1. Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health by Leana Wen (Metropolitan)

Wen has been a calming, wise presence on MSNBC though the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, in her memoir, the doctor and former Baltimore health commissioner brings that sensibility to her origin story. Wen arrived in the U.S. with her parents, who were seeking political asylum, and chronicles their financial struggles and the misdiagnoses that hastened her mother’s death from cancer. Drawing from her experience, including her time as an emergency room physician, Wen strenuously argues for investment in public health to save society’s most vulnerable.

2. The Orphans of Davenport: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children’s Intelligence by Marilyn Brookwood (Liveright)

It is genes or environment that matters most in IQ? Psychologist Brookwood takes on that hotly contested debate in her fascinating investigation into a 1930s study in Iowa that found that children at a crowded, affectionless state orphanage stagnated while those in a loving, stimulating institution for the “feeble-minded” improved dramatically in their IQ scores. In her insightful narrative, robust with characters and ideas, Brookwood examines how the era’s eugenicists and racists rejected and repressed the study, which decades later became the foundation for enrichment programs like Head Start.

3. Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn (Viking)

Flyn spent years traveling to landscapes wracked by disasters, from wars and economic collapse to toxification, and with her extraordinary perspective and literary grace, she has found redemption rather than darkness. From slag heaps in her native Scotland and a volcano-ravaged town in Montserrat to blighted areas in Detroit, Flyn explores places in the process of human abandonment and natural reclamation. Visceral and poetic, she writes about how “when a place has been altered beyond recognition and all hope seems lost, it might still hold the potential for life of another kind.”

4. Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur
(Scribner)

Kapur entwines history, biography, and memory in his engrossing narrative inspired by the “aspiring utopia” of Auroville, in coastal southern India, where he and his wife, Auralice, were raised before leaving for the U.S. as teenagers. They later married and returned to raise their family, and ended up learning about themselves. Auralice’s mother, a beautiful rebel from Belgium, and father, a descendant of a notable New York family, were drawn to the community’s idealism and rejection of materialism, but became enmeshed in the conflicts that plagued its evolution, and died on the same day. Kapur vividly evokes the promises and disappointments inspired in the attempt to create a perfect world.

5. We Want What We Want by Alix Ohlin (Knopf)

Ohlin chairs the creative writing department at the University of British Columbia and fans of Lorrie Moore’s short stories will be drawn to Ohlin’s. The 13 stories speak to the title of this collection, as Ohlin subtly and elegantly deals with longing and loss, with characters who seem to be spectators of their own lives. Ohlin captures the contradictory feelings of yearning and detachment and has a special talent for keying into young people, especially women, through experiments and performances of adulthood.