Blue Helmet: My Year as a UN Peacekeeper in South Sudan tells the story of a country, a conflict, and the institution of peacekeeping through the eyes of a senior American military officer working on the ground in one of the most dangerous countries on the planet.

In How to Change History Robin Hemley grapples with the individual’s navigation of history and the conflict between personal and public histories.

With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.”

With measures of dark humor, the essays take seriously the literary, material, and political stakes of fathering and in doing so challenge patriarchal norms and one-dimensional accounts of fatherhood.

During a collision of women’s rights, gun policy, and racial tension, Thank You for Staying with Me is a frank and intimate rumination on how national policy and social attitudes affect both the individual and the public sphere, especially in a conservative part of the United States.

In this ode to the earth and all its living creatures, French Djiboutian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet, where “the Sahel rises in you, in me / the Red Sea boils in you, in me / Nunvut is melting in you, in me.” This translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson preserves the rich musicality of the original French, as well as its frequent use of wordplay and often unusual word choice.

Mike Stark’s Starlings is a first-of-its-kind history of starlings in America, an oddball, love-hate story at the intersection of human folly, ornithology, and one bird’s tenacious will to endure.

Mrs. Cook and the Klan is a true crime investigation that not only sheds new light on Myrtle Underwood Cook’s unsolved killing but also explores the confluence of the social, political, and economic forces that brought the Klan, lawless street gangs, a local mob boss, and the temperance movement together in a small American town.

Willie McCovey, known as “Stretch,” played Major League Baseball from 1959 to 1980, most notably as a member of the San Francisco Giants for nineteen seasons. In A Giant among Giants, the first biography of Willie McCovey, who passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty, Chris Haft tells the story of one of baseball’s best hitters and most-beloved players.

With a month-by-month approach, David Krell breaks down major events in both baseball and American culture at large in 1978, chronicling in novelistic detail the notable achievements of some of the greatest players of the era, along with some of the national pastime’s quirkiest moments, to capture an extraordinary year in baseball.