1. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World)

Poet Hong writes in “United,” the opening essay in a collection that blends memoir, criticism and polemic into a distinctive, powerful mix: “In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world. We are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership.” Hong begins this knockout book, a National Book Critics Circle Award 2021 winner, with her yearlong depression and imaginary tic, a facial spasm, and in her ingenious associations segueing through this extraordinary, boundary-defying collection, we find the book we need to read to make sense of our current, senseless times.

2. The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal by Silvia Foti (Regnery History)

On her deathbed, Foti’s mother asked her daughter to take over a book project on her own mythologized father, who led Lithuania’s 1945-46 revolt against the Soviets and was celebrated for decades in Chicago’s tightly knit Lithuanian neighborhoods after his execution by the KGB. Foti came across a 1941 document connecting her grandfather, Jonas Noreika, with sending Jews and half-Jews to a ghetto, and she went on an investigative mission to Lithuania, where she heard Noreika described as a “Jew killer.” Working with the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, Foti uncovered a trove of incriminating evidence, including thousands of pages of KGB transcripts and a collection of letters. Determined and resourceful, Foti pieced together the facts with sensitivity, conviction, and a sense of narrative that revealed the ugly truth: Her grandfather did not rescue Jews; he perpetuated their elimination as they were starved, beaten, raped, and killed in ghettos in an effort to eliminate Jews from Lithuania.

3. Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur (Norton)

As the title of her capacious, ambitious new book indicates, Northwestern University historian Masur focuses on “the struggle for racial equality in civil rights that spanned the first eight decades of the nation’s history, a movement that traveled from the margins of American politics to the center and ended up transforming the US Constitution.” This is a history of the antebellum movement against racist oppression, showing how unfree the free states really were and detailing how the “ideas of race, rights, citizenship, and federalism that are crystallized in those monumental measures of 1866 made their way into the mainstream of northern American politics and then into federal policy.” Masur deftly weaves in stories of everyday people who challenged local laws, fought codes and restrictions, petitioned, and resisted with a force and vision that shaped the 14th Amendment.

4 Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Knopf)

Stevens and Swan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for their masterful biography De Kooning: An American Master, turn to another psychologically complex, iconic painter whose influence spanned the 20th century: Francis Bacon. Forensic in their research, Stevens and Swan tap their countless interviews and draw a portrait of the volatile artist as a boy growing up amid Irish fox-hunting society with a tyrannical father as the Troubles emerged. They vividly convey Bacon’s fear living as a gay man in Europe as well as his debauchery, drinking, and gambling as he gallivanted through London’s Soho. The authors wonderfully capture Bacon’s charismatic personality, but as especially gifted art critics they also convey the power of his piercing portraits and the bleakness of his paintings, especially the triptychs and diptychs for which he is justly celebrated.

5. Spilt Milk by Courtney Zoffness (McSweeney’s)

In her finely wrought, shapely memoir in 10 essays, Zoffness not only reflects on transmissions genetically through the family line, but also extends her curiosity to the influence of cultural shifts. In her memoir’s playful title, Zoffness signals her wry, and dexterous, sensibilities. The opening essay, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear,” begins with her son, age five, with eyes “wild, lidless,” and anxieties she “wrench[es] out like a splinter,” then spirals into vignettes of her own anxieties migrating and morphing through adolescence, then associating to 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic. While this memoir is expansive, its richness lies in its details. In one example, Zoffness opens the essay chapter titled “Boy in Blue” with “Most mornings, my four-year-old arrests me.”