Emily Witt sets her arresting memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, in New York City from 2016 to 2021, charting her entry into the city’s techno scene with its mind-altering drugs, ecstatic music and community of people sometimes embracing, sometimes resisting a changing new world. In her book’s first section, she describes learning the “geography of nightlife,” writing gauzily about raves and parties she attends, the drugs she takes and the general euphoria that blankets her life for several months as she falls in love with a fellow raver, Andrew. 

When the Trump presidency begins, we are thrust back into the waking world with her, and the story takes on much darker hues. Still, she continues to party until she can’t: COVID-19 hits the city with ferocity. Gone are the raves and the DJs and the scene itself, “and with it the illusion of health and safety.” Witt invites us to relive a tumultuous era in the country’s history through the eyes of a keen observer.

Witt, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed exploration of nontraditional sex, Future Sex, relays her experiences covering watershed moments and national tragedies: the aftermath of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, protests after the death of Breonna Taylor, and the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. She reflects on the country’s collective heartbreak and rage alongside her own personal losses, like her tumultuous romantic entanglement and breakup with Andrew, which throws her world into chaos. And she deftly analyzes her role as a journalist in a mad world where her work feels, at times, ineffectual. 

Witt looks back at this time of experimentation with wisdom, writing that she used hallucinogens to “psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted . . . that I sought a chemical window to see outside.” In the end, readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it’s more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads. This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it.

Connie Chung broke the glass and bamboo ceiling when she became the first Asian American woman to co-anchor a national news broadcast program, joining Dan Rather at the desk of the CBS Evening News. Her visibility and success led generations of Chinese parents to name their daughters Connie. In her briskly paced memoir, Connie, Chung recounts her personal and professional life with candor, humor and heart. 

Growing up as the youngest of 10 daughters and the only child in the family born in the U.S., Chung spent more time watching television than doing chores, and her family stopped everything to listen to Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. The legendary newsman’s coverage of politics and government lit a spark in Chung. In 1971, she landed a job as a Washington correspondent on his program. (Cronkite, she writes, “radiated gravitas and humility, never behaving like the superstar he was.”) Over the next 40 years, Chung embraced the excitement of “getting the get”—landing an exclusive story or interview—and faced the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated profession. Connie carries readers through the ups and downs of Chung’s career as the major networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) piped her image and voice into millions of American living rooms during prime time. Readers will glimpse the relationships that have sustained Chung; she gushes about her husband, talk show host Maury Povich: “Were it not for Maury, I could never have had the career I had. . . . He helped me navigate my treacherous path up the ladder.”

Chung pulls no punches as she describes the harassment she faced from anchors who felt threatened by her work, among them Dan Rather, who sabotaged her career after the network sent her to cover the Oklahoma City bombing (Rather was on vacation and unreachable when it occurred). And she movingly recounts going public during the #MeToo movement with the story of her own sexual assault by a gynecologist when she was in college. Connie offers words of advice for future women reporters: “Remember to have a sense of humor, take your work seriously, don’t forget to have a life and—most importantly—stretch your hand to others who are trying to climb on board.” Chung’s humanity and journalistic passion reverberate through this invigorating memoir.