Remembering Tomi Ungerer

The iconic illustrator and artist, whose books never shied away from introducing children to the darker sides of life, died earlier this month at 87. Our children’s books editor, Maria Russo, writes: “There’s nothing out there like Ungerer’s books any more. Maybe that’s because no one else is willing to pull the mask back on the grown-ups — their wars, their lies, their needless aggressions — with quite as much gleeful honesty.”

Isaac Mizrahi on his favorite books

“For me literature is most effective when it’s sort of plain,” the fashion designer and author Isaac Mizrahi says in this week’s By the Book. “Style is suspicious to me in general. I think that’s true about my taste in everything. Food. Décor. Clothes.”

An excellent new history of the Troubles in Ireland and more

In “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe uses the 1972 abduction of a Belfast mother of 10 to tell the story of the Troubles. The Times’s critic Jennifer Szalai calls the book “resolutely humane” and “meticulously reported.” The Irish novelist Roddy Doyle says that Keefe’s book “has lots of the qualities of good fiction.”

Dwight Garner reviews the former F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe’s memoir, “The Threat: How the F.B.I. Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.” McCabe was fired last year. He may have been “driven out of Dodge," Garner writes, but he has “returned with a memoir that’s better than any book typed this quickly has a right to be.”

Parul Sehgal considers “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” by Saidiya Hartman, an “exhilarating social history” about young black women in the early 20th century who tossed out the narrow scripts about intimacy they had been given.