An engaging and valuable introduction to the career of one of our most memorable presidents. Pivotal events, decisions, and issues in Lincoln’s private and public life are scrutinized and explained clearly by noted historian James A. Rawley. During an innovative yet bloody era marked by mass communication, unheard-of national recognition and media attention, and the increasingly destructive uses of technology to wage war, Lincoln did all that he could to preserve the nation as a whole.

In his final days in office in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt invited dozens of friends to the White House for lunch. They had never met as a group, but they had one thing in common: Each played tennis with the president and advised on policy matters. Roosevelt half-joked that the public would never know how much these tennis partners did to make his administration a success. Journalists dismissively called them the “Tennis Cabinet,” making light of their contribution, but Roosevelt knew otherwise. Roosevelt’s tennis mates shaped the nation’s diplomacy, ending wars and promoting American interests abroad.

By shifting the focus from Watergate and Washington to Nixon’s deep, defining roots in California, Paul Carter boldly challenges common conceptions of the thirty-seventh president of the United States. All have missed arguably the most important perspective on Nixon as California’s native son, the only U.S. president born and raised in California. More biographies have been written on Nixon than any other U.S. politician. Yet the territory traversed by Carter is unexplored, revealing for the first time the people, places, and experiences that shaped Richard Nixon and the qualities that garnered him respect from those who knew him well.

In Gbenga Adesina’s groundbreaking debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history. In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant’s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.

The essays in Selected Misdemeanors are unapologetic word grenades lobbed into an otherwise complacent forgetfulness. Throughout the collection, Sue William Silverman focuses on pivotal, often fleeting moments that defined the course of her life, such as a fraught family vacation; an evening watching the Chippendale dancers’ extravaganza; a Pac-Man-and-whisky-fueled rumination on failed relationships; and the way melodramatic movies such as Rome Adventure shape an adolescent’s idea of love.

In 1950s Bombay, Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, a champion of women’s education who assumes the right to choose his daughters’ vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city’s dynamic new modern art movement, Jaya is driven by her desire to express both the pain and extraordinary force of life of a nation rising from the devastation of British rule. When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a woman mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in the men’s domain of art. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family’s standing and crush her reputation; Jaya loses a vital connection to Kamlesh.

Covering more than five hundred years of cultural transformation, Bakandamiya: An Elegy is a book-length epic poem set in northern Nigeria. The poem moves from passages of mythic power to elegant lyricism with remarkable skill, subverting the legend of Bayajidda, a prince from Baghdad whose arrival reshaped the outlook of the Hausas, a Native ethnic group in West Africa. Told in part from a Bori spirit’s point of view and in part through personal lyrics, part prayer and part praise song, Bakandamiya decries the loss of culture and spirituality due to colonization from both the West and the East.

Ted Kooser sees a writer’s workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year.

The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is a memoir about the complex role pickups have played in Fred Haefele’s life and in American culture at large. In his adult life as an arborist, teacher, and father, pickups bore him through hard times and disaster, high adventure, triumph, and love. Through his tenure with twelve trucks, Haefele recounts his experiences with tree climbing and academia, masculinity and motor culture. For Haefele, pickup trucks hold a unique place in the American psyche—equal parts fantasy steed and dray horse, they’re avatars of the American spirit.

Set against the backdrop of a remote location in the throes of rapid development, Nik Delaney leaves a respected career in wildlife biology to return home to Wyoming. In the Rocky Mountain winter, every relationship Nik has wears even thinner as she cares for her aging father, faces a crumbling marriage, and parents Finn, the son of her antagonistic brother. Then Zolo, her foster dog, runs away. Nik’s search for Zolo in the vast and unforgiving landscape introduces her to the eccentric residents of the high sagebrush, including a rancher trying to run an ecolodge in oil country and a displaced herd of wild mustangs led by a mare called Tess

In seeking to understand how visitors’ perceptions and experiences have shaped their understanding of the purpose of national parks, and nature more broadly, The Mountains Are Calling places visitors at the center of Yosemite’s story. In histories of the national parks, environmental historians traditionally focus on either a conflict between preservation or exploitation, or a celebration of its founders, but such approaches often overlook the millions of visitors or depict them as backdrops in a larger morality play over the preservation of nature. Michael W. Childers instead addresses the lived experiences of visitors and their role in creating national parks, within the context of national park policy shifts and broader American cultural history. 

It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts’s account of that hike.