MANDELA: In Honor of an Extraordinary Life, by Makaziwe Mandela. (Rizzoli, $75.) This hybrid biography of Nelson Mandela, compiled by his daughter, includes personal photographs, letters, stories, journal entries and charcoal drawings to offer an intimate rendering of the South African leader’s life.
FRANK BOWLING: Landscape, by Frank Bowling. (Hauser & Wirth, $50.) Published to accompany an exhibition of Bowling’s artwork at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, this collection presents his vibrant abstract landscape paintings in rich detail, through foldouts and close looks at the layers and washes of select works.
REAL CLOTHES, REAL LIVES: 200 Years of What Women Wore, by Kiki Smith. (Rizzoli Electa, $60.) This survey presents over 300 garments from the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, from a woman’s World War I uniform to Sylvia Plath’s Girl Scout attire, accompanied by commentary from the author.
MIRACLES AND MACHINES: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend, by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd with photographs by Rosamond Purcell. (Getty, $45.) This volume tells the story of “the monk,” a 450-year-old robot ancestor in the figure of a Franciscan lay brother, and traces the history of automatons back to the late Renaissance.
THE YOUNG MAN, by Annie Ernaux. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. (Seven Stories, paperback, $13.95.) In her latest book, Ernaux documents her affair with a man 30 years her junior and writes about the entanglement’s effect on her sense of time and memory: “With him,” she writes, “I traveled through all the ages of life.”
THE INTERNET CON: How to Seize the Means of Computation, by Cory Doctorow. (Verso, $24.95.) Doctorow, a journalist and science fiction author, takes aim at the “complex thicket” of patent, I.P. and copyright laws that allow major tech companies to avoid competition and offers legislative solutions for breaking up big tech.
MEMORY AND DESIRE, by Philip Caputo. (Arcade, $27.99.) After he appears in the paper for rescuing Cuban migrants near Key West, a newspaper editor finds his life and marriage upended when a lover from his distant past reaches out with shocking news.
BISMARCK’S WAR: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe, by Rachel Chrastil. (Basic, $35.) Chrastil’s rigorous history of the late-19th-century conflict between Napoleon III’s France and Prussia under Otto von Bismarck details how the treatment of civilians, and military modernization, shaped European understandings of war.
