“I never knew anyone quite like my father, but then I never really knew my father, either,” wrote the historian Daniel J. Boorstin at age 76 in the only nine pages of autobiographical narrative he produced during a career spanning thousands of pages of historical writing. This unfulfilled quest for generational understanding becomes the raison d’être of the new biography of his life, The American: The Hidden History of Daniel J. Boorstin and His Twentieth Century, written by his son, Jon Boorstin. It also echoes the central preoccupation of many of the books that follow: identity.
From favorite presidents and family histories to professional stigmas and competing interests, identities—both personal and collective—are actively cultivated, begrudgingly or gratefully inherited, openly ignored or railed against.
Great American Presidents: The Twelve Who Transformed the Nation by Allan J. Lichtman, Ph.D. ’73 (Bancroft Press, $32.95)
Great American Presidents offers a few surprises and plenty of opportunities for debate. Impact, not virtue, unites its 12 ideologically diverse presidents. From Washington and Polk to LBJ and Reagan, each chapter includes a timeline of achievements—measured by lasting effects, both good and ill. Lichtman, a historian and political analyst known for predicting U.S. presidential election outcomes, provides a framework for evaluating historical performance; each chapter ends with a numerical “greatness” scorecard.
The Au Pair by Teddy Wayne ’01 (Harper, $30)
An affair. A murder. A fragile male ego. The Au Pair, like the publishing professionals it portrays, understands the marketplace down to the Brooklyn-writer protagonist and a juicy, headline-making trial. In his latest page-turner, Wayne revisits a particular flavor of toxic masculinity—equal parts willful naivete and entitlement—embodied by his protagonist, author Steven Hammer, whose convincing internal dialogue reduces the novel’s female counterparts to vehicles for his own life lessons.
The American: The Hidden History of Daniel J. Boorstin and His Twentieth Century by Jon Boorstin ’67 (University of Georgia, $34.95)
In this untraditional biography of his father, Daniel J. Boorstin, writer and filmmaker Jon Boorstin explores the void between fathers and sons and the context that makes each generation a product of its time. The story begins with Daniel’s grandfather, a Jewish immigrant in the deep American South; it continues through his father Sam’s defining role in the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, a young Jewish factory worker in Atlanta wrongfully convicted of murder and subsequently lynched. It then follows Daniel’s youth in Tulsa and the beginnings of what would be a prolific career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the 12th Librarian of Congress. Along the way, the author examines the reverberations of antisemitism, racism, and historical trauma across generations.
The Torah Is an Open Book: Radical Readings for the Seeker and the Skeptic by Caryn Broitman ’83 (Broadleaf Books, $26.99)
Questioning the Torah is an integral part of a sacred tradition called mid-rash, the rabbinic process of interpreting and expanding upon the text of the Hebrew Bible. Rather than advocating literal interpretation of the Torah, which comprises the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, Broitman, a rabbi and former Silver Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, shows how an “open” approach allows modern readers to challenge and connect with the text through their own lives. She argues that this approach deepens collective understanding of the Torah while welcoming readers regardless of religious background or beliefs.
First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing, edited by Nina Beguš, Ph.D. ’20 (University of Michigan, $19.95 paperback)
Beguš, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, adds new voices to the conversations sparked in her recent book, Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI. In this new essay collection, writers share their encounters with generative text and contend with its perception as an existential threat to their profession. Essays consider how AI can help writers overcome writer’s block, the ways generative texts lack emotional investment, and what this technology might mean for the future of the profession. One essay is delivered as an extensive prompt that allows readers to plug-and-play into AI tools. Contributors include Sasha Stiles ’02, Ken Liu ’98, J.D. ’04, Nicholas Nardini, Ph.D. ’17, and former postdoctoral fellow Katy Ilonka Gero.
Class Encounters: A Memoir of the 1960s by Frinde Maher ’64, M.A.T. ’66 (TidePool Press, $32)
“The ruling class” is “hard to get into and hard to see outside of”—a keen observation by the author that doubles as a prevailing theme in this memoir-meets-exploration of class identity. Maher’s advantaged upbringing, marked by cotillions and old money musings on “summer people,” provides both a vivid main antagonist to her coming-of-age story and the privileged means of opportunity to challenge it. After following other family members to Harvard, Maher, who later became a professor of education and women’s studies at Wheaton College, strives to develop a belief system and career independent of that pedigree while candidly confronting her own naivete and detachment from the working class she aims to help through her social activism in the 1960s and career in teaching.
A Series of Opinionated Animals: A Memoir by Michelle Lerner, J.D. ’98 (Bancroft Press, $27.95)
Love propels both the narrative and narrator in this unusual memoir of a life shaped by relationships with animals. From the hijinks of a squirrel in captivity and a “ferocious” chicken, to love at first sight with a horse named Shire, we witness how animals cultivate and, in Lerner’s case, shape a destiny. Her childhood bonds with nonhumans lead to a career as a lawyer and animal advocate who co-founded the Harvard Law School Student Animal Legal Defense Fund.
Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future by Caitlin Vincent ’07 (Scribner, $30)
In 2024, 2.1 million Americans attended an opera—up 23 percent from the prior year, a surprising increase after decades of audience decline and declarations of the art form’s pending death (looking at you, Timothée Chalamet). Here, Vincent, a librettist, trained vocalist, and opera company director with a love-hate relationship to the discipline, unpacks our complicated relationship with opera. She traces its history against a backdrop of colonialism, explains the basics for newbies, and examines questions of adaptation, authenticity, appeal, and resilience. The result is a playful, approachable peek behind the curtain for connoisseurs and novices alike.
Has Medicine Lost Its Mind? Why Our Mental Health System Is Failing Us and What Should Be Done to Cure It by Robert C. Smith, S.M. ’99 (Prometheus, $28.95)
From exorbitant costs to disparities in access, the failures of the U.S. healthcare system are widespread. But some of its biggest care gaps, we learn, exist in the area of mental health. Half of all Americans will experience mental health challenges at some point, but fewer than half will have access to care (and less than 10 percent of those experiencing substance abuse issues, specifically). Extreme shortages of mental health professionals leave patients in the hands of primary care teams who lack training to treat psychological disorders, thanks to the mind-body divide in the medical profession. Drawing on decades of clinical experience and teaching, Smith, a professor emeritus of medicine and psychiatry at Michigan State University, argues that prioritizing mental health could improve overall patient health outcomes while reducing costs through prevention.
Canada After America: A Strategy for Prosperity in a Changed World by Ricardo Hausmann and Eric Protzer (Sutherland House, $23.95)
For decades after World War II, Canada’s prosperity relied on its proximity to and economic integration with the United States. But during the second Trump administration, tariffs, retaliatory duties, and deteriorating relations have exposed vulnerabilities in Canadian economic policies and revealed how the U.S.-Canada relationship stunted Canada’s growth in certain sectors. Hausmann, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab, and Protzer, a research fellow at the lab, offer a timely, well-rounded road map with proposals for Canada that include prioritizing supply chains more resilient to distance and tackling a housing shortage that limits urban growth.
Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times by Wendy Lesser ’73 (Harper, $32)
This intriguing cultural study is equal parts history, travelogue, and cautionary tale. Lesser begins with the city on the precipice of upheaval in 1929, examining its descent into Nazism and its conversion into the capital of the Third Reich. The book’s second half turns to modern-day Berlin, navigating how the city has transformed while echoes of the past remain alive within its walls, and how it is dealing with modern-day challenges, from extreme wealth gaps and widespread inflation to erosion of women’s and minority rights. Along the way, parallels between late-Weimar Berlin and twenty-first-century America start to seem eerily familiar.
