NYT Books

Thomas Mallon looks back on the AIDS crisis, the heyday of magazines and an exhilarating city in “The Very Heart of It.”

In a scrappy new memoir, Jeff Weiss blurs fact and fancy as he recounts his stint as a bit player in the celebrity-industrial complex.

In “Charlottesville: An American Story,” Deborah Baker retraces the events leading up to the violent Unite the Right rally in 2017 and its political aftermath.

In “The Catch,” struggling twin sisters are forced to rethink their lives after the reappearance of their mother, presumed dead for decades.

A new biography by Willard Sterne Randall shows how 18th-century Boston’s most popular businessman put his mark on the American Revolution.

In “The Once and Future World Order,” by Amitav Acharya, and “The Golden Road,” by William Dalrymple, our best hope might be that history repeats itself.

An expansive new biography of William F. Buckley Jr. traces the eventful life of the conservative activist who intuitively grasped the media’s centrality to politics.

In “The Gunfighters,” the journalist Bryan Burrough offers a lively look at the legends and myths of the Wild West.

Anelise Chen’s genre-bending book “Clam Down” sees an insightful metaphor in a text message typo.

In “The Spinach King,” John Seabrook recounts how his grandfather turned a family farm into an industrial behemoth, and exposes the greed and malfeasance behind the prosperous facade.