1. Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin (Simon & Schuster)

The Oklahoma City bombing, in which Timothy McVeigh attacked a federal building and killed more than 160 people, occurred three decades ago, but the motives behind it remain up-to-the-moment. Toobin, who covered the trial for the New Yorker, connects the dots in his superb new book and shows how Oklahoma City laid the groundwork for today’s angry, anti-government, gun-loving right-wing domestic terrorists. That includes the ones who participated in the January 6 riots who, Toobin suggests, are in many ways just Timothy McVeigh types with the power of the internet and social media behind them.

2. Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir by Rachel Louise Snyder (Bloomsbury)

Snyder has reported around the globe about women’s survival, and her much-lauded, prize-winning book No Visible Bruises explored the epidemic of domestic violence. In her stunning, eloquent memoir, she turns the lens on herself. Just eight years old when her mother died, uprooted by her father’s new Evangelist wife, Snyder rebelled as a teenager and armed with her breathtaking curiosity, took to the world. With nuance, wit, and compassion, and guided by her determination to connect with others, Snyder chronicles her inspiring transformation.

3. Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg (Knopf)

Popular history may have elevated Nelson Mandela to sainthood and reduced his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, to sinner, but in his dual biography, South African scholar Steinberg fully grasps the persona each one created. This perceptive, nuanced biography exposes the pain both husband and wife exchanged and depicts their marriage as a window into the inhumanity of apartheid.

4. Life B: Overcoming Double Depression by Bethanne Patrick (Counterpoint)

A force of nature, Patrick, aka @TheBookMaven, created #FridayReads on Twitter and blazes a bright literary light in the world. Now she has astonishingly chronicled her own despair and anguish with wit, honesty and even charm: bad days, worse days, and the haze of adolescence until her 50s when she is diagnosed with a double depression, in which a chronic depression spirals into a major depressive disorder. Fearing self-harm, Patrick checks herself into a psychiatric hospital. Her candor about mental illness, medication, and therapy, along with discoveries of her own family history, makes for an inspiring chronicle.

5. Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown)

Like his earlier works of fiction, most recently his National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The House of Broken Angels, Urrea’s wonderful new historical novel is distinguished by his capacious heart, narrative talents, and complicated yet lovable characters, particularly women. Urrea reimagines his mother’s World War II experience with the Red Cross “Donut Dollies,” female volunteers assigned to bring coffee, good spirits – and donuts – to men on the Western Front. Through the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald, Urrea avoids sentimentality as he evokes the valor of these women, the perils of their experience, and their PSTD that followed.