‘HITLER: ASCENT, 1889-1939’ By Volker Ullrich (Alfred A. Knopf). How did a man described as a “half-insane rascal” and “pathetic dunderhead” rise to power in the land of Goethe and Beethoven? Why did millions of ordinary Germans embrace him and his doctrine of hatred? How did this “most unlikely pretender to high state office” assume complete control of a once democratic country and set it on a monstrous course through history? In this insightful and revealing biography, Mr. Ullrich shows how Hitler used an arsenal of demagogic tools (lies, fake promises, theatrical rallies, mantralike phrases) to exploit a “constellation of crises” in post-World War I Germany, including economic woes, unemployment and political dysfunction. He argues that Hitler’s rise was not inevitable but that his domestic adversaries failed to appreciate his ruthlessness, while foreign statesmen naïvely believed that they could control his aggression. His book shows just how the unthinkable can happen. (Read the review.)

‘NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS’ By Ocean Vuong (Copper Canyon Press). These fierce, startling poems capture the history of prejudice in America (where “trees know/ the weight of history”) and the hopes and fears that bring immigrants to its shores. Mr. Vuong — who was born on a rice farm outside Saigon in 1988 and was the first in his immediate family to learn to read — writes with a musical appreciation for the sound and rhythm of words. He has a talent for capturing stories and memories (like those of his grandmother, who remembers the fall of Saigon) in unexpected and searing images, and uses the magic of language here to turn “bones to sonatas” and by pressing pen to paper, to touch his family “back from extinction.” (Read the review.)

‘LAB GIRL’ By Hope Jahren (Alfred A. Knopf). The geobiologist Hope Jahren possesses the two attributes Nabokov deemed essential to the writer: “the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Her memoir communicates the electric excitement of a scientific discovery; the discipline and tedium involved in conducting long-term experiments; and the arduous, sometimes thrilling experience of fieldwork. The volume is, at once, an enthralling account of her discovery of her vocation, and a gifted teacher’s guidebook to the secret lives of plants — a book that should do for botany what Stephen Jay Gould’s writings did for paleontology, and what Oliver Sacks’s essays did for neurology. (Read the review.)

‘THE NORTH WATER’ By Ian McGuire (Henry Holt). This novel about a 19th-century whaling expedition is as gory as Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” as darkly melodramatic as a classic Jacobean drama. Its villain, Henry Drax, is a monster, reminiscent of the demonic Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s operatic masterpiece “Blood Meridian” and the sadistic bully Wolf Larsen in Jack London’s “The Sea-Wolf”; and its action-stuffed plot reverberates with echoes of “Moby-Dick,” “Lord Jim” and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” Thanks to its author’s gifts as a writer, however, the novel never reads like a patched-together literary homage, but instead emerges as a gripping and original act of bravura storytelling that immerses us in a Darwinian world that is as unforgiving as it is bloody. (Read the review.)

‘BORN A CRIME: STORIES FROM A SOUTH AFRICAN CHILDHOOD’ By Trevor Noah (Spiegel & Grau). Best known as the host of “The Daily Show,” Mr. Noah brings to his comedy an outsider’s gift for observation and an instinctive radar for the absurdities of life. His sense of humor was forged during his childhood in South Africa, where he grew up the son of a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father — a relationship whose very existence violated that country’s racial laws during the apartheid era. Mr. Noah gives us a harrowing understanding of what it was like to grow up in a society where questions of race permeated every aspect of daily life, and at the same time has written a deeply affecting love letter to his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, a remarkable woman who was determined that her son “be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.” (Read the review.)