Also of interest...the rewards of a narrow focus

Zona

by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon, $24)

Most writers wouldn’t be able to keep readers engaged throughout a book-length analysis of an obscure and slow-moving 1970s art film, said Chris Barton in the Los Angeles Times. But the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer isn’t just any writer. While making a case for the greatness of Andrei Tarkovsky’s road movie Stalker, Dyer offers compelling digressions on Russian gulags, Chernobyl, 9/11, and much else. Still, for all his witty and learned asides, it’s his deep appreciation of the film that stays with you.

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Marigold

by James G. Hershberg (Stanford, $39.50)

This 900-page study of missed opportunities to end the Vietnam War is a “staggering exercise in historical scholarship,” said Gordon M. Goldstein in The Washington Post. James Hershberg spent years focusing on a 1966 effort, code-named Marigold, in which a Polish diplomat nearly brought the U.S. and North Vietnam together for direct peace talks. Though he found nothing that explained why the initiative collapsed, he makes a strong case that Marigold was peace’s best hope in pre-1973 Vietnam.

The Lifespan of a Fact

by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal (Norton, $18)

This unusual work offers “exciting reading for anyone interested in how we define ‘the truth,’” said Matthew Tiffany in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. When writer John D’Agata tried to publish an impressionistic essay about a Las Vegas suicide, he and magazine fact-checker Jim Fingal spent months in a tug-of-war about which facts mattered. In the “enthralling” correspondence that’s reproduced here, the two men “dove deep” into what it means to create “nonfiction.”

Anatomy of Injustice

by Raymond Bonner (Knopf, $27)

Raymond Bonner’s “meticulously researched” new book unpacks a 1982 South Carolina homicide case that was “egregiously bungled” by small-town law enforcement, said Ethan Gilsdorf in The Boston Globe. Just three months after an elderly widow was found murdered, and despite a lack of relevant evidence, a mentally disabled black handyman was sentenced to death for the crime. Bonner writes “workaday” prose, but his “masterful” management of the facts will leave you gasping.