NYT Books

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.

Kevin Sack chronicles the Charleston, S.C., congregation that was the target of a brutal 2015 hate crime, and the church’s central role in the larger saga of the South.

In Austin Taylor’s novel “Notes on Infinity,” the speed of success prevents undergraduate founders from reflecting on, let alone fixing, an original sin.

In “I’ll Tell You When I’m Home,” the Palestinian American writer Hala Alyan draws on her life experiences and her family’s multiple displacements across generations.

“Is a River Alive?,” the new book by Robert Macfarlane, is gorgeously written but also windy and sentimental.

In “When It All Burns,” Jordan Thomas brings an anthropologist’s eye to the life-or-death struggle with fire.