Jennifer Szalai

“The New India,” by Rahul Bhatia, combines personal history and investigative journalism to account for his country’s turn to militant Hindu nationalism.

For his latest book, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère sat in a Parisian courthouse, absorbing grueling testimony about the 2015 massacre at the concert hall and other venues in the city.

“The Impossible Man,” by Patchen Barss, depicts the British mathematical physicist and Nobelist Sir Roger Penrose in all his iconoclastic complexity.

“Playing Possum,” a new book by the philosopher Susana Monsó, explores the mysteries of grief and mourning in the animal world.

“The Price of Power,” by Michael Tackett, reveals a legislator for whom political survival has been a top priority — even when it means supporting a “sleazeball” for the presidency.

Two new books by psychologists explore the roots of group identity, arguing that it is natural and potentially useful — even in polarized times.

“The Message” marks his re-entry as a public intellectual determined to wield his moral authority, especially regarding Israel and the occupied territories.

As a young conservative, David Brock smeared Hill, who accused the Supreme Court justice of sexual harassment. Now, in a new book, Brock is denouncing Thomas and the court’s rightward tilt — and contending with his own complicated past.

In “Defectors,” the journalist Paola Ramos interviews MAGA supporters, Proud Boys and others to investigate a constituency long thought reliably Democratic.

In a new memoir, the journalist Emily Witt delivers a coolly precise chronicle of Brooklyn’s underground party scene and her romance with a fellow partygoer.