1. Mariko Hewer’s review of Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany by Harald Jähner (Basic Books). “While these years of openness and devil-may-care experimentation provided innumerable people with opportunities to which they’d never before had access, the republic’s frequently changing political goals, coupled with rising joblessness and lingering feelings of humiliating defeat, created a vacuum into which the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), better known as the Nazis, seamlessly stepped.”


2. Peggy Kurkowski’s review of A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind by Stephen Budiansky (W.W. Norton & Company). “There’s no shortage of hefty books about the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam, but Budiansky takes an admittedly unconventional approach that readers will find refreshing. Built around the experiences of nine individuals who emblemize an aspect of human existence ‘that was changed by what took place there,’ he elevates the story of Antietam far beyond the battlefield.”


3. “Little Boy Found” by Ellen Prentiss Campbell. “My parents rarely spoke of Hugh. Albums of black-and-white snapshots document his brief cameo appearance. The only remaining immediate family member who knew him, I don’t really remember Hugh. He left a flickering shadow — a lost-boy shadow. I sorted the cards by date, postmark, or best guess, a little like beginning research for a story. But I was shuffling these cards for a game of solitaire. The objective: Find Hugh.”


4. “Our Year of Reading Dangerously” by Holly Smith. “Sargent was correct, but the ‘casual unconcern’ isn’t the only galling thing about book-banners. Worse is the hubris, the certainty of a particular entity — be it an individual parent, a school board, or some other self-appointed gatekeeper — that it alone is not only qualified to discern which books might harm ‘the children,’ but also that it has the right to unilaterally remove those books from schools. When we launched ‘And the Banned Played On’ last fall, it was partly to try to answer the question, ‘What are these book-banners afraid of?’ Because they’re clearly afraid of something.”


5. Eugene L. Meyer’s review of Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy by David Rohde (W.W. Norton & Company). “Garland’s caution, Rohde writes, left it to the U.S. Supreme Court, with its Trump-appointed conservative supermajority, to drag its feet in considering Trump’s claims of presidential immunity for any criminal acts. Rohde sees the existential danger in this, as the justices entertained arguments already rejected by appellate judges. Prior to the book’s publication, the Supreme Court immunity ruling that Rohde feared again upended efforts to hold Trump accountable for his alleged crimes.”

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