Between the World and Me BY TA-NEHISI COATES

It is a riveting meditation on the state of race in America that has arrived at a tumultuous moment in America's history of racial strife.

What it does better than any other recent book is relentlessly drive home the point that "racism is a visceral experience..."To be black in the ghetto of Coates's youth "was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease."

A black man's stark, visceral experience of racism.

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS BY JOBY WARRICK

The Islamic State, whose radical Islamic warriors have inflicted their brutality across the globe from the Middle East to Paris, was founded as al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2004 by a Jordanian thug known by his nom de guerre, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

IJoby Warrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, explains the importance of this gangster and analyzes his continuing influence on the Islamic State long after his death in 2006.

Joby Warrick shows in painful but compulsively readable detail how a series of mishaps and mistakes by the U.S. and Jordanian governments gave this unschooled hoodlum his start as a terrorist superstar and set the Middle East on a path of sectarian violence that has proved hard to contain.

The Book of Aron BY JIM SHEPARD

In the summer of 1942, German soldiers expelled almost 200 starving children from an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and packed them into rail cars bound for Treblinka.

Drawing on his imagination and dozens of historical sources, Shepard brings the Warsaw orphanage to life in this remarkable novel about a poor Polish boy and his friendship with the caretaker of the orphans, the pediatrician Janusz Korczak.

Aron relays his world just as he experiencesthat his town slides into hell. Although relentless in its portrayal of systematic evil, "The Book of Aron" is nonetheless a story of such candor about the complexity of heroism that it challenges us to greater courage.

Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush BY JON MEACHAM

Jon Meacham's new biography of George H.W. Bush accomplishes a neat trick.

In Meacham's telling, Bush indeed lacked an ideological vision, was as overmatched in domestic policy as he was masterful on the global stage, benefited from his family's influence, and remains overshadowed "by the myth of his predecessor and the drama of his sons ' political lives."

What Meacham so skillfully adds to this understanding -- through extraordinary detail, deft writing and, thanks to his access to Bush's diaries, an inner monologue of key moments in Bush's presidency.

Fates and Furies BY LAUREN GROFF

The book's first half concocts the blessed life of Lancelot "Lotto" Satterwhite, the adored son of a wealthy family who has great ambitions to be an actor. His wife, Mathilde, so long impoverished and alone, willingly takes on the chore of encouraging Lancelot.

And halfway through, Groff turns from "Fates" to "Furies." Here's a woman as determined as Antigone, as ferocious as Medea.

'Fates and Furies' review: A masterful tale of marriage and secrets.