Zona
by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon, $24)
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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.