With this week’s selection of titles, we put ourselves into the hands of experts: expert storytellers, expert thinkers, expert biographers of expert subjects. For instance? As the founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection, Julia Van Haaften is a leading authority on the city’s rich photographic heritage — surely the right person to have produced the first major biography of Berenice Abbott, the larger-than-life artist who captured and defined New York City in some of the 20th century’s most arresting images. Read that, and spend some time lingering over the photos. Also for instance: We recommend fiction by the celebrated masters Thomas McGuane and Richard Powers — whose new novel, “The Overstory,” is reviewed by Barbara Kingsolver, speaking of experts — and nonfiction by Hannah Arendt (about politics), Barbara Ehrenreich (about mortality) and Ross Douthat (about the Catholic Church under Pope Francis). Other choices include a family memoir, a debut novel about a single gay mother, a ghost story and a Nordic thriller with shades of “The Silence of the Lambs.” And if the Abbott biography gets you thinking about the character and destiny of cities, you might want to settle in with Ben Austen’s “High-Risers,” about the ill-fated Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago. It’s not a happy story, but it’s an important one, and Austen, a journalist who frequently writes about urban planning and housing issues, tells it expertly and well.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

BERENICE ABBOTT: A Life in Photography, by Julia Van Haaften. (Norton, $45.) The photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was born in Ohio and fled to Greenwich Village after dropping out after one year at Ohio State University. In 1920s Paris, she took sensitive and indelible portraits of Jean Cocteau, James Joyce and others. After returning to New York, she became a revolutionary chronicler of the modern metropolis. Julia Van Haaften, the founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection, has written the first full-dress biography of her. “This is a vital work of American cultural history, and it wedges in so many personalities and vistas that it’s hard to know where to begin,” our critic Dwight Garner writes.

NATURAL CAUSES: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, by Barbara Ehrenreich. (Twelve, $27.) At 76 years old, Barbara Ehrenreich has decided that she is old enough to die, and she has sworn off annual exams, cancer screenings and other measures those with health insurance are expected to take. “Natural Causes” takes aim at the wellness movement as a whole, at our tendency to treat aging as an outrage or, worse, as a sin. The book is “peevish, tender and deeply, distinctively odd,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “The pleasures of her prose are often local, in the animated language, especially where scientific descriptions are concerned. Her description of cells rushing to staunch a wound is so full of wonder and delight that it recalls Italo Calvino.”

FUTUREFACE: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging, by Alex Wagner. (One World, $28.) Alex Wagner was born in 1977, in Washington, D.C. The only child of a Burmese mother and a white American father, she grew up listening to histories of “migrations, escapes, settlement, assimilation.” In “Futureface,” she embarks on a quest to find out as much as she can about both sides of her family, beyond the gauzy stories that have been handed down. The book “raises urgent questions having to do with history and complicity,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Wagner is determined to look at her family with the coldest eye, making excuses for no one.”