School is back in session, which for some people means packing lunchboxes and anguishing over outfits in the morning dark, and for other people means muttering about the bus traffic snarling Main Street on the way to the gym. For us, though, back-to-school time is just one more reason to celebrate good books. This week, that includes books about school: Robert Pondiscio’s “How the Other Half Learns,” about a year in the life of the impressive but polarizing charter school network Success Academy, and Paul Tough’s “The Years That Matter Most,” looking at college through the lens of a class system that reinforces its own rigid hierarchy. There’s also Samantha Power’s memoir, “The Education of an Idealist,” which is less about school than about Power’s on-the-job evolution as President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations. Two books this week tackle prejudice head-on — Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” and Bari Weiss’s “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” — while Corey Robin’s “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas” upends some conventional wisdom about the Supreme Court justice. Finally, in fiction, we recommend new novels from some old favorites: Ann Patchett, Jacqueline Woodson and the British master Andrew Miller. Don’t think of them as required reading — nobody likes a syllabus — but maybe sneak one of them inside your calculus textbook and enjoy.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Twitter: @GregoryCowles

THE ENIGMA OF CLARENCE THOMAS, by Corey Robin. (Metropolitan, $30.) In the 1960s and 1970s, Clarence Thomas, now the longest-serving justice on the current Supreme Court, was a self-described “radical” and adherent of Malcolm X. He marched against the Vietnam War. In this incisive new book, Corey Robin argues that Thomas has not abandoned his old views on race but has retrofitted them to propel a conservative agenda. “It’s a provocative thesis, but one of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “The result is rigorous yet readable, frequently startling yet eminently persuasive.”

THE DUTCH HOUSE, by Ann Patchett. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) In Patchett’s luminous new novel, an orphaned brother and sister grapple with love, loss and family history after their wicked stepmother banishes them from the family home. Like a fairy tale, the novel takes a winding road and doesn’t rush to a finish. “Patchett’s prose is confident, unfussy and unadorned,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “I can’t pluck out one sentence worth quoting, but how effective they are when woven together — these translucent lines that envelop you like a spider’s web.”

HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, by Ibram X. Kendi. (One World, $27.) In this lively and provocative follow-up to “Stamped From the Beginning,” his National Book Award-winning history of racist ideas, Kendi scrutinizes himself and the rest of us, laying out a blueprint for combating racism wherever it lurks — which, he argues, is pretty much everywhere. Jeffrey C. Stewart calls it a “stunner of a book” in his review: “What emerges from these insights is the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind, a confessional of self-examination that may, in fact, be our best chance to free ourselves from our national nightmare.”