Do you religiously recycle your stuff, but wonder what happens after the truck carts it away? Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter’s book about the trade in trash and recyclables, looks at how billions of dollars’ worth of usable materials (sometimes tossed after just a single use) gets collected, sorted, baled, sold and shipped off to recyclers, and reveals who is making a living harvesting the materials we pay to part with. He follows the trail all the way to the end, describing the people who pay a high price to pick apart and process (usually with bare hands) the valuable resources locked up in our waste. The book also includes color photographs of working conditions few Americans would tolerate.

Minter is uniquely qualified to write about this industry. He grew up in the family scrap business and now lives in China, where he serves as the Shanghai correspondent for Bloomberg World View. The book is part family history and part travelogue, as he accompanies Chinese scrap dealers crisscrossing the U.S., snapping up shipping containers’ worth of materials, including electronics that are tossed out by the tons every year. He also travels to Asia, where entire regions have dedicated themselves to recycling our scrap. Recycling brings much-needed employment to these often-impoverished areas and demonstrates the resourcefulness of the developing world, whose citizens repurpose, reuse and resell the stuff we consider “trash.” Minter describes these places, transformed from fertile rural backwaters to bustling, polluted urban centers where the labor is unregulated and the materials are toxic.

Adam Minter does not claim to be an environmentalist, and readers of that bent might be offended at his disdain of recycling, especially as practiced by well-to-do and well-meaning suburbanites. He does point out, however, that despite the toxic effects of some overseas materials processing, the developing world is doing what people in America used to do before things got so disposable: They are using brains and initiative to reuse perfectly good stuff. For all our talk about sustainable lifestyles and “going green,” Minter says, the people who buy our leftovers might be teaching us a lesson or two.

From The Tipping Point (2000) onward, Malcolm Gladwell has made a specialty of gathering commonly accessible facts and viewing them from uncommon—and often surprising—perspectives. In David and Goliath, he seizes on the fable of the title to undergird his thesis that “the powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.” In his eyes, David had the edge over Goliath from the start, not just because he possessed a superior weapons system—the far-reaching sling vs. the short-range spear and sword—but also because he imposed his own rules of combat instead of conceding to Goliath’s.

Gladwell goes on to argue that conditions first seen as adverse or limiting can actually be turned into wellsprings of strength. Thus, large classes may be better for students than small ones; attending a top university may be the worst (or, at least, the most discouraging) educational choice; getting tougher on crime may actually increase crime as well as create other social disorders; being dyslexic or losing a parent at an early age may make one more persistent and intellectually agile than being able to read easily or having the comfort of a two-parent family; kids who don’t grow up playing basketball (for example) may approach the game in such fresh ways that they outscore kids who do; and people who are confronted en masse by life-threatening dangers—whether it be the bombing of London in World War II, the violent suppression of Civil Rights demonstrations in the U.S. or the brutalizing of Catholics in Northern Ireland by British soldiers—will almost always be strengthened rather than weakened by their shared experience.

To support these points, Gladwell intersperses a series of inspiring personal stories with summaries of related scientific studies in education, economics, psychology and sociology. His tone is relentlessly upbeat, but he in no way contends that being poor, dyslexic and downtrodden is the best start in life for anyone. He does make the case, however, for mining the dross of life for those small specks of gold and for looking beyond the obvious to the actual.

Margaret Klaw’s Keeping It Civil offers a dishy behind-the-scenes look at family law, which takes place at “the vortex of marriage, divorce, parenthood, sex, money, love, anger, betrayal, sexual orientation, reproductive technology, and the rapidly shifting legal landscape on which it all plays out.” Interested yet? This fascinating book offers readers a front-row seat to all the drama.

Klaw, the founder of an all-women law firm in Philadelphia, explores such issues as how divorcing parties divide assets and how the court determines the best interests of the child. In “Anatomy of a Trial”—a string of interconnected chapters so interesting I was tempted to flip straight to them—she provides a fictionalized play-by-play of a custody battle. She often presents a scene to readers, invites them to consider it, and then analyzes it further in a way that seems to change everything.

For instance, Klaw describes a young man without legal representation who is trying to duck out of a child support debt. Luckily for him, he represents himself well and manages to “dodge a bullet,” but before the reader can breathe a sigh of relief, Klaw points out that she usually represents the opposing side—the women who need child support from the men who can’t pay it. She pokes holes in the young man’s arguments even as she acknowledges the difficulty of his situation.

In short, it is both Klaw’s legal expertise and her warmheartedness that make this book so approachable—and her terrific prose doesn’t hurt, either. I especially recommend this for book groups, where discussions about these ethical and legal dilemmas will no doubt be spirited.

Author Katy Butler describes Knocking on Heaven’s Door as “part memoir, part medical history, and part investigative journalism.” She is absolutely right, and this carefully arranged braid of a book is stronger and more appealing than any single strand would be alone. Yet at bottom, it’s a deeply personal story.

Butler writes heartrendingly about the death of her father, whose health began to deteriorate when he had a mild stroke. In her view, his process of dying was unnecessarily prolonged due to a pacemaker. As her father’s health declines, Butler gets busy. She successfully lines up various kinds of support for her caregiving mother. She advocates for her father’s medical rights. And she loves him deeply, even as he changes before her eyes. Comparing her father to Tintern Abbey, the partially destroyed edifice that inspired Wordsworth, she writes, “he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.”

As Butler sought to understand what was happening to her father, she explored the history of the device ticking in his chest, sending steady signals to his heart. She became absorbed by the development of emergency medicine: how it changed the deaths of many Americans, cruelly prolonged life for others and led to our culture’s worship of quick technological fixes to medical crises.  She takes her father’s story as a case in point. By moving between the details of her family’s story to the larger cultural and medical context in which it takes place, Butler manages to make some astonishing arguments—arguments whose force often comes from following the money. She traces, in amazing specificity, how hospitals are encouraged to adopt a save-the-patient-at-all-costs attitude, without regard for the patient’s quality of life or quality of death. The person who really pays for this, she argues, is the patient and the often under-informed family.

In all, Butler argues persuasively for a major cultural shift in how we understand death and dying, medicine and healing. At the same time, she lays her heart bare, making this much more than ideological diatribe. Readers who are eager to get their own paperwork and wishes in order, or who are thinking about their aging loved ones with concern, or who simply care about how our culture deals with basic questions of life and death, should be sure to pick up this book. It is one we will be talking about for years to come.

To the End of June is a book about heartbreak. It's filled with tales about failed relationships; broken bonds between parents and children; attempts by foster parents to care for those lost children; the frequent, painful separations when those relationships fail. And even when the relationship does work, and a foster child does find a loving home, the child often carries into adulthood the emptiness of having lost his or her biological parents.

There are few silver linings in To the End of June. Author Cris Beam isn't out to paint a pretty picture. A gifted writer, Beam tells her tale in a short, staccato style. There is no need for flowery prose. The facts tell the story in a dynamic way, and Beam's rhythmic writing keeps the narrative flowing.

Here are some of those eye-opening facts: There are nearly 500,000 children in foster care in the United States. Up to $20 billion is spent annually on their health and management. Besides the inherent emotional scars of being separated from their biological parents, foster children are frequently shuttled from home to home and face a greater risk of suffering mental, physical and sexual abuse.

But it's the human stories Beam uncovers that bring the facts to life. Consider Oneida, 16, a half-Cuban, half-Italian girl from Brooklyn who moves in with a middle-class foster couple, only to disappear after refusing to follow the house rules. Or Noble, a crack baby adopted by a gay couple who provide the love and support to help him survive. Or Lei, a Chinese-American girl who makes it through foster care and graduates from an Ivy League school, only to struggle in adulthood because she never really knew her biological parents.

The shocking details about the foster care system and the compelling human stories make To the End of June an important book, one that sheds light on the lives of a half million children who are too often neglected and ignored.

Debora L. Spar is a wife and mother. She was also one of the first female professors at Harvard Business School, and is currently the president of Barnard College. She is, in many ways, an exemplar of the notion that women can “have it all,” yet for years she eschewed feminism as the province of hairy-legged cranks. In Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, Spar dismantles her own resistance to the movement that arguably allowed her the life she has today, but also looks at the ways feminism created false expectations that have left many women too defeated to get out of bed, much less “lean in.”

Remember the early 1970s ads for Charlie perfume, which portrayed a gorgeous blond with a briefcase on one arm and toddler on the other walking a city street while a chorus sang about her being “kinda new, kinda now”? Spar argues that while feminism pushed for women to have it all—full equality and the ability to choose from several options—many women misread the handbook and instead felt forced to take it all on. To prioritize career over family was neglectful, while domesticity was capitulation to the patriarchy. And either way, we lose: Men still do a fraction of the housework even when they're at home more, and women still earn less money and possess far less wealth than men. Hear me roar, indeed.

Spar threads her personal story into this larger survey, from marriage to her wide-ranging career. As an educated, upper-class white heterosexual woman, she has little to say about the poor, people of color or lesbians. Those struggling to find bus fare in their couch cushions may find all this caterwauling about “having it all” a tad indulgent, but the book ends with suggestions that can help forge connections, from involving men in women's issues to removing the pressure to do everything in favor of making more conscious choices. Wonder Women doesn't have all the answers, but the questions it raises may lead to much-needed change.

If you had to decide whether a person should live or die, what would you do? This is the central theme of Five Days at Memorial, a gripping account of how doctors, nurses and their patients at one New Orleans hospital endured unbearable conditions after Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. Flooding, loss of electricity, sweltering heat, dwindling medical supplies and anarchy in the streets were among the issues confronting doctors and nurses at Memorial Medical Center. The situation eventually deteriorated far enough that some hospital workers were placed in the unenviable position of deciding whether to let critically ill patients suffer, or hasten their deaths. They chose to administer morphine and other drugs, ending the lives of at least 18 patients.

Five Days at Memorial chronicles the events leading up to these deaths, and the ensuing criminal investigation and trial of those deemed responsible. In the five days after the hurricane devastated the city, the hospital’s power failed, as did its generators. The lack of air conditioning added to patients’ suffering. Delays on the part of the corporation that owned the hospital slowed an evacuation, as did confusion among the various local, state and federal agencies trying to manage the crisis. So there lay the severely ill, without medication or hope of rescue. For some doctors and nurses, euthanasia seemed the only choice.

The original story that became Five Days at Memorial was co-published in the New York Times and ProPublica, and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Journalist Sheri Fink is a dogged researcher, a thorough interviewer and a gifted writer who turns nonfiction into lively prose. The characters she writes about are real, but their unbelievable circumstances make the book read like a work of fiction.

Readers will come away with a greater understanding of the difficult circumstances residents of New Orleans faced during Katrina, and will also confront important moral and ethical questions. Fink asks us to consider: If we had been there during those dark, desperate days at Memorial, would we have made a different choice?

In 1962, Malvina Reynolds captured both the rapid development and growth of the suburbs, as well as their homogenous character, in her song “Little Boxes,” which Pete Seeger made famous the following year: “Little boxes on the hillside / little boxes made of ticky tacky . . . they all look just the same.”

Fifty years later, as Leigh Gallagher observes in this captivating and thoughtful social history, the suburbs that the Ozzie and Harriet Nelsons of the 1950s and early 1960s so coveted are now declining, fostering a shift in the shape of the American dream of home ownership.

In The End of the Suburbs, Gallagher traces the history of the suburb from its rise during the post-WWII development of tract housing in places such as Levittown, Pennsylvania, to the great urban exodus of the ’50s and ’60s, when many city-dwellers decamped to wealthy enclaves such as Lake Forest, Illinois. The suburbs grew so quickly because of the rapid growth of the middle class, the advent of mass production of building materials and houses, and the freedom provided by the automobile.

Gallagher acknowledges that most Americans still live in the suburbs because we are a culture that values privacy and individualism, but she provides plenty of evidence that suburbia is at the beginning of a steep decline. Drawing on extensive interviews with policy analysts, construction and housing experts, and suburban dwellers themselves, she cites several reasons for the decline of the suburb as we know it: Home values have inverted; cities are experiencing a resurgence; households are shrinking; the price of oil is rising. As urban areas have witnessed a rise in population and influx of wealth over the past decade, the suburbs have experienced a rise in poverty; from 2000 to 2010, she points out, “the growth rate in the number of poor living in the suburbs was more than twice that in the cities.”

The End of the Suburbs is a first-rate social history that asks pointed questions about one of America’s most cherished cultural institutions.