This summer, heavy hitters will rule beach reading

Sometimes air needs clearing. Sometimes windows need opening. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves about the bedrock beneath our feet. Spring is a good time. But summer is even better—reading alone on a park bench, on an empty beach at 8 in the morning. It never made sense that summer reading should be inconsequential, and feather light, just as the head and the air get clearer and there is more room to think. Summer reading—especially this summer— the possibility of refresher courses.

About everything.

Good news is, there are more new books to fill this role than any one vacation could hold. Bad news is, the world appears profoundly, even irrevocably, screwed up, and we demand more clarity on more fundamentals than ever. In fact, if the rumblings of uncertainty in the air since the financial meltdown of 2008 had any positive byproduct—if the sense of dislocation that intensified with the election of Donald Trump held any upside—it’s this: a mountain of new books to clear the cluttered air of the 21st century.

For instance, I just read two small, accessible books about the Common Good, and I was transfixed by this crazy idea for a nation where people set aside self-interest.

Where is this place?

And what, exactly, is this … Common Good?

That you might sincerely wonder is why Robert Reich’s “The Common Good” (Knopf, $22.95) and Steve Almond’s “Bad Stories” (Red Hen, $16.95) read like civic lessons recast as invigorating thrillers: Can the American people remind themselves of their shared goals before it’s too late? Can a great nation withstand leadership— political, corporate and otherwise— whom the common good has mostly been a talking point?

Reich was secretary of labor for Bill Clinton, and his book is tiny, pocket-ready, clean-looking and a touch morally pure at times to seem applicable on Planet Trump—in the appendix, he cites the screenplay for “It’s a Wonderful Life” as recommended reading—but that earnest, generous clarity of vision is also what makes the book compulsive: He directs us to ways Clintons, Bushes, Obama and Trump, and countless CEOs, tested the common good—which Reich describes as “our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens who are bound together in the same society.”

I mean, what could go wrong? Almond, a longtime essayist (and co-host of the popular “Dear Sugar” podcast with Cheryl Strayed), has a few thoughts. He writes that he considered subtitling his book “Toward a Unified Theory of How It All Came Apart,” but settled on “What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country.” He doesn’t see himself here as a theorist, but a writer, with faith in the potential for stories (“the basic unit of human consciousness”) to lend meaning. The problem is, Almond explains, the stories this country has told itself—stories like, Nobody Would Vote for a Guy Like That, and Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses— tend toward the self-flattering, pushing us ever further from legitimate good. (Disclaimer: I took a creative-writing course with Almond at Harvard.) Still, all is not lost.

Jon Meacham’s “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels” (Random House, $30) is a casual tour of pivotal, at times inspiring road stops, moments when leadership and electorate pulled together (mostly) for a vision grander than the length of their noses. If these “good stories”—useful partial-truths, really—are messier than this speedy book allows, Meacham does a good job of casting triumphs as never quite forged.

Besides, context is everything: Trump, of course, is the elephant in the room, the catalyst for retelling our civic successes, trotted out at times to serve as contrast. Meacham notes in the days before the 2017 inauguration, the president told aides to regard the office as a TV series with himself as the star, tasked with squashing each week’s enemy. A story like that rattles in your head as you read an account of Lyndon Johnson pressing George Wallace about conscience: “Listen, George,” Johnson said, “don’t think about 1968. Think about 1988 … Do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh caliche soil that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated’?”

It’s a welcome, foundational approach to familiar history, a digging up of the social contract that we’ve left so long at the bottom of the shoebox, to reread the small type.

Need a reminder of those founding documents? There’s “The Bill of Rights: A User’s Guide” (Hachette, $18.99), from constitutional scholar Linda R. Monk. Looking for a politician who lived up to those papers? “Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope” (Center Street, $28), a series of interviews about the legacy of RFK, between his daughter Kerry and (somewhat obvious) figures like John Lewis and Bono. Given up on hope entirely and need a patient, intimate diagnosis on our collapse and rate of decay? “America: The Farewell Tour” (Simon & Schuster, $27, August), by journalist Chris Hedges, groups our ailments under starkly titled chapters like “Work” and “Sadism.”

When Meacham writes that “what counts is not just the character of the individual at the top, but the character of the country,” it’s obvious, though nice to have a plainly stated reminder of a root discomfort— that it’s not just institutions that fail and require top-to-bottom reassessment.

Lately book titles alone point toward a need to fundamentally reinforce the way we are, the way things work, and what the hell is happening, at its most elemental, talk-slowly-and-clearlyticktock: Chicago author Catherine Lacey’s terrific 2017 novel, titled “The Answers,” now in paperback (FSG, $16), reads often like a queasy accounting of our contemporary soul in the Age of Big Data. Marilynne Robison’s latest collection of essays on faith is simply “What Are We Doing Here?” (FSG, $27). There’s little prescriptive to this—you’re left with few answers. But smart questions, and the desire to grasp the world at its most plaintive.

Which is not to say the empty din of a title as bare-bones as “Reporter” (Knopf, $27.95), the new memoir from journalist Seymour Hersh, means a dry litany of instructions on becoming an investigative legend. But the book does serve as a helpful distillation of the basic role that journalism often plays: holding authority accountable. Likewise, “Building and Dwelling” (FSG, $30), from renowned urban-design theorist Richard Sennett, reads like a culmination of thoughts on the 21st-century city.

Environment? Elizabeth Rush’s graceful “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” (Milkweed, $26) and Eliza Griswold’s even better “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America” (FSG, $27) address elevated sea levels (“Rising”) and fracking (“Amity”) from front stoops and town halls of communities watching their climate change through clinched teeth.

Race? “What the Truth Sounds Like” (St. Martin’s, $24.99), from Michael Eric Dyson, considers the tension between activism and policy through a 1963 hotel meeting between RFK and several black artists, including James Baldwin.

Even a subject as light as the saga of superheroes just got something as necessary as artist Ed Piskor’s “X-Men: Grand Design” (Marvel, $29.99), a beautiful, sprawling one-book retelling of the 55-year soap opera of these mutant crime fighters.