Covered Bridge is a daily blog produced by VISTA Today connecting our readers with opinions, reports, articles, and books from around the web. 

Fall is an excellent time to pick up a new book. The shorter days and colder evenings mean you’ll delight in spending more time in doors. So we’re excerpting some reviews of new non-fiction titles just released this month.

“M Train”, by Patti Smith

“Unlike “Just Kids,” Smith’s previous memoir, “M Train” is not a sustained narrative but a collection of short, loosely connected essays. Each piece shuttles backward and forward through time; she might start somewhere like the present day, but soon Smith is transported across years and continents, and off we go with her, like neophytes accompanying a seasoned pilgrim. “Just Kids” was an elegy for her great friend and former lover, the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and the wanderings of “M Train” add up to an elegy, too, though a less overt one, for Smith’s late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, a guitarist with the rock band MC5, who died in 1994.”

“Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter”, by Kate Clifford Larson

“The tragic life of Rosemary Kennedy, the intellectually disabed member of the Kennedy clan, has been well documented in many histories of this famous family. But she has often been treated as an afterthought, a secondary character kept out of sight during the pivotal 1960s. Now the third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy takes center stage in “Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,” by Kate Clifford Larson, a biography that chronicles her life with fresh details and tells how her famous siblings were affected by –and reacted to — Rosemary’s Struggles.”

“Reclaiming Conversation”, by Sherry Turkle

Her new book, “Reclaiming Conversation,” extends her critique, with less ­emphasis on robots and more on the dissatisfaction with technology reported by her recent interview subjects. She takes their dissatisfaction as a hopeful sign, and her book is straightforwardly a call to arms: Our rapturous submission to digital technology has led to an atrophying of human capacities like empathy and self-­reflection, and the time has come to reassert ourselves, behave like adults and put technology in its place. As in “Alone Together,” Turkle’s argument derives its power from the breadth of her research and the acuity of her psychological insight. The people she interviews have adopted new technologies in pursuit of greater control, only to feel controlled by them. The likably idealized selves that they’ve created with social media leave their real selves all the more isolated. They communicate incessantly but are afraid of face-to-face conversations; they worry, often nostalgically, that they’re missing out on something fundamental.