Hey, baby: It’s the Fourth of July. Maybe read a book about America? My father will be — ever the history student, he’s made it a life goal to collect books about each president. (He reminds me that a few years ago, when I gave him Candice Millard’s “Destiny of the Republic,” about James A. Garfield’s assassination, I told him, “Good luck finding a whole book on Rutherford B. Hayes.”)

This week’s titles won’t help on the Hayes front — obviously — but we do have one book about two presidents: In “The Problem of Democracy,” Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein revisit the father-son team of John Adams (the second president) and John Quincy Adams (the sixth president), who between them spent much of their lives puzzling out the implications of self-rule as a form of government. Read that, and be struck anew by the coincidence that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the nation’s 50th birthday, July 4, 1826.

Democracy and America’s national identity are twin themes running through much of this week’s list. In “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone,” the Canadian filmmaker Astra Taylor tries to develop a working definition for democracy. In “Ill Winds,” the political scientist Larry Diamond looks at threats to democratic order around the world. In “This America,” the historian Jill Lepore considers the uses and misuses of American exceptionalism. And in “Spying on the South,” the late journalist Tony Horwitz retraces Frederick Law Olmsted’s antebellum journey below the Mason-Dixon line to better understand the country’s stubborn divisions. We also recommend a couple of novels, a memoir of grief, a literary biography and a reporter’s exposé of the generic drug industry.

It’s not all bad news. When we reviewed three of those democracy books on our cover last week, we went with a cheeky grim headline — “Woe the People” — to reflect the mood of the times. But as Astra Taylor pointed out in a subsequent tweet, her book also celebrates the power of community organizing and grass-roots movements to effect change: Sometimes, she wrote, democracy’s real message is “Whoa, the people.”