Nonfiction: 5 New Reads for Fall

In 2007 Canadian journalist Deborah Campbell went undercover in Damascus to report on the exodus of Iraqis into Syria following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. To help with her reporting, she hired a fixer, an Iraqi refuge named Ahlam. When Ahlam was arrested by Assad’s regime, Campbell desperately tried to find her, even putting her own life at risk, haunted by the possibility their work together had led to her disappearance.

Award-winning journalist and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes about his decades-long friendship with Nora Ephron, the celebrated writer and film director who passed away in 2012.

In the latest spin on the decades old murder of Martha Moxley – the teenager from Greenwich, Conn., who was bludgeoned to death with a golf club back in 1975 – Robert F. Kennedy’s new book gives a detailed and spirited defense of his cousin Michael Skakel, who was convicted of her murder in 2002. (His conviction was later overturned after serving 11 years of a 20-years-to-life sentence, and Connecticut’s highest court is now deciding whether or not to reinstate the conviction.) Not only does Kennedy make the case for Skakel’s innocence but also offers an alternative theory for who the real murderers were.

Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General and international relations expert Jennifer Welsh investigates 21^st century geopolitics and the seemingly unpromising future of liberal democracies in The Return of History.