NPR's Book of the Day Folgen

After the protests last year, we heard the phrase "racial reckoning" a lot, as some groups of people struggled to catch up with what's just been reality for many others. This week we've got two books that might help you reckon with that reckoning, in two different ways: Traci Todd and illustrator Christian Robinson's bright and powerful picture book biography Nina: A Story of Nina Simone and poet Claudia Rankine's Just Us: An American Conversation, in which she puts together poetry, essays and images to bring readers into an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about race.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In her memoir, Fiona Hill extends her riveting testimony from Donald Trump's first impeachment trial. And while she might not dish as much dirt as other Trump-era memoirists, the former senior National Security official writes movingly about Trump and about polarization and other threats to American democracy. She points to Russian history to suggest that distrust in government and political systems can lead to collapse. And while she describes Trump as the symptom of that division and distrust, she also says he put a spotlight on what needs fixing.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Percival Everett's page-turning new detective novel The Trees is at once gruesome and screamingly funny. A racial allegory rooted in southern history, the book features two big-city special detectives with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation who are sent to investigate a small-town crime. The murders are hideous in detail, the language is rough, there are racial epithets of all kinds, and somehow the politically incendiary humor is real. Everett talks with NPR's Scott Simon about how — and why — he blended these styles.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy