Books

David S. Reynolds’s massive new biography argues that the traditional view of Abraham Lincoln’s relationship to the economy and society of his times is wrong — he was very much connected to both, and in ways relevant to today.

The architecture critic Paul Goldberger lays out how one man, David Walentas, saw the potential in a derelict warehouse district on the Brooklyn waterfront. And the desirable enclave Dumbo was born.

Tomi Ungerer’s final children’s book follows a flight through a harrowing dystopia, while Kate McMullan celebrates spring and Katharine Holabird just celebrates.

It would be hard to imagine a more pugnacious epistolary sampling than “Speaking in an Empty Room: The Collected Letters of John Sanford,” who was an exacting writer’s writer and a veteran of Hollywood blacklisting.

Jennet Conant’s “The Great Secret” is about many things: the chaotic nature of war, the subterfuge of governments, the randomness of scientific discovery, the story of one unassuming young American doctor.

An East Hamptoner looks back on an encounter with the writer, recently given new life in a PBS documentary.

Expressions of guilt pervade Bina Bernard’s wrenching debut novel about a Polish Jewish couple’s desperate struggle to protect their children during the Holocaust.

Jill Bialosky’s latest poetry collection, “Asylum,” offers a pilgrimage of sorts in five sections through the shock, grief, guilt, and eventual acceptance occasioned by a sibling’s suicide.

Alexander Nemerov’s “Fierce Poise” captures the first decade of Helen Frankenthaler’s career with both a fly-on-the-wall intimacy and a great understanding of her work and what made her tick.

Walter Isaacson reveals in clear, simple, factual, and fascinating detail how Jennifer Doudna spearheaded the invention of the revolutionary gene-editing tool Crispr.

The real mixes with the imaginary, Thomas Hart Benton with the young sleuths hunting his murderer, in Helen Harrison’s latest, set in 1967 New York.

In Daphne Merkin's novel, Judith Stone is a book editor in 1990s Manhattan in a relationship of “erotic compliance” and “self-abandon” — not erotica, but literary erotic psychology.