Also of interest…

My Father Left Me Ireland

by Michael Brendan Dougherty (Sentinel, $24)

Michael Brendan Dougherty’s often beautiful memoir is “a cri de coeur for a more connected, traditional way of life,” said Barton Swaim in Commentary. A senior writer at the National Review, Dougherty grew up barely knowing his Irish father, but his mother taught him to cherish Irish culture, and that heritage eventually became a lifeline. Though he at times overstates the extent of America’s supposed cultural decay, his book is “by turns heartrending, droll, and shrewdly insightful.”

The Buried

by Peter Hessler (Penguin, $28)

In Peter Hessler’s “closely observed, touching, and at times amusing” account of life in today’s Cairo, “small dramas play out alongside Egypt’s bigger ones,” said John Freeman in The Wall Street Journal. A friendship that develops between the New Yorker writer and his building’s garbage collector becomes the heart of the book, and several such characters help convey a more complex story about the post–Arab Spring era than headlines can capture. “The book is an extraordinary work of reportage.”

Greek to Me

by Mary Norris (Norton, $26)

Mary Norris’ new book is “one of the most satisfying accounts of a great passion that I have ever read,” said Vivian Gornick in The New York Times. The New Yorker copy chief, who wrote a 2015 best-seller about grammar, has also nursed a long fascination with Greece. Since first visiting at 30, Norris has regularly immersed herself in the country’s language and culture, and she makes her enthusiasms ours. “You feel yourself in the presence of a traveler whose authority emanates from lived experience.”

Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer (Knopf, $26)

Pico Iyer has written a book about dying, and “it is not only a joy to read, it’s helpful,” said Randy Rosenthal in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The globe-trotting writer has resided in Japan since 1992, so the nation’s Buddhist culture provides the backdrop as he and his wife try to make sense of her parents’ demise and her own briefly debilitating stroke. Not that facing mortality is easy anywhere, but Iyer’s “mysteriously affecting” account offers flashes of illuminating insight. ■