Most of our recommended books this week take their cues from the past, whether that means the mysterious circumstances of one author’s personal history, as recounted in Beth Nguyen’s memoir “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” or the consequential collision of religion and education and slavery that Rachel L. Swarns traces in her history “The 272.”
Prudence Peiffer offers a group biography of artists in Lower Manhattan at a turning point in art history, Kate Strasdin mines a 19th-century fashion diary for details about that era’s daily life, Ann Patchett centers her new novel on a mother telling her adult daughters about a long-ago fling, and biographies of Hubert Humphrey (by Samuel G. Freedman) and the so-called “Genain quadruplets” (by Audrey Clare Farley) cast light on very different currents of American society in the middle of the 20th century.
Also up this week: a fun murder mystery, and a look not at the past but at the (possible) future, courtesy of Emily Monosson and her book “Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic.” Happy reading.
—Gregory Cowles
This tender group biography follows six artists (including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Robert Indiana) who in the 1950s and ’60s lived together on one block of Lower Manhattan, reviving the art world with different perspectives from the macho Abstract Expressionists who preceded them.
Harper | $38.99
Drawing on a 19th-century scrapbook that served as its keeper’s personal sartorial journal, Strasdin (a fashion historian) undertakes an exacting examination of the era’s style trends as well as the far more private domestic sphere.
Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret and “Our Town” in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.
Harper | $30
The “Genain” sisters (real name Morlok), who came from an abusive home and all suffered from schizophrenia, were the subject of a famous study 60 years ago. Farley’s account demonstrates not just the sadness of their story, but the stakes.
Building on her groundbreaking work for The Times, Swarns fashions a complex portrait of 19th-century American Catholicism through the story of the nearly 300 people enslaved on Jesuit plantations who were sold in 1838 to save Georgetown University from ruin.
Random House | $28
Growing up, all Nguyen knew about her biological mother was that she had stayed in Vietnam when other family members fled. In this poignant memoir, the author investigates her own origin story, and the ripple effect of absence.
Scribner | $27
Like “The Last of Us,” the entertainment franchise in which a fungal pandemic turns people into zombies, “Blight” emphasizes the scary things that fungi can do — in this case, especially to plants and trees.
In the 1940s, as mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey led it to become one of America’s most progressive cities in terms of racial justice. This biography is a superbly written tale of moral and political courage.
Oxford University | $34.95
In Swann’s new novel, translated from the German by Amy Bojang, eccentric senior citizens who share a dilapidated cottage in the English countryside must contend with a vexing dilemma: what to do with the body of a housemate they’ve stashed in the shed.
