Also of interest…in feats of bravery

The Burglary

by Betty Medsger (Knopf, $30)

Betty Medsger’s important new book serves to remind us that “no government agency should be allowed to function without close oversight,” said Repps Hudson in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 1971, when anti-war activists broke into an FBI office to steal files, Medsger was the only reporter who dared publish the burglars’ discoveries. This “very readable” account tells the whole story for first time, detailing how the previously anonymous thieves toppled J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance empire.

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An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris (Knopf, $28)

Though it sticks closely to the historical record, Robert Harris’s novelization of the Dreyfus affair fulfills “every requirement of a first-rate thriller,” said Sherryl Connelly in the New York Daily News. In 1894, when the French military falsely convicted a Jewish officer of treason, the task of proving the suspect’s innocence fell to bigoted but honor-bound Col. Georges Picquart. The truth eventually came to light, but Harris’s retelling reminds us that the path to redemption was “thick with espionage, daring, and cruel turns of fate.”

Stringer

by Anjan Sundaram (Doubleday, $26)

What Anjan Sundaram lacks in common sense, “he makes up for in grit,” said Ted Koppel in NPR.org. The former Yale math major never makes entirely clear why he turned down a job at Goldman Sachs to work as an unsalaried reporter in Congo. Idealism was a factor, though, and it never fully dies as Sundaram confronts poverty, corruption, crime, and a war that’s claimed 5 million lives. This is at heart a coming-of-age tale, “and a wonderful book it is, too.”

Body Counts

by Sean Strub (Scribner, $30)

Sean Strub’s new memoir “beautifully demonstrates how an individual, working with a community, can be a fulcrum of change,” said Michael Bronski in the San Francisco Chronicle. Strub was a gay man in his early 20s when the AIDS epidemic struck, and the crisis impelled him to take action. He became a pioneering fundraiser for LGBT causes, the nation’s first HIV-positive House candidate, and the founder of the magazine Poz. Body Count “presents us with an insider’s view of American political life,” yet somehow inspires.