11 New Books We Recommend This Week Dec. 10, 2020 Old worlds spring to life in this week’s recommended titles, from a scientific account of Neanderthal culture to a biography of the seminal American foodie James Beard. There’s a new edition of “The Babur Nama,” the diaries of the 16th-century warlord who founded the Mughal dynasty in India. A look back at the golden age of Egyptology starting in 1822 — which is to say, a look back at archaeologists looking (way) back. A biography of the modernist poet and painter Max Jacob, and one of Eleanor Roosevelt, and a novel set in Britain in the decades after World War II. And there’s a reissue of Susan Taubes’s 1969 novel, “Divorcing,” which itself has much to say about history and the passage of time.