Books

The latest round of books we like are meaty, weighty, often serious — and very, very good. This week, in an exciting new addition to the list, we’re incorporating favorites from our daily book critics, Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and Jennifer Senior, all of whom bring their enthusiasms to bear on what they’ve read recently, and all of whom have piqued my interest in what they’ve been reading.

For sheer storytelling alone (well, for Churchill too), I’m most eager to read Candice Millard’s “Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill.” Millard specializes in taking an extraordinary episode from the past and blowing it out into a sweeping narrative; in “The River of Doubt,” she gave us Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon, and in “Destiny of the Republic,” she homed in on President Garfield’s assassination.

Speaking of leaders, albeit a very different kind, there’s a big new biography of Hitler, the first of two volumes from the German historian Volker Ullrich. Michiko Kakutani’s review of “Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939” drew some excitement on social media over implicit parallels — make of it what you like. The book is already No. 11 on our combined print and e-book best-seller list. “Enjoy” seems to be the wrong word to employ in this context. “Take heed”?

Pamela Paul

Editor of The New York Times Book Review

HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939, by Volker Ullrich. Translated by Jefferson Chase. (Knopf, $40.) According to our chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, this new biography portrays Hitler as a clownish, deceitful narcissist who took control of a powerful nation thanks to slick propaganda and a dysfunctional elite that failed to block his rise.

TIME TRAVEL: A History, by James Gleick. (Pantheon, $26.95.) James Gleick — you know him from his best sellers “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” and “Chaos: Making a New Science” — enlists philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation to take us on a mind-bending journey from H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine” to cyberspace.

ODES, by Sharon Olds. (Knopf, $26.95.) The poet Sharon Olds, a laureate of sexuality, has been on a fierce late-career run. Our book critic Dwight Garner says her latest collection picks up where her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Stag’s Leap” left off, and contains some of the best and most ingenious poems of her career.

HERO OF THE EMPIRE: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, by Candice Millard. (Doubleday, $30.) Our critic Jennifer Senior called this account of Winston Churchill’s heroics during the Second Boer War “as involving as a popcorn thriller.” It’s lively, suspenseful and packed with memorable details — who else would bring 18 bottles of 10-year-old Scotch to war?

SHIRLEY JACKSON: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin. (Liveright, $35.) You probably remember “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Lottery” all too well. This long-awaited biography traces Shirley Jackson’s evolution as an artist. Ruth Franklin makes a case for Jackson’s importance as a writer in the tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and James.

BLOOD AT THE ROOT: A Racial Cleansing in America, by Patrick Phillips. (Norton, $26.95.) This book tells the shocking true story of how a Georgia county drove out its black citizens in 1912 and remained all-white for 80 years. Well written, timely and important, the book is by a man who grew up there and wondered what made his hometown so strikingly different from the rest of the country.

DEATH BY VIDEO GAME: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline, by Simon Parkin. (Melville House, $25.95.) What makes video games so engrossing that some fanatical players in Taiwan have recently died because they couldn’t stop playing? Parkin answers this question by looking at all the ways these games provide existential succor — giving structure to life’s moments of uncertainty, a refuge where we can inhabit different identities and yet the rules are very clear.

THE WONDER, by Emma Donoghue. (Little, Brown, $27.) This is Emma Donoghue’s first novel since her runaway best seller “Room” was turned into a movie. Here she takes on another harrowing story of a child. During the 1850s, a nurse travels to rural Ireland to determine the truth about a girl’s mysterious fast in this intense historical novel.