In “Lara’s Story,” the Polish journalist Wojciech Jagielski recounts how one woman went searching in Syria for a son who had succumbed to radical Islam.
Two new books, Kermit Pattison’s “Fossil Men” and Meave Leakey’s “The Sediments of Time,” offer a glimpse into the adventurous world of the men and women searching for our origins.
In her memoir, Katherine May writes about coping with “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress.”
Kerri Greenidge discusses two books about African-Americans in the years before the Civil War, and Neal Gabler talks about “Catching the Wind,” his biography of Edward Kennedy.