Nonfiction

• `This Body I Wore: A Memoir,' by Diana Goetsch, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 24

In 2013, at 50, Goetsch's life started to collapse.

Her success as a writer and public-school teacher masked a decadeslong depression. In a blog for The American Scholar in 2015, Goetsch wrote about how she “longed daily to be a woman,” a longing she had suppressed since childhood. Her new memoir is about her own transition and the story of the trans community over the course of her lifetime.

Current affairs

• `The Trayvon Generation,' by Elizabeth Alexander, Grand Central Publishing, April 5

Less than a month after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Alexander published an essay in The New Yorker titled “The Trayvon Generation,” in which she wrote about the young people who had grown up in the past 25 years, repeatedly watching stories that “instructed them that antiBlack hatred and violence were never far.” Her worry for that generation, including for her own sons, was braided with a consideration of the “creative emergences” in Black communities. This book expands on that widely shared essay.

• `Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,' by Amy Gajda, Viking, April 12

Amy Gajda, a law professor at Tulane, examines the history of privacy in America, from the concerns of the Founding Fathers to the concerns of those who carry an ever-larger trove of personal data around in our pockets every day. In recounting the long history of debates over privacy, Gajda differentiates between everyday citizens and the press, and explains the hazards of both too little privacy and too much privacy.

• `A Brief History of Equality,' by Thomas Piketty. Translated by Steven Rendall, Belknap Press, April 19

Piketty, an economist and author of perhaps the most surprising bestseller in recent memory (the 800-plus page “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”), here synthesizes his ideas about the persistence of economic inequality in a shorter form. But as the “equality” in the title suggests, he also emphasizes the ways in which progress has been made. “In the long term, the march toward equality is very clear,” he recently said. “I really want to insist on that.”

• `His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,' by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, Viking, May 17

Floyd's name and face traveled around the world soon after he was killed on May 25, 2020. This book by two Washington Post reporters — building upon a six-part series in the Post — fills in the life behind the tragedy. It traces the roots of Floyd's family to slavery and sharecropping, recounts his segregated childhood education in Houston and draws the connections between his adult life and crises in American housing, criminal justice and policing.

History, revisited

• `Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire,' by Caroline Elkins, Knopf, Tuesday

“Empire was not just a few threads in Britain's national cloth,” writes Elkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “It was the fabric from which the modern British nation was made.” She explores how brutality was inextricably bound up in Britain's

colonial project — and was in fact a central part of its “civilizing” mission — focusing on a few historical episodes, including the Morant Bay Rebellion, the Irish War of Independence, the Second Boer War and others.

• `Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,' by Kim Kelly, Atria/One Signal, April 26

In this wide-ranging survey, Kelly unearths the stories of the people — farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees — behind some of the labor movement's biggest successes.

• `River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile,' by Candice Millard, Doubleday, May 17

In the 19th century, British explorers Richard Burton and John Speke set out to trace the Nile River, a yearslong process that led Speke to what he eventually called Lake Victoria. But Millard shows that the men did not “discover” anything — local populations knew very well where the headwaters of the Nile were — and their journey was greatly helped along by Sidi Mubarak Bombay, an East African man who was sold into slavery and sent to India before finding his way back to the continent.

• `The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich,' by Nancy Dougherty, Knopf, May 24

Heydrich, the powerful SS chief, was the principal architect of the Holocaust, nicknamed the “hangman of the Gestapo” and “the butcher of Prague.” Dougherty died in 2013, before she finished this book, so Christopher Lehmann-Haupt — a longtime literary critic for the Times — completed it. Lehmann-Haupt died in 2018.

Et. alia ...

• `Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist,'

by Frans de Waal, Norton, April 5

De Waal — whose sprightly, intelligent, utterly compelling studies of bonobos and chimpanzees have taken on such topics as empathy, grief and compassion — here turns to gender and sex. “Whereas it is true that gender goes beyond biology, it's not created out of thin air,” he writes. “There is every reason, therefore, to see what we can learn about ourselves from comparisons with other primates.”

• `Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong,' by Louisa Lim, Riverhead, April 19

“The act of writing about Hong Kong has become an exercise in subtraction,” says Lim, a journalist and author who was raised there.

She refers to her efforts to protect her sources, by removing identifying details that could endanger them, but the point has a bigger resonance in the story of a place whose history has often been overtaken by a colonial point of view. With this book, Lim set out to put Hong Kongers at the center of the story, weaving together portraits of citizens with major historical moments — the British takeover in 1842, the transfer of sovereignty to China in 1997, the pro-democracy protests in recent years.

• `The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold,' by Sam Knight, Penguin Press, May 3

What are those foreboding visions that people sometimes have? Are they, in fact, real? This is the fascinating story of psychiatrist John Barker, who invited fellow Britons to share their premonitions with him after becoming convinced that the 1966 Aberfan disaster — in which an avalanche of coal slurry buried a Wales school and other buildings — had been foretold by supernatural signs.