NONFICTION Freedom and equality were the ideals that drove the Revolutionary War and the birth of the United States and gave the American republic an esteemed place among nations. Historians have written countless books extolling the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers. But the troubling issue of slavery always rumbles in the background as this glorious saga is recounted. How could the founding generation talk so boldly about freedom and equality while holding thousands of black people in bondage?

NONFICTION The images of Woodstock—the mud, the traffic, Jimi Hendrix, farm land packed with half a million people—are iconic. And memories of Woodstock, whether through photos, the film that chronicled the festival or stories passed down from attendees whose brain cells might not have been at their sharpest that August weekend in 1969, are unavoidable.

In 1979, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog set out to make “Fitzcarraldo,“ a feature film about a man obsessed with building an opera house deep in the Amazon rainforest. Famously, Herzog’s undertaking itself became a seemingly impossible, monomaniacal project. While filming on location in the jungle, Herzog lost his lead actor through a combination of illness and bad nerves, replaced him with a raging, emotionally unstable actor, faced Indian attacks and braved shipwreck and a variety of injuries in the name of art.

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Attila the Hun has long been one of history’s bogeymen. And it did not improve his reputation when Kaiser Wilhelm, addressing German troops in 1900, exhorted them to emulate Attila as they embarked on suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China. But as historian Christopher Kelly persuasively argues in “The End of Empire,“ Attila was more an astute political strategist than a savage barbarian.

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In 2001, the Bush administration sent U.S. Special Operations and CIA forces into Afghanistan with the plan to topple the Taliban regime and capture Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Taliban regime fell quickly, but the hunt for bin Laden failed. Eventually, the new war in Iraq drew the administration’s attention away from Afghanistan, giving the Taliban a chance to regroup.

NONFICTION Anew account of the Bataan Death March—in which more than 70,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war were victims of appalling barbarism—portrays a particularly grim episode of World War II following Japan’s invasion of the Philippines. Driven from Manila into the hills of the Bataan peninsula, the combined Allied forces fought without hope of reinforcement or escape until they had no choice but to capitulate. The largest surrender in U.S. military annals was followed by a forced 60-mile march along Luzon’s main highway during which more than 10,000 of the POWs were summarily murdered or died from torture, wounds and disease.

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Why wear shoes when you run? Whether you’re a weekend jogger or serious marathoner, the answer’s easy, right? We wear shoes to protect our feet and provide the cushioning necessary for an activity that puts enormous pressure on vulnerable joints. Yet if that’s the case, Christopher McDougall argues in his new book, “Born to Run,“ why has the rate of running injuries increased even as shoes provide ever more padding?

In “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,“ she rewrote the rules of the mystery genre—and did so again in “Murder on the Orient Express.“ In “And Then There Were None,“ she created what seemed to be an insoluble puzzle and then wrote a perfectly logical ending. Her books were so popular that “Christie for Christmas” became a gift-giving tradition, and stories of her soaking in a tub, eating apples and formulating her plots have become an endearing picture.

Navigating one’s way in contemporary society is no longer merely a question of knowing which fork to use. Rather, as Robin Abrahams persuasively reports in “Miss Conduct’s Mind over Manners,“ it is knowing how to cope with “the dilemmas that live in the gray area between ethics and protocol.“ Abrahams, who has a doctorate in psychology, is the “Miss Conduct” columnist for the Boston Globe Magazine. Witty as well as perceptive, she keeps the tone agreeably light as she dispenses practical advice on social interaction in an increasingly diverse and fragmented society.

Readers hoping Rick Bass’ new work of nonfiction, “The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana,“ would advocate on behalf of his beloved Yaak Valley will have to be satisfied with a few paragraphs that appear on Page 5. “I have spent the bulk of my adult life advocating for the permanent protection of these wilder, farther places in the Yaak through the congressional designation of wilderness areas,“ Bass writes. “But right here, right now, is—in this book—the only time you’ll hear me carry on about any of that.“

Every age has its high-flying buccaneers, but few are as candid about their fall as publisher and journalist Neil White is in his affecting memoir, “In the Sanctuary of Outcasts.“ Wanting to do good, White also knowingly did wrong and consequently was incarcerated in the Louisiana prison that was also the last leper colony in the continental United States.

Don’t go out in the woods today,“ the song cautions us, but as Amy Stewart’s comprehensive and lavishly illustrated “Wicked Plants” asserts, nowhere is completely safe. Certainly anywhere plants are grown, indoors as well as out, in gardens as well as the wilds, danger lurks for the ignorant and the unsuspecting.

NONFICTION The latest book by Lawrence Block, author of more than 60 crime novels, is a memoir; and as he approaches his 71st birthday this month, the author has been hinting that it could be his last book. Except for a couple of how-to writing volumes, “Step by Step” is Block’s first book of nonfiction, and it is a quirky and curious piece of work.

NONFICTION While major golf championships end on spring and summer Sundays, for thousands of fans these tournaments aren’t really over until they have been sliced and diced by Dan Jenkins in the next edition of Golf Digest. Jenkins, a 79-year-old Texan, is a successful novelist (“Semi-Tough,“ “Dead Solid Perfect”), but he’s at his best as a journalist. He has been covering golf for newspapers and magazines for six decades, and by his count he has been a member of the working press at 198 major championships. He’s currently covering his 199th, the U.S. Open that concludes today in Farmingdale, N.Y.

NONFICTION Few homeowners facing foreclosure have had the opportunity to share their financial travails privately with Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. In fact, as Edmund L. Andrews writes in his cautionary book, “Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown,“ he may be the only one. Of course, Andrews approached Greenspan as an economics reporter for The New York Times, not as a troubled homeowner, which may explain Greenspan’s reaction.