IT’S BETTER THAN IT LOOKS: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear, by Gregg Easterbrook. (PublicAffairs, $28.) According to Easterbrook, we worry more about threats like climate change and inequality than we recognize our good fortune. People, he says, react with astonishment when told how well we’re doing, so his book sets out to tell them just that. “The primary causes of a mostly improving life — progress, both social and technical — entail a lot of change,” he writes, and “even universally desirable change may be greeted with trepidation.” But “in the contemporary world most people are better off in most ways when compared to any prior generation.”

FRESHWATER, by Akwaeke Emezi. (Grove Atlantic, $24.) This remarkable debut novel traces the course of mental illness in a young Nigerian-born woman from babyhood — when Ada’s fretful crying cannot be soothed — through her college years, when multiple personalities begin to bloom inside her mind. Our reviewer, Tariro Mzezewa, praises it as “poetic and disturbing,” and also groundbreaking. “More powerful than Emezi’s prose,” she writes, “is what it brings to the real world. … This novel expands the universe of mental illness to include women of color and other ethnicities. Rooting Ada’s story in Igbo cosmology forces us to further question our paradigm for what causes mental illness.”

POLITICAL TRIBES: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, by Amy Chua. (Penguin, $28.) Ethnocultural rivalry shapes both international relations and domestic policy, Chua says, and cannot be reasoned away because its divisions are hard-wired. Yet Americans, she declares, refuse to recognize this truth. “A lot of the interest of ‘Political Tribes’ comes from the strong sense it emanates of an author arguing with herself,” David Frum writes in his review. “Chua both condemns tribalism and respects its power. She insists that the United States alone of nations among the earth has often transcended it — and then presents impressive contrary evidence from the past and the present. Chua reckons with the many tribalisms of the American past: ethnic, religious and racial. She hopes for a future in which tribalism fades — even as she mercilessly details its accumulating strength.”

HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE YOU MAKE: Lessons From a Year Among the Oldest Old, by John Leland. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A Times reporter chronicles the lives of six elderly Americans, mining them for advice on how to turn old age into a virtue — “not just a preparation for death but a prescription for life at any age.” The book began as a series of articles exploring different aspects of aging, and in addition to the self-help has expanded to include research findings, philosophical insights from sources including Seneca, James Brown and Jack Kerouac, and Leland’s own struggles — relating to an aging mother, starting over after a divorce — as a quiet throughline.

EAT THE APPLE: A Memoir, by Matt Young. (Bloomsbury, $26.) Young’s brutally honest account of his time in the Marines and his three tours in Iraq is inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining. “It is also a useful corrective to the current idealization of the American soldier,” Mark Bowden writes in his review. “Service deserves respect, of course, but it does not in itself guarantee stirring and selfless acts of bravery. Young is his own case in point.” The memoir, Bowden adds, “is in its own way a loving portrait, but it is also unsparing, ugly and outrageous. I can’t see it making the commandant’s reading list.” To be clear, Bowden counts that in the book’s favor.