Gilbert Cruz:

So, “The Wide Wide Sea” by Hampton Sides is about the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook, Captain Cook, very, very well-known British explorer.

This is the journey that he took from England in 1776 to the South Pacific in part to return a Tahitian man or a man from those islands to his own island, but also to try to find the Northwest Passage, which, as you both know, was a thing that people really tried to do back then.

And it’s one of those classic pieces of historical nonfiction that anyone who loves seafaring adventure will enjoy, but it also has that very sort of necessary realization of what it means to have engaged in these sort of imperialist endeavors back then. And so it has a modern understanding of history while also being incredibly detail-oriented and incredibly entertaining.

So, that’s one. And the other one I will talk about is very contemporary. It is “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here” by Jonathan Blitzer. We just came out of a presidential election in which the immigration situation at the southern border was one of the key sort of points of debate. And what Blitzer, who is a staff writer at “The New Yorker,” has done is put together a history of a half-century of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

It focuses on three nations, three Central American nations, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. And through administrations, Republican and Democrat, it sort of tells the story of how we have gotten to the point where we are today.