While reading Tough Streets, Rough Skies, and Sunday Sidelines, readers may need to be reminded that it is a true story. From Larry Wansley’s days as a young police detective, dodging bullets while attempting to calm the Compton (California) race riots, to his leadership of a staff that identified the 9/11 hijackers, this globally respected security figure has written an action-packed recollection of his foot-to-the-pedal career. Written with two-time Edgar Award winner Carlton Stowers, Wansley’s autobiography runs the emotional gamut from terrifying to heartbreaking to laugh-out-loud funny, with the dangerous and high-drama situations that are often only found in fiction.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov, the main character in Amor Towles’ novel, found himself on the wrong end of the Bolshevik revolution. This educated, witty aristocrat was confined to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel across the street from the Kremlin. His world became an attic room during some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history. During this incarceration, he meets an actress, a shrewd politico, and a temperamental chef. Then fate puts the life of a precocious young girl in his hands. The novel cast a spell on Lisa and Kim when they read it. It will own you when you hear it in their dramatic presentation.

Ben Kuroki was a 24-year-old Japanese American farm boy whose heritage was never a problem in remote Nebraska—until Pearl Harbor. Among the millions of Americans who flocked to military stations to enlist, Ben wanted to avenge the attack, reclaim his family honor, and prove his patriotism. But as anti-Japanese sentiment soared, Ben had to fight to be allowed to fight for America. And fight he did. As a gunner on Army Air Forces bombers, Ben flew 58 missions spanning three combat theaters: Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, including the climactic B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan that culminated with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He flew some of the war’s boldest and bloodiest air missions and lived to tell about it. In between his tours in Europe and the Pacific, he challenged Franklin D. Roosevelt’s shameful incarceration of more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry in America, and he would be credited by some with setting in motion the debate that reversed a grave national dishonor.

In the euphoric wake of America’s victory, the decorated war hero used his national platform to carry out what he called his “59th mission,” urging his fellow Americans to do more to eliminate bigotry and racism at home. Told in full for the first time, and long overdue, Ben’s extraordinary story is a quintessentially American one of patriotism, principle, perseverance, and courage. It’s about being in the vanguard of history, the bonding of a band of brothers united in a just cause, a timeless and unflinching account of racial bigotry, and one man’s transcendent sense of belonging—in war, in peace, abroad, and at home.

Thomas Jefferson has been reinvented more than perhaps any American president in history. In the 19th century, slavery defenders invoked Jefferson’s defense of states’ rights while abolitionists drew on his antislavery writings in support of their cause. After the Civil War, Jefferson’s reputation declined because of his association with secession and disunion, but in the 20th century, his image soared as he came to embody the democratic values America fought for during World War II. Unsurprisingly, Jefferson’s legacy has shifted yet again in the 21st century, effectively becoming a partisan talisman—jettisoned by the left as a plantation patriarch and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism.

Dissatisfied with these political caricatures and manic swings, leading Jefferson scholars Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano instead situate the founding father in his complicated historical context and reveal how his wisdom can be applied today. In a series of three interrelated essays, the authors paint a nuanced portrait. Taken together, “Thomas Jefferson Survives” demonstrates how, even amid crisis, Jefferson managed to articulate a capacious and optimistic vision for the future of the American people.

The Wild West gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it as a mere product of dime novels and B movies. As Bryan Burrough shows us, there’s much more below the surface. At the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reason behind this boils down to one word: Texas. Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of northern occupiers turned the heat up further.

The explosion in the postwar cattle business took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a veritable blood meridian. “The Gunfighters” brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story.

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In “The Bookshop,” we see the stakes: what has been, and what might be lost. Evan Friss’ history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including, the Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus.

“The Bookshop” is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944. “The Bookshop” is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.

Where were you in 1962? John F. Kennedy was in the White House, monitoring the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Glenn was orbiting Earth in the Friendship 7. But if you were a Texas teen, you were dancing the Twist, Mashed Potato, Limbo, and Locomotion while listening to the Beach Boys or those Jersey Boys. In short, it was a year filled with memories and music. Join Dave Tanner as he recalls the sights, sounds, and songs that will answer the question, "Where Were You In '62?"

In “The Chief,” David Nasaw presents an intimate portrait of William Randolph Hearst, famously characterized in the classic film “Citizen Kane,” and whose influence was nearly as great as many world leaders. A brilliant business strategist, Hearst controlled the largest publishing empire in the United States, including 28 newspapers, the Cosmopolitan Picture Studio, radio stations, and 13 magazines. He quickly learned how to use this media stronghold to achieve unprecedented political power. The son of a gold miner, Hearst underwent a public metamorphosis from Harvard dropout to political kingmaker; from outspoken populist to opponent of the New Deal; and from citizen to congressman.

With unprecedented access to Hearst’s personal and business papers, Nasaw details Hearst’s relationship with his wife, Millicent, and his romance with Marion Davies; his interactions with Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, and every American president from Grover Cleveland to Franklin Roosevelt; and his acquaintance with movie giants such as Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Irving Thalberg.