By Bill Lueders.

One of America's best writers, Jon Krakauer, came out with one of the year's most distressing books, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Doubleday). It recounts a series of "date rape" sexual assaults involving members of the University of Montana football team, and the official response--sometimes noble, often deplorable. Krakauer documents the shocking frequency of these crimes, and the callousness of those who commit them. (One frat boy boasts of plying "our techniques" to incapacitate unsuspecting young women with alcohol, then having sex with them, all without a sliver of awareness that this is rape.) And he offers a withering assessment of a justice system that at times seems more sympathetic to perpetrators than victims. But mostly, he tells the story of these women, wounded but courageous, and ultimately triumphant over the adversity they have been forced to endure.

Scott Carney, a writer I've had the good fortune to edit, has an insightful book about the pursuit of spirituality, A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness, and the Path to Enlightenment (Gotham Books). Like Carney's first book, The Red Market, about organ trafficking, his new work is essentially an investigation. The subject of his inquiry: How, in 2012, a Buddhist acolyte named Ian Thorson ended up dead at age thirty-eight from dysentery and dehydration in a remote part of Arizona. Carney uses the case to examine both the appeal and the danger of the quest for transcendence. In a world where much evil, and some good, is driven by religious belief, we need all the enlightenment we can get.

Patti Smith begins her new book, M Train (Knopf), with a nod to "writing...