PROUST’S DUCHESS: HOW THREE CELEBRATED WOMEN CAPTURED THE IMAGINATION OF FIN-DE-SIÈCLE PARIS

BY CAROLINE WEBER

Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris offers a summer vacation to Paris in the age of Marcel Proust. Caroline Weber’s richly detailed triple biography of the salonnières who inspired the glamorous Duchesse de Guermantes, a central character in Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, immerses readers in the social, artistic, and intellectual entanglements of France’s most fashionable circles during the waning years of the beau monde. Combining meticulous archival research with a sympathetic mindset and unflagging narrative elegance, Proust’s Duchess makes for an absorbing read.

INCARNATIONS: A HISTORY OF INDIA IN FIFTY LIVES

by SUNIL KHILNANI

In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani invites the reader into the history of India by telling the stories of 50 Indian lives: women and men, religious seekers and power-hungry kings, challengers of caste, poets, monks, mathematicians, filmmakers, and many more. Certain themes and patterns recur with striking frequency: among them, the pull of religious asceticism, expressed within fixed rites, roles, and caste structures. There are waves of challenges to this pull: the importance of cultural clashes as well as syntheses; the role of verse in encapsulating and spreading a very wide range of ideas and intellectual disciplines. Yet these themes only begin to indicate the tremendously wide and sophisticated range of the ideas of Indians over some 2,500 hundred years—including their own ideas about India—that the book explores.

MAKE TROUBLE: STANDING UP, SPEAKING OUT, AND FINDING THE COURAGE TO LEAD—MY LIFE STORY

by CECILE RICHARDS

Now more than ever, our country needs activists for women’s rights. In her recent autobiography Make Trouble, Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, shares her life’s journey of working for a better world. In this entertaining and powerful book, Richards recounts many stages of her work: from activism in her teen years, to labor organizing, to galvanizing national support for reproductive health, to defending reproductive rights in unprecedented and grueling hearings before Congress, to mobilizing broad support for millions to show up at the Women’s March. She also shares personal stories and reflections on family, marriage, and raising children in these times. Throughout these life events, Richards’ passion and values shine through. She inspires all of us, at all ages, to stand up, speak up, and find the courage to lead.

A MOUTH IS ALWAYS MUZZLED: SIX DISSIDENTS, FIVE CONTINENTS, AND THE ART OF RESISTANCE

by NATALIE HOPKINSON

As #Woke emerges as a new index of a black radicalism, tethered to a heightened sense of violence against black bodies, the efforts of previous generations of black insurgency—around the globe—can easily be overlooked and forgotten. Natalie Hopkinson’s A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance offers a timely reflection on the role of the arts in the lives of six dissidents, including visual artist Kara Walker, poet Ruel Johnson, and radical intellectual Walter Rodney, author of the classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The title of the book is drawn from late Guyanese poet Martin Carter, whose words “… by the food it eats to live,” complete the line that Hopkinson’s title elicits.

THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT: A SAGA OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

by YURI SLEZKINE

If Leo Tolstoy were a historian rather than a novelist, and living today, he would write The House of Government and claim his name was Yuri Slezkine. This book is a literary monument, the closest thing to War and Peace ever written by a historian. It tells the story of the Bolshevik revolutionaries from their pre-1917 agitations through their years in power, including how they dealt with and often participated in Stalin’s purges. Drawing heavily on diaries and other documents never before translated into English, Slezkine’s book is quickly being recognized as the best book ever written about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.

FIRE AND FURY: INSIDE THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE

by MICHAEL WOLFF

Why do people, factions, and entire countries continue, generation after generation, to rally behind a certain type of man? Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury doesn’t answer why but at least provides a portrait of how different factors and groups align themselves to make such individuals come to be. On the surface, Wolff’s book is a play-by-play of how the current U.S. administration, which everyone assumed couldn’t happen, happened. But by being more literary than journalistic, it also possesses a certain Warholian quality. Reading this book, one realizes that we have come to expect anything—no matter how outrageous—from the current U.S. president and his inner circle. And, in turn, they have relentlessly embraced living up to that reputation.

TYRANT: SHAKESPEARE ON POLITICS

by STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Imagine a country bitterly divided between two parties, with populist tyrants blaming everything on a religious minority. You’ve guessed it: It’s England, as described by Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt, who started to write furiously in the aftermath of the last election, doesn’t mention current affairs, but he draws ample lessons from Shakespeare for our own time. Getting rid of the tyrant is not enough (things got worse after the assassination of Julius Caesar), but there is some hope. In Shakespeare’s world, at least, one tyrant, Coriolanus, is defeated at the ballot box.