New and noteworthy

■ “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century,” by George Packer. (Vintage, 624 pp., $17.95.) “If you could read only one book to comprehend America’s foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it,” Times reviewer Walter Isaacson wrote about Packer’s biography of the controversial diplomat, which was a Pulitzer finalist.

■ “Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen,” by Mary Norris. (Norton, 240 pp., $15.95.) This paean to Norris’ “decadeslong obsession with Greece: its language (both modern and ancient), literature, mythologies, people, places, food and monuments,” as Times reviewer Vivian Gornick characterized it, rivals the New Yorker copy editor’s now famous obsession with punctuation, at which her subtitle winks.

■ “Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations,” by Mira Jacob. (One World, 368 pp., $20.) Times Graphic Content columnist Ed Park called the experience of reading these “searching, often hilarious tête-à-têtes” about what it means to be a person of color — by the Indian American writer and illustrator (living in New York with her white, Jewish husband and their biracial son) — “as effortless as eavesdropping on a crosstown bus.”

■ “Inland,” by Téa Obreht. (Random House, 400 pp., $18.) The main characters in Obreht’s second novel — a hardened and haunted frontierswoman managing messes left by the men in her orbit and an orphaned Balkan emigré who ends up an outlaw — may not be who we’re “conditioned to think of when we conjure the old American West,” Times reviewer Chanelle Benz noted, “but they too are America.”

■ “Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination,” by Brian Jay Jones. (Dutton, 496 pp., $18.) That Jones “spends more time on Seuss’ prolific drawing than on his rhyming,” Times reviewer Adam Gopnik said, makes sense for an author who has also written biographies of Jim Henson and George Lucas, since Geisel, too, was “an American master who married shrewd commercial instincts and a weakness for something close to formula with a genuinely overflowing and companionate visual style.”

■ “Naamah,” by Sarah Blake. (Riverhead, 304 pp., $16.) This “21st-century riff on climate disaster,” viewed through the “crafty poetic” prism of the biblical Noah’s wife, left Times reviewer Joan Silber with “an abiding admiration for the writer’s charged powers of imagination.”