For the 50 million students attending public school in America, how they are taught about America’s history of slavery and its deprivations is as fundamental as how they are taught about the Declaration of Independence and its core assertion that “all men are created equal.” A deep understanding of one without a deep understanding of the other is to not know America at all.

In this tender narrative, Cyrus Grace Dunham tells their story of mostly giving up their given name, Grace, and mostly taking on their chosen name, Cyrus. For Mx. Dunham, who identifies as non-binary, the process is not a linear one. After realizing that Grace is dissolving, they spend time existing in and noticing their body, focusing on what they want, rather than taking on Cyrus too quickly.

1619, not 1776, should mark the beginning of our nation’s history. Slavery, rather than the Declaration of Independence, more accurately explains the foundation of the United States. Despite their centuries-long subjugation, Black Americans have shaped our country’s experience, Ms. Hannah-Jones emphasizes. She writes, “Black Americans have been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

Jia Tolentino explains how capitalism, patriarchy, and technology lead many women into a perpetual process of optimizing. Advancing in your career means scarfing down kale salads every day at Sweetgreen while checking work email. Exercising focuses less on health and more on looking taut. Barre, with its “rapid-fire series of positions and movements,” offers the most efficient path. Only once you’ve made it can you enjoy Lululemon, whose pants, according to the founder (a man), “just actually don’t work” on “some women’s bodies.”

Just when you thought American nuns were going extinct, they’re back and gaining momentum. In 2010, after 50 years of precipitous decline, only 50,000 “perpetually professed Catholic sisters” remained, serving God at the median age of 74. But over the past decade, things have changed radically. Becoming a nun is much more popular now, especially among young women, and increasingly among women of color.

Keith Gessen is a successful writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and 4-year-old son, Raffi. Like many white liberals, Mr. Gessen has read Nikole Hannah-Jones and therefore wants to send Raffi to a racially diverse kindergarten. But when theory becomes reality, he finds out that choosing a school is not easy.

At the presidential debate three weeks ago, Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden on why he opposed busing as a means to achieve school desegregation. This prompted tons of half-baked articles that failed to explain the nuance of the issue. Enter Nikole Hannah-Jones to save the day.

The conclusions are stark. The data is sound. And the policy recommendations are as plain as day. But what makes this book outstanding isn’t just the hard-hitting numbers and the well-rendered charts and graphs. What I appreciated just as much was Prof. Johnson’s ability to tell a compelling story of the people behind the numbers.

Some say that reading is for people who refuse to get in the arena, who refrain from taking action, who prefer to hide. But I strongly disagree. For me, reading helps us to consider the perspectives of others, build our empathy, and most important, to follow the facts. Our lived experiences matter, and so do our personal truths, but reading offers a way to pass over, to connect, and to return transformed.

We live in a country where white people own 95 percent of the farms, while Latinx people own 3 percent and African Americans own 1 percent. Consider that Latinx people do 80 percent of the farm work, or that 100 years ago, Black people owned 14 percent of the farms — or that in South Africa, people of color own 27 percent.

According to food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman, owner of Soul Fire Farm and author of Farming While Black, our organized system of unequal food distribution amounts to food apartheid, which relegates white people to food abundance and people of color to food scarcity.