ESSENTIAL: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice, by Jamie K. McCallum. (Basic, $30.) McCallum’s latest book on the state of labor in the U.S. takes stock of how the pandemic sparked a mass worker rejection of low-wage jobs, from the “Great Resignation” to unionization efforts at Amazon.
HEREAFTER: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, by Vona Groarke. (NYU Press, $22.95.) Groarke shares a lyrical story of her great-grandmother, an Irish immigrant who found pain, suffering and ultimately a future in 19th century New York.
THE LIGHTHOUSE OF STALINGRAD: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II, by Iain MacGregor. (Scribner, $30.) A meticulous and colorful account of the highly mythologized Battle of Stalingrad, using firsthand testimonies to chronicle the Soviet Army’s struggle for “the Lighthouse,” a strategic building at the center of the city.
ALL THE BROKEN PLACES, by John Boyne. (Pamela Dorman/Viking, $28.) This sequel to “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” tells the story of Gretel, a 91-year-old widow living in present-day London who remains haunted by her complicity in her brother’s death and by her father’s role in Auschwitz.
THINGS WE FOUND WHEN THE WATER WENT DOWN, by Tegan Nia Swanson. (Catapult, paper, $22.95.) In this wide-ranging magical realist eco-noir debut, a young woman on an isolated island investigates her mother’s disappearence and the violent secrets that lurk behind it.
SILENT SPRING REVOLUTION: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening, by Douglas Brinkley. (Harper, $40.) A historian traces the U.S. policy transition from conservation to environmentalism during the “Long Sixties,” crediting Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” as a driving intellectual force.
THE ALLY, by Iván Repila. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem. (Other Press, paper, $16.99.) A man in his 30s, committed to feminist allyship to impress a woman, creates a macho man’s club with hopes of provoking women into fighting harder for their cause. His hopes are dashed, but the satire is searing.
WHAT THE EAR HEARS (AND DOESN’T): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency, by Richard Mainwaring. (Sourcebooks, paper, $16.99.) A musician uses popular and classical music, the development of the Polaroid camera and more to outline the ways “living things rely on hertz.”
