1. Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

The prodigiously gifted Whitehead, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, returns to Harlem, extending the saga starring family man – and sometimes fence – Ray Carney of his 2021 Harlem Shuffle. With Crook Manifesto, Whitehead moves forward a decade or so to the seedy, Nixon-era New York, with Carney trying to score Jackson 5 concert tickets for his daughter. Whitehead keenly observes wildly different strata of society and captures the vicissitudes of the decade in this dynamic novel, propelling it to the bestseller list.

2. Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel G. Freedman (Oxford University Press)

In his resonant biography, Columbia University journalism professor Freedman rescues Minnesotan Humphrey from the dustbin of history where he had been relegated as LBJ’s vice president, a supporter of the Vietnam War, and the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Richard Nixon in 1968. Freedman introduces a generation of readers to the son of a South Dakota pharmacist who encountered racism as a graduate student in Louisiana and became “boy mayor” of Minneapolis, fighting both anti-Black and anti-Jewish covenants. At the 1948 Democratic convention, he adroitly and effectively called for rejection of the states’ rights argument, and as Freedman movingly describes it, Humphrey convincingly beseeched opponents to walk boldly into the “bright sunshine of human rights.”

3. We Are Too Many: A Memoir (Kind of) by Hannah Pittard (Holt)

Pittard has done the impossible: reinvented the divorce memoir.  When she learns of her husband’s affair with her transgressive best friend, Pittard’s marriage implodes, and the result is her s fractured narrative in three acts – the first as a play, with dialogue and stage directions with scenes like (“Hannah Discovers Her Husband Is Having an Affair,” and “Several Hours Later, a Phone Call from Patrick”). Pittard sustains the drama of ambivalence: “It took us months to learn to stop saying we loved each other when we said goodbye,” she observes. She finds “little triggers everywhere,” and somehow, magically, this intimate, dynamic memoir becomes an excavation of not only marriage, but also self, friendship, and memory. 

4. Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival by Mark Guarino, foreword by Robbie Fulks (University of Chicago Press)

Guarino’s richly textured cultural history is informed by his instinctive sense of the sounds and lyrics that originated in Chicago’s small taverns and clubs that were an “unusual hothouse for creativity,” crucial to the reinvention of country and folk music. Guarino captures the improvisation of balladeers and troubadours, and their music shaped by the century’s gyrations of immigration and industrialization. Among his most memorable characters is Studs Terkel’s friend Win Stracke, co-founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music, musician, and activist, hounded by Hoover’s anti-communist FBI, who observed: “Chicago has no entrenched cultural tradition like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. An idea can grow here without being required to conform.”

5. Hotel Cuba by Aaron Hamburger (Harper Perennial)

In his resonant and rich novel, Hamburger reimagines his family’s experience with the widely restrictive laws and quotas of early 20th-century America that blocked immigrants, including Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution on the Polish-Russian border, and drove them to seek refuge in Cuba. Hamburger places resilient Pearl and her flighty younger sister, Frieda, at the emotional center of his empathic, satisfying saga. Hamburger, who was recently awarded Lambda Literary’s Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, evokes the colorful, sultry Prohibition-era Havana, as both young women make their way in the world.