1. The Golden Gate by Amy Chua (Minotaur)

Perhaps best known for introducing “Tiger Mother” to the American lexicon, Chua, a Yale Law School professor, now makes her fiction debut: a captivating murder mystery featuring the matriarch of an affluent family in Berkeley, California, an unreliable narrator with a trio of granddaughters, one of whom may be the culprit. Then there’s the code-switching homicide investigator with his own secrets in this rich social history of the tempestuous 1940s, with real characters like Madame Chiang Kai-shek as well as historical wrongss like the Japanese internment, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Mexican deportation.

2. American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In their engrossing history, McWhirter and Elinson capture the evolution of the AR-15 from its creation in an engineer’s garage to its adoption as a weapon of mass destruction in Aurora, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde. The Wall Street Journal reporters deftly detail the rifle’s technical evolution into an easy-to-use, lightweight device requested by the Army into a deadly weapon, its popularity supported by the NRA and private equity. Engrossing, authoritative and deeply reported, American Gun captures the horrific tragedies wrought by this weapon that has fiercely divided America.

3. When the Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest Season by Rich Cohen (Random House)

In a quartet of basketball teams and star players – the Celtics’ Larry Bird, the Lakers’ Magic Johnson, the Bulls’ Michael Jordan, and the Pistons’ Isiah Thomas – in four games of the 1987-88 NBA season, Cohen sees the transformation of the game, with Bird representing the past and Jordan the future. He has a “revisionist take” on Isiah Thomas, whom he watched as a high school player from Chicago’s West Side and who embodied brutal aggression, and argues that Thomas deserves a place in the pantheon of great players. A contributing writer to Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, Cohen infuses his new book with the distinctive charm evident in Monsters, about the 1985 Chicago Bears, and The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse.

4. Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter by Rachel Shteir (Yale University Press)

In her nuanced, insightful biography, Shteir recovers the life and legacy of women’s rights activist Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique 1 those around her, (p 178) For her robust portrait of Friedan, from a bookish Midwestern Jewish girl to wife, mother, author, and co-founder of the National Organization for Women, to her disputes over sexual politics with other feminists, Shteir conducted more than 100 interviews and consulted new archival material for this vivid portrait of an activist icon.

5. Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins by Jennet Conant (W.W. Norton)

She was one of the first journalists to enter Buchenwald and Dachau, and for her reporting on the Korean War, Higgins was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. The committee cited her “fine front line reporting showing enterprise and courage,” adding: “She is entitled to special consideration by reason of being a woman, since she had to work under unusual dangers.” Conant’s engrossing biography vivifies Higgins, a beautiful, “nervy” trailblazer with the New York Herald Tribune. She worked with relentless disregard for her own safety, even when married with children, in Vietnam into the Johnson administration. “As always, for Maggie,” writes Conant, “communism was the enemy, freedom the issue worth fighting for.”