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system for most of her life. Dasani’s
existence is full of contradictions—her
Brooklyn shelter is just blocks away
from some of the borough’s most
expensive real estate—and Elliott is
relentless in her efforts to capture
them all. In exact and searing detail,
she places Dasani’s story alongside
the larger issues of inequality,
homelessness and racism in the city
and more broadly the U.S.
4 How the Word Is Passed
Amid a discussion of what students
should be learning about history,
Clint Smith, a poet and journalist,
takes readers across the U.S. —from
the Monticello plantation in Virginia
to a maximum-security prison in
Louisiana—to underline the legacy
of slavery and how it has shaped the
country. The result is an insightful
dissection of the relationship between
memory, history and America’s
ongoing reckoning with its past.5 Aftershocks
Born in Tanzania and raised all over the
world, from England to Italy to Ethiopia,
Nadia Owusu never felt she belonged
anywhere. In her aching memoir, she
embarks on a tour de force examination
of her childhood, marked first by her
mother’s abandoning her when she
was a toddler and later by the death of
her beloved father. Through assessing
the people and places that shaped her,
Owusu picks up the pieces of her life
to make sense of it all. In lyrical and
lush prose, she crafts an intimate and
piercing exploration of identity, family
and home.6 Empire of Pain
From the author of the 2019
best seller Say Nothing, which dived
into Northern Ireland during the
Troubles, Empire of Pain is a stirring
investigation into three generations
of the Sackler family. Patrick Radden
Keefe explores the Sacklers and the
source of their infamous fortune,
earned by producing and marketing
a painkiller that became the driving
factor behind the opioid crisis. It’s
a sweeping account of a family’s
outsize impact on the world —and
a dogged work of reporting that
showcases the horrific implications
of greed.7 A Swim in the
Pond in the Rain
George Saunders is deeply familiar
with the 19th century Russian short
story—he’s been teaching a class
on the subject to M.F.A. students for
two decades. Here, he opens up his
syllabus, analyzing seven iconic works
by authors including Chekhov and
Tolstoy to highlight the importance of
fiction in our lives. In a world bursting
with distractions, A Swim in the Pond
in the Rain demands the reader’s
attention; Saunders begins by breaking
down a story line by line. In less
thoughtful hands, this exercise would
be draining, but Saunders infusesso much heart into the practice that
instead it is simply fun.8 The Copenhagen Trilogy
Originally published as three separate
books in Danish between 1967 and
1971, The Copenhagen Trilogy, now
presented in a single translated
volume, is a heartbreaking portrait of
an artist. In precise and brutally self-
aware terms, Tove Ditlevsen reflects on
her life, from her turbulent youth during
Hitler’s rise to power to her discovery
of poetry and later to the dissolution
of her multiple marriages. Though
the story was written decades ago,
the complexities of womanhood that
Ditlevsen captures are timeless.9 Finding the Mother Tree
In her first book, pioneering forest
ecologist Suzanne Simard blends her
personal history with that of the trees
she has researched for decades. Find-
ing the Mother Tree is as comprehensive
as it is deeply personal, especially as
Simard writes of her curiosity about
trees and what it has been like to work
as a woman in a field dominated by
men. Her passion for the subject at
the book’s center is palpable on every
page, coalescing into an urgent call to
embrace our connection with the earth
and do whatever we can to protect it.10 The Kissing Bug
When Daisy Hernández was a child, her
aunt traveled from Colombia to the U.S.
in search of a cure for the mysterious
disease that caused her stomach to
become so distended that people
thought she was pregnant. Growing
up, Hernández believed her aunt had
become sick from eating an apple; it
wasn’t until decades later that she
learned more about Chagas disease.
As Hernández describes in her deftly
reported book, Chagas—transmitted by
“kissing bugs” that carry the parasite
that causes it—is an infectious disease
that sickens hundreds of thousands of
people in the U.S., many of whom are
poor immigrants from Latin America.
She traces the history of Chagas and
the lives most impacted by it, offering a
nuanced and empathetic look into the
intersections of poverty, racism and the
U.S. health care system.