Covid-19, SCOTUS, and the Navy SEALs headline this season’s offerings, along with memoirs from rising politicians, rehashes of Trump administration scandals, takedowns of the gun industry, and portraits of inequality in America.

Top 10

Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs

David Philipps. Crown, Aug. 24 ($28.99, ISBN 978-0-593-23838-7)

The saga of a Navy SEAL platoon chief who became a right-wing hero after several of his men accused him of war crimes is told in this “enthralling, blow-by-blow” account, starred by PW.

Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence

Anita Hill. Viking, Sept. 28 ($30, ISBN 978-0-593-29829-9)

Hill explores the causes and effects of gender-based violence and how the fight to end it has progressed in the three decades since she testified against Clarence Thomas.

The Deeper the Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home

Michael Tubbs. Flatiron/Oprah, Nov. 16 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-17344-7)

Tubbs, who became the first Black mayor of Stockton, Calif., at age 26, reflects on his career and the lessons he learned from his mother, grandmother, and aunt while his father was in prison.

Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America

Eyal Press. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 17 ($28, ISBN 978-0-374-14018-2)

Starred by PW, this “deeply reported and eloquently argued” survey investigates the working conditions of people who perform jobs the rest of society wants to keep hidden from view.

Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America

Ryan Busse. PublicAffairs, Oct. 19 ($29, ISBN 978-1-5417-6873-4)

Busse, a former executive at the gun company Kimber, details his reasons for leaving the industry and why it must be reformed in order to bring gun violence to an end.

Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

Carla Power. One World, Sept. 7 ($28, ISBN 978-0-525-51057-4)

Power—whose much-praised memoir If the Oceans Were Ink documented the year she spent studying the Qur’an—examines efforts to rehabilitate ISIS fighters and other extremists.

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

Andrea Elliott. Random House, Oct. 5 ($30, ISBN 978-0-8129-8694-5)

Pulitzer-winner Elliott chronicles eight years in the life of a young Brooklyn woman who discovers that escaping poverty might mean leaving her family behind.

The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Age of Fentanyl and Meth

Sam Quinones. Bloomsbury, Oct. 12 ($28, ISBN 978-1-63557-435-7)

Bestseller Quinones follows Dreamland with a look at the next stage of the opioid epidemic and community efforts to repair the damage. 250,000-copy announced first printing.

Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir

Marie Yovanovitch. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jan. 11 ($30, ISBN 978-0-358-45754-1)

The former ambassador to Ukraine discusses the smear campaign that led to her abrupt dismissal in 2019 and her decision to testify in President Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice

Tony Messenger. St. Martin’s, Dec. 7 ($28.99, ISBN 978-1-250-27464-9)

Journalist Messenger expands on his Pulitzer-winning series about the practice of forcing poor people charged with misdemeanor crimes to pay unaffordable fines or go to jail.

Politics & Current Events Listings

Abrams

Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal by Carissa Byrne Hessick (Oct. 12, $27, ISBN 978-1-4197-5029-8) details how the constitutional right to a jury trial has been undermined by the rise of plea bargaining, and why the current system is unjust.

Algonquin

The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA by Jorge L. Contreras (Oct. 26, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-61620-968-1) recounts the fight against a biotech company whose patents on two human genes made it prohibitively expensive to test for hereditary breast cancer. 75,000-copy announced first printing.

Apollo

Some Kids Left Behind: A Survivor’s Fight for Health Care in the Wake of 9/11 by Lila Nordstrom (Aug. 24, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-948062-62-6) is the story of how toxic debris from the Twin Towers sickened students at a nearby school, and one survivor’s campaign to win compensation for her classmates.

Basic

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson (Oct. 5, $30, ISBN 978-1-5416-4753-4). Conservative commentator Hanson argues that identity politics, rising inequality, and a vast, unelected government bureaucracy have undermined the foundations of American citizenship.

Bold Type

Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America by Keith Boykin (Sept. 14, $28, ISBN 978-1-64503-726-2) revisits recent efforts to address racial inequality to understand where they came up short, and how to move forward in the face of a crisis sparked by demographic change.

Broadleaf

Our Fair Share: How One Small Change Can Create a More Equitable American Economy by Brian C. Johnson (Sept. 28, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-5064-7075-7) outlines the causes of income and wealth inequality in America and how to fix it with a “Citizen Dividend.”

Counterpoint

The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America by Barrett Holmes Pitner (Oct. 12, $26, ISBN 978-1-64009-484-0) recovers the term “ethnocide,” coined in 1944 to describe the systematic destruction of an ethnic group’s culture, as a means of understanding the Black experience in America.

Crown

This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life by Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods (Oct. 12, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-23886-8). The creators of the podcast Ear Hustle share stories of incarceration and life after prison.

Custom House

They Called Us “Lucky”: The Life and Afterlife of the Iraq War’s Hardest Hit Unit by Ruben Gallego and Jim DeFelice (Nov. 9, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-304581-1) documents Arizona congressman Gallego’s service in the Iraq War, where his Marine company lost more men than any other single unit in the conflict.

Dey Street

Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence by Stephen Kurczy (Aug. 3, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-294549-5) depicts life in Green Bank, W.Va., where Wi-Fi and devices with electromagnetic emissions are tightly restricted in order to minimize interference with telescopes at the Green Bank Observatory.

Diversion

The New Border Wars: The Conflicts That Will Define Our Future by Klaus Dodds (Sept. 28, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-63576-907-4) looks at the history of border conflicts in the modern world and how climate change, population growth, and other factors will intensify them in the coming years.

Doubleday

Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience by Eli Saslow (Sept. 28, $27, ISBN 978-0-385-54700-0) collects people’s experiences of the pandemic from across the U.S., including a restaurant owner forced to close his family business and an EMT trying to save lives in New York City.

Duke Univ.

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed (Sept. 24, $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4780-1771-4) examines how complaints about sexual harassment, discrimination, and other issues are handled at academic institutions, and what needs to happen in order to make real change possible.

Dutton

Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA by Tim Mak (Nov. 2, $29, ISBN 978-1-5247-4645-2) explains how the gun lobbyist organization’s extreme rhetoric in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre led to lawsuits and law enforcement investigations that have severely damaged the group.

Ecco

The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right by Adam Harris (Aug. 10, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-297648-2). According to PW, this “sharp and vigorous” history of racial discrimination in American higher education features “vivid portraits” of Black pioneers, including George Washington Carver.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (Sept. 21, $28, ISBN 978-0-374-24852-9) considers sex in the #MeToo era and its connections to gender, class, race, and power.

Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury by Evan Osnos (Sept. 14, $30, ISBN 978-0-374-28667-5). After living in China for a decade, New Yorker writer Osnos visits the U.S. communities he knows best in order to understand the roots of the nation’s political dysfunctions.

Fsg Originals

The Uninnocent: Notes on Violence and Mercy by Katharine Blake (Nov. 2, $16 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-374-53852-1) narrates the story of the author’s reckoning with a horrific crime in her family—her 16-year-old cousin’s murder of a boy he didn’t know—when she was a law student.

Ferris and Ferris

The Vote Collectors: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers Behind the Nation’s Greatest Electoral Fraud by Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner (Nov. 16, $28, ISBN 978-1-4696-6556-6) recounts the story behind the absentee ballot scam in Bladen County, N.C., that resulted in the overturning of a 2018 congressional election.

Flatiron/Oprah

The Power of Women: Learning from Resilience to Heal Our World by Denis Mukwege (Nov. 2, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-250-76919-0). Nobel-winner Mukwege interweaves stories of sexual assault survivors he has treated in the Democratic Republic of Congo with a call for reforms to better confront sexual abuse around the world.

Griffin

Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Zeba Blay (Oct. 19, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-250-23156-7) profiles Black women actors, musicians, and artists who have overcome racism and sexism to influence American culture.

Hachette

The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence by Douglas London (Sept. 28, $30, ISBN 978-0-306-84730-1). A CIA veteran chronicles the three decades he spent targeting and recruiting foreign spies, and describes how U.S. intelligence has declined since 9/11 and the Iraq War.

Harper Wave

Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers by Deborah Tuerkheimer (Sept. 28, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-300274-6) examines why credible accusations of sexual misconduct are often disbelieved, and what can be done to help protect victims of abuse.

Lawrence Hill

Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in Black America by Randal Maurice Jelks (Nov. 2, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-64160-603-5) reflects on recent political struggles over police brutality, economic inequality, and other issues in a series of letters addressed to Martin Luther King Jr.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century by Fiona Hill (Oct. 5, $30, ISBN 978-0-358-57431-6) details the former national security adviser’s journey from England’s coal-mining country to Harvard University, then testifying in President Trump’s first impeachment trial.

House of Anansi

China Unbound: A New World Disorder by Joanna Chiu (Oct. 5, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4870-0767-6) surveys the factors contributing to China’s economic rise and growing influence over world affairs, and its government’s use of surveillance technology and crackdowns to maintain control.

Knopf

Honor Bound: An American Story of Dreams and Service by Amy McGrath and Chris Peterson (Aug. 3, $28, ISBN 978-0-525-65910-5). The former Marine combat pilot discusses her military career and her decision to challenge Mitch McConnell for his U.S. Senate seat. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood by Mark Oppenheimer (Oct. 5, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-525-65719-4) chronicles how the Pittsburgh neighborhood—one of the oldest Jewish communities in America—is attempting to overcome the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.

Metropolitan

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross (Oct. 12, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-80422-8) examines the affordable housing crisis in America through the lens of Osceola County, Fla., near Disney World, where wealthy investors buy foreclosed properties while tourist industry workers are forced to live in rundown motels.

MIT

Digital Suffragists: Women, the Web, and the Future of Democracy by Marie Tessier (Oct. 5, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-262-04601-5). A comment moderator for the New York Times discusses the structural reasons why women’s voices are underrepresented in online comment forums, and what can be done to fix the problem.

Morrow

Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump by Jennifer Rubin (Sept. 21, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-298213-1) details the role women voters, activists, and politicians played in ousting Donald Trump from the White House and electing the first female vice president.

New Press

Refugee High: Coming of Age in America by Elly Fishman (Aug. 10, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-508-4). PW says this “intimate and moving” look at a Chicago high school where nearly half the student body was born in another country is “a powerful portrait of resilience in the face of long odds.”

Other Press

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, trans. by Ruth Diver (Aug. 3, $14.99 trade paper,

ISBN 978-1-63542-178-1). Novelist Majdalani’s account of the events leading up to the August 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut is a “razor-sharp reckoning with a tragedy decades in the making,” according to PW.

Oxford Univ.

The Contagion Next Time by Sandro Galea (Nov. 1, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-757642-7) examines how racism, economic inequality, and other social ills made the U.S. vulnerable to Covid-19, and what can be done to prevent the next pandemic.

Pantheon

The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth by Kristin Henning (Sept. 28, $30, ISBN 978-1-5247-4890-6) draws on the author’s experiences representing juvenile defendants to examine how aggressive policing of Black youth creates trauma, instills resentment of law enforcement, and inhibits adolescent development.

Penguin Press

Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler (Sept. 7, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-29768-1) examines how the Covid-19 pandemic and advances in digital technology will affect urban life, and contends that health-care reforms are essential to the future of U.S. cities.

Princeton Univ.

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid (Oct. 5, $35, ISBN 978-0-691-17933-9) looks at how militant leftist politics of 1960s America influenced the ultranationalist philosophies of the founder of the Jewish Defense League.

PublicAffairs

Flight 149: A Hostage Crisis, a Secret Special Forces Unit, and the Origins of the Gulf War by Stephen Davis (Sept. 7, $28, ISBN 978-1-5417-0005-5) uncovers the covert British intelligence operation that resulted in an international hostage crisis during Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Random House

Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court by Linda Greenhouse (Nov. 9, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-44793-2) documents the Supreme Court’s rightward shift and central role in the major controversies of the past year.

Rowman & Littlefield

Thirteen Cracks: Repairing American Democracy After Trump by Allan Lichtman (Nov. 8, $21.95, ISBN 978-1-5381-5651-3) identifies 13 weak points the Trump presidency exposed in American democracy, and suggests ways to strengthen them.

Scribner

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall (Nov. 2, $27, ISBN 978-1-9821-7862-8). In the follow-up to Prisoners of Geography, Marshall analyzes maps of Australia, Greece, Turkey, and the Sahel to explain how these and other hot spots will shape world affairs.

Seal

For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez (Sept. 7, $28, ISBN 978-1-5416-7487-5). The founder of Latina Rebels offers advice on overcoming the challenges women of color face.

Simon & Schuster

The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family by David Cay Johnston (Oct. 19, $28, ISBN 978-1-9821-7803-1) delves into the former president’s finances, including the $1.7 billion his businesses brought in during his presidency, and the $400 million debt that comes due in 2024.

St. Martin’s

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright (Aug. 24, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-27574-5). Kahl, a national security adviser in the Obama administration, and Wright, a Brookings Institution fellow, analyze the geopolitical fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Univ. of Chicago

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism by Edward H. Miller (Dec. 6, $30, ISBN 978-0-226-44886-2) reveals the life story of the candy maker who founded the John Birch Society and helped push right-wing conspiracy thinking into the mainstream.

Verso

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern by Stuart Jeffries (Oct. 26, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-78873-822-4) contends that the rise of postmodernism since the 1970s paved the way for today’s political dysfunctions.

Yale Univ.

A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right by Matthew Rose (Aug. 3, $28, ISBN 978-0-300-24311-6) profiles Oswald Spengler, Alain de Benoist, and other philosophers whose critiques of liberalism provided the intellectual framework for the rise of the radical right.

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