THE PEOPLE VS. DEMOCRACY: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It, by Yascha Mounk. (Harvard University, $29.95.) The title of this book makes clever use of what looks like a glaring oxymoron: After all, what is democracy if not rule by the people? But Mounk, who lectures on political theory at Harvard, shows how populist insurgencies can undermine democracy in the long run. “One of the many things to recommend this clarifying book is its international scope,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “As much as Donald J. Trump might fancy himself one of a kind, Mounk argues that the American president is part of a global wave.”

IMPEACHMENT: A Citizen’s Guide, by Cass R. Sunstein. (Harvard University, paper, $7.95.) Sunstein’s topic has obvious contemporary resonance, as Andrew Sullivan notes in his review, and though this short book does not take up the Trump presidency directly it does tease out “various hypotheticals with some similarities to our current concerns,” concluding that “each of these is an impeachable offense.” Yet Sunstein also cautions that the Constitution was written to ensure that a clear national consensus was necessary if a president was to be judged to be gravely violating his oath of office, or betraying the country. “This is why in well over two centuries the impeachment power has been invoked against sitting presidents only four times,” Sullivan writes, “and never actually pursued to conviction.”

THE TEMPTATION OF FORGIVENESS, by Donna Leon. (Atlantic Monthly, $26.) Commissario Guido Brunetti embarks on another atmospheric Venetian criminal investigation, this time coming to the aid of a woman whose husband has been attacked on one of the city’s stone bridges. “Tagging along after this sleuth is a wonderful way to see Venice like a native,” Marilyn Stasio writes in the Book Review’s crime column, “especially since Leon takes care to give us precise directions for his routes. But Brunetti’s observations aren’t always pretty. The air pollution is beyond acceptable limits, and don’t even mention the pollution of the canals.”

A LONG WAY FROM HOME, by Peter Carey. (Knopf, $26.95.) This latest novel from the two-time Booker Prize-winning author of “True History of the Kelly Gang” and “Oscar and Lucinda” follows a married couple and their bachelor neighbor on a bumptious 10,000-mile auto race in 1950s Australia, grappling along the way with the country’s historical treatment of its Aboriginal population. “With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel ends up far from where it started, in a place of historical reckoning and colonial guilt,” Craig Taylor writes in his review. “Carey’s longtime readers will appreciate his arrival here. … Using a wild road race, he’s found a journey into Australia’s broken past.”

MY FATHER’S WAKE: How the Irish Teach Us How to Live, Love and Die, by Kevin Toolis. (Da Capo, $26.) The hospital death of Toolis’s brother, followed by his father’s death in small-town Ireland, led him to examine death rituals around the world. The Irish wake, he concludes, is “the best guide to life you could ever have.” In her review, Ann Neumann says that the author’s “fine skill at showing the means and aftermath of death” most animates the book: “Toolis’s writing is so visceral and profound when he is near dying bodies that the lessons of such experiences become evident.”