Before Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony or Virginia Woolf, there were the Bluestockings, a group of British women writers and thinkers who, as Gibson writes in this intimate social history, transgressed sexist conventions to educate themselves, produce books on a range of subjects and contribute to some of England’s liveliest salons.

As recounted in this history of the 1986 space shuttle disaster, the tragedy was a preventable lesson in hubris and human error. Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the players involved even as he focuses on the relentless string of snafus that plagued the mission.

In 1971, this newspaper called Fu Pei-mei “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But as King’s biography notes, it was really the other way around: The legendary Fu, who taught generations to cook dishes from all over China, preceded Child on TV by two months. King interviews women who learned from Fu’s cookbooks and show, making the case that she was a cultural force.

As many American evangelical congregations moved to the political right over the past decade, Circle of Hope, in Philadelphia, became more progressive. With sensitivity and compassion, Griswold chronicles the church’s fateful decision to embrace a mission of racial justice, delivering, in her account of the crisis that followed, a portrait in miniature of our passionate, divided nation.

Rarely seen diary entries from the screenwriter who adapted Edward Albee’s Broadway hit are a highlight of this unapologetically obsessive behind-the-scenes look at the classic film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

In this transcendent Holocaust memoir by a journalist and poet internee, translated by Paul Olchváry, the details of the concentration camps and their horrors are rendered so precisely that any critical distance collapses. Debreczeni’s account was published in 1950 and lay obscure for decades because of Cold War politics.

Chung’s entertaining and revealing memoir traces the triumphs and disappointments of her groundbreaking career in broadcast journalism, which reached its pinnacle when she was named co-anchor of the “CBS Evening News” alongside Dan Rather — only to see herself sidelined by a controlling Rather and by sexism in the industry.

From “Queen for a Day” to “The Real World,” “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” it’s all here in Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story of reality TV. With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, the New Yorker staff writer outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent pop-culture concoction that we love to hate, hate to love and just can’t quit.

Trebay is a veteran of the style wars: Prior to joining this paper, he did stints as a handbag designer, a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a model and a reporter at The Village Voice, chronicling a lost New York that was as gritty as it was glamorous. Trebay knew everyone; this memoir is indeed a who’s who of that vanished Gotham. But more than that, it’s a love letter to a city, a life and a family, and to beauty itself.

King uses Handel’s “Messiah,” possibly “the greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as a hub whose spokes radiate outward to a host of key historical forces and personalities that characterize 18th-century Britain.

This urgent and propulsive account of Latin American politics and immigration makes a persuasive case for a direct line from U.S. foreign policy in Central America to the current migrant crisis.

In her fifth memoir, Fuller describes the sudden death of her 21-year-old son. Devastating as this elegant and honest account may be — it’s certainly not for the faint of heart — it also leaves the reader with a sense of having known a lovely and lively young man.