquisitely chiseled vignettes, Hardin captures the deplorable conditions in Flint and the injustices that have plagued it for generations. In short, self-contained chapters, Hardin evokes the anguish, as well as the quotidian existence, of Flint’s residents, and entwines reflections of his own unhappy childhood and difficult relationship with his mother, who was declining into dementia and eventually left him to work through his grief.