Twelve Churches, by Fergus Butler-Gallie (Avid Reader). This collection of portraits of twelve churches offers an ambitious retelling of Christianity’s evolution. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem illustrates the paradoxical nature of a religion that twins life and death, peace and violence, prosperity and poverty; the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, illuminates Christianity’s “complicated dance with secular power”; the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama, affords a glimpse of how “time and justice are inherently linked” in Christian thought. A wide-ranging final chapter, centered on a megachurch in Nigeria, hidden churches in China, and churches that provide virtual services, explores how hope for the future, especially as articulated in the Book of Revelation, remains fundamental to Christianity’s appeal.

My Childhood in Pieces, by Edward Hirsch (Knopf). This pithy, poignant memoir by an award-winning American poet immortalizes a bygone world in a colorful mosaic of vignettes, jokes, and reflections. The Jewish community of Hirsch’s mid-century youth is vividly evoked in characters including his father, a would-be gangster with a penchant for enigmatic mottoes like “Blood ain’t pee”; his tough, “Old Testament” mother; and a boisterous host of wily, wisecracking grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, neighbors, and friends. Though cut with loss, the book has a madcap spirit; reading it feels like hearing family stories volleyed across a dinner table where even the ghosts are chiming in with their own versions of events.

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