Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In the modern board game of Life, players come to a fork in the journey very early on: get a job or go to college. If they choose college, they might find a higher-paying job in the long run, but they’ll have to take out loans and pile up debt before ever collecting a paycheck. Players might start a family along life’s road, but whichever fork they choose, unlike real life, always leads to retirement and never to death.

The Mansion of Happiness—the prototype for Life—was the most popular board game in 19th-century Britain, and while it was more moralistic than its later American counterpart, it raised many of the same questions about this journey called life. With her characteristically vivid storytelling, New Yorker writer Jill Lepore uses this British game to embark on a stunning meditation on three questions that have dominated serious reflection about human nature and culture for centuries: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die?

Lepore proceeds by exploring the stages of life from before birth, infancy and childhood to growing up, growing old, dying and life after death. For example, she examines 17th-century physician William Harvey’s discovery that human life begins with an egg (as opposed to the long-held belief that humans germinated from seeds), and illustrates the ways that such an idea came to have significant political consequences for women by the latter half of the 20th century. She focuses on the Karen Ann Quinlan case to show how the definitions of life and death—once the province of religion—were suddenly decided not in a hospital or a church but in a courtroom.

Through these stories, Lepore demonstrates how the contemplation of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, so that scientific narratives of progress now promise a different sort of eternity—right up to the vague idea that one day, when the Earth dies, humans will simply move to outer space. In The Mansion of Happiness, Lepore’s refreshing and often humorous insights breathe fresh air into these everlasting matters.

Indian land makes up about 2.3 percent of the land in the United States, and the Indian population in the US is slightly over two million. And yet, as novelist David Treuer wryly observes in his sobering yet quietly redemptive book, Rez Life, in spite of how involved Indians have been in America's business, most people will go a lifetime without ever knowing an Indian or spending time on an Indian reservation.

There are roughly 310 Indian reservations in the United States, but not all of the 564 federally recognized tribes have reservations. All Indian reservations have signs that welcome travelers, offering acknowledgment that the lands the drivers are about to enter is different from the lands through which they have been traveling. Such signs exist in more than 30 states, and you can see them in areas as diverse as the rocks of the Badlands, the suburbs of Green Bay and the sprays of Niagara Falls. Twelve reservations are larger than the state of Rhode Island, and nine are large than Delaware.

As Treuer points out, most people think of life on the reservation as harsh, violent, drug-infested, alcohol-fueled, poor and short. This story of reservation life is often accompanied by a version of history that lays the blame on Anglo-Americans and their despicable treatment of Native Americans.

Treuer's elegant chronicle of the lives and stories of individuals on his own reservation, Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, chips away at the stony structures that embed these views of the reservation in the American consciousness. We meet, for example, Red Lake Nation conservation officer Charley Grolla, who is deeply devoted to protecting the waters and the land on the reservation from outsiders who would encroach upon and destroy it. And we meet Sean Fahrlander, an excellent ricer who can fillet a walleye faster than anyone Treuer knows. Fahrlander continues to fish on the land he has called home all his life, in spite of the state government's attempts now and then to challenge the treaty that the Ojibwe have with the state of Minnesota.

Treuer convincingly and affectionately captures reservation life in order to demonstrate that the reservations are more than scars, tears and blood. Through his stories, he affirms that there is beauty, pride and love in Indian life and on Indian reservations.

Since 1934, more than 100,000 brides have traveled to a store at the end of a tired-looking block on Main Street in Fowler, Michigan, in search of the perfect wedding dress. Occupying a former bank building, Becker’s Bridal stocks more than 2,500 wedding dresses, a “blizzard of white” squeezed tightly onto three floors of crowded racks. On the second floor, in the former bank vault, sits a room where floor-to-ceiling mirrors cover each wall. In this “Magic Room,” brides stand atop a tiled, circular pedestal in soft lighting as they reflect on the moments that have led them to this place and finally decide on which dress might be the one.

When best-selling author Jeffrey Zaslow (The Girls From Ames) visits the store, his fascination with the lives of its customers catches fire. Weaving the stories of the women who built and nurtured the store with those of several brides-to-be, he captures the powerful allure of Becker’s and the hope and optimism that women bring with them to the Magic Room. Among others, we meet Danielle DeVoe, a social worker whose challenging family life led her from a young age to dream of the power and magic of love, and Julie Wieber, standing on the pedestal for the second time, accompanied by her daughters and recalling through tears the memory of her late first husband, Jeff.

The present owner, Shelley Becker, has been looking into the 90-year-old mirror in the front of the store since she was a little girl; it reminds her of her grandmother, Eva Becker, who ran the store with a firm hand. When she looks into the mirror, she also wonders about the lives of the brides who have stood in front of it. Whose marriages have dissolved? Whose have grown richer as the years have progressed? She wonders if her own daughter, who now works there with her, will join the long line of Becker women who have run the store.

In The Magic Room, Zaslow captures the joy, hope, love and magic in the hearts of these women, and in the hearts and lives of the Becker family, who have made it possible for generations of young women to experience the magical moment of becoming a bride.