1. Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In this much-discussed jeremiad, Packer draws on cultural, political, and intellectual history, and an appreciation of the current crisis of economic inequality, to explore our current fraught political landscape. He describes America today as being divided into four warring tribes: the “Free America” of “self-reliance,” a Libertarian impulse of corporate and affluent interests; the elite believing in globalization at the expense of others; “Smart America,” with its confidence in meritocracy, Lipitor, Amazon Prime, affirmative action, and a social safety net; the “Real America” of Sarah Palin, drawn to the demagoguery of Donald Trump; and “Just America,” who since 2014 have been energizing politics with a heightened focus on equality, including greater attention to righting the nation’s racial wrongs.  Is there any hope that these often quite hostile tribes will come together?  At the end of his ambitious book, Parker concludes: “All of this asks that we put more faith in ourselves and one another than we can bear.”

2. Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Salzman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In her deliciously satisfying narrative, Saltzman hits the history button reset on Napoleon Bonaparte by telling his history through a slant: Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana, the massive masterpiece pillaged from Venice to become a crown jewel of the Louvre Museum, which would also display other great works of art looted from Italy. “The looting of art reflected the best and the worst of Napoleon’s character,” writes Salzman in her vivid, revelatory history. “Bonaparte didn’t think of himself as a plunderer. Anything but. In the Italian campaign he saw himself as a soldier, a commander, a victorious general in chief – a citizen of the Republic of France carrying the Revolution abroad, and already a statesman, a diplomat who told the people of Lombardy he was freeing them from the despotic Austrian regime.”

3. Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford (Flatiron)

What of the children of the incarcerated? Ford hits the best-seller list with her powerful and nuanced memoir as the daughter of a man serving a long sentence for rape, opening with his letter saying he would be released. Ford wisely focuses her account on his absence rather than the reunion, allowing her to chronicle her childhood with her brother in 1990s Fort Wayne, Indiana, and their beleaguered, short-tempered young mother, burdened as the family’s sole provider, as well as her demanding but loving grandmother. Ford evokes these relationships as they evolved, through her yearning for her father, reaching an understanding of the matriarchs in her life and coming into her own as a woman.

4. When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer by Curtis Wilkie (W. W. Norton)

Mississippi-born journalist Wilkie, who has distinguished himself as a sharp, analytical, and nuanced chronicler of civil rights for half a century, reconstructs an ugly and overlooked episode involving the Ku Klux Klan that resonates today as an expression of white supremacy. To infiltrate the Klan as an informant, the FBI recruited Tom Landrum, who had served in the Air Force, played college football, and returned to his hometown of Laurel, Mississippi, and was horrified to witness the KKK’s “White Knights,” who had murdered civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Wilkie draws on brave Landrum’s written FBI reports and shows how the White Knights were implicated and prosecuted for the murder of longtime NAACP President Vernon Dahmer, who died after the KKK firebombed his home. 

5. Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin (Pantheon)

What happens when she falls in love with his mind, and it vanishes? What’s left of the marriage?  In Henkin’s generous, wise – and wry enough to avoid sentimentality – novel, dashing Shakespeare scholar Spence sweeps graduate student Pru off her feet, they marry, and he wins many awards and is showered with privileges. When he is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at 57 and is unable to finish his book, she must return money for his book contract, which leaves them in financial straits, especially with his disabled sister and a son from a prior marriage to support. Astonishingly, Henkin transforms what could be a mighty grim work of fiction into a melancholy and tender one enriched by the viewpoints of a constellation of characters.