1. The Measure of Our Lives: A Gathering of Wisdom by Toni Morrison, foreword by Zadie Smith (Knopf)

With this collection of Morrison’s fierce and elegant insights, and the cumulative power of this small volume, the late Nobel laureate is with us again. The title is drawn from one of her famous speeches: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” As the Publisher’s Note explains, by juxtaposing revelatory flashes that are “remarkable for their linguistic felicity, keenness of psychological observation, and philosophic profundity, the book “addresses issues of abiding interest in Morrison’s work: the reach of language for the ineffable; transcendence through imagination; the self and its discontents; the vicissitudes of love; the whirligig of memory; the singular power of women; the original American sin of slavery; the bankruptcy of racial oppression; the humanity and art of black people.”

2. Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography by Kate Bennett (Flatiron)

Taking off from the nervy #FreeMelania slogan and its roots in public curiosity and incredulity toward the inscrutable and occasionally provocatively clad first lady, CNN’s East Wing correspondent Bennett attempts to puncture the myth of the sphinxlike Melania Trump. Bennett draws on her deep Washington sources and the Trump circle to create a vivid portrait of the Slovenian-born model. Bennett depicts President Donald Trump’s third wife as a canny creator of her own image and makes the case that Melania Trump breaks new ground in the history of powerful White House wives.

3. The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright)

The insightful and incisive O’Toole, contributor to The Irish Times and The New York Review of Books, argues that the British lurch toward Brexit stems from a long English tradition of reverence for heroic defeat, a sense of national entitlement, and frustration with its perceived decline in global importance after World War II. O’Toole contends that making the EU the focus of British frustrations unleashed this nationalism, and that what he describes as the “toxic sludge” of the conflicts over Brexit will be part of England’s groundwater in the years to come.

4. The Broken Road: George Wallace and a Daughter’s Journey to Reconciliation by Peggy Wallace Kennedy (Bloomsbury)

The daughter of George Wallace, the virulently segregationist Alabama governor, Kennedy grew up to challenge her father’s racism, criticize the Iraq War, and condemn the Trump administration’s rallying cry, “Make America Great Again.” Kennedy relates the story of the historic civil rights march in Selma and her attempts to make reparations in the 2015 commemoration with civil rights leader Donzaleigh Abernathy. Earnest and sincere, Kennedy recounts how in both word and deed her father, late in his life, repented for his past.

5. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A great big American novel doesn’t come along that often, but Lerner’s The Topeka School is one that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an exploration of topical and epic concerns. Lerner, winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, is known for his “autofiction,” but here he stretches that form into a big social novel, situated in the middle of Kansas at the end of the Clinton administration but extending to the arrival of Trump’s MAGA. The story is told through interwoven narratives, shifting perspectives between high school debater and cool kid Adam and his psychologist parents, including his mother whose success has landed her as an expert on the Oprah show, as well as a troubled teen, an outsider who injects eerie unease early in the novel. Toxic masculinity, the homophobic Westboro Baptist Church, Bob Dole, Donald Trump, and finally MAGA add a topspin to this dynamic novel about language, power, and violence embedded into American culture.



